Summer baseball offers new opportunities, entertainment
AMARILLO, Texas—Jordan Garr drove his black Honda Accord with the California plates and parked right next to Potter County Memorial Stadium at 11 a.m. on a cool Thursday. There were just a handful of other vehicles there at this hour. A distant Gator tractor working the wet infield was the only noticeable sound. Garr got out, wearing a baseball uniform with a red “CageRats” jersey, and reached inside the car for his equipment. It was two hours before the first pitch.
“Living the dream,” he told the Amarillo Globe-News. “Living right down the street, playing every night. I’ll take any chance I can get, and this is a good chance.”
Throughout the day Thursday, through two doubleheaders, college players from Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Michigan, Minnesota, Virginia, New York, Missouri and Arkansas—and points in between—arrived in various vehicles for their first games.
Baseball nomads, if you will. Need players, will travel. It’s a summer way of life for college players, who travel across the country to play in leagues to hone and showcase their game for what they hope will be the right set of eyes.
“For a lot of these guys, especially the juniors and seniors, this is a job interview,” said Andrew Jenkins. “You never know who is going to be watching. We’ve got a lot of guys, lot of hard-nosed guys, who love to play baseball.”
Jenkins is the coach of the Amarillo Eagles, one of eight baseball teams in the first-year Great Southwest Collegiate League. There are as many as 30 college summer leagues across the country. Nine, including this one, play under the umbrella of the National Baseball Congress.
College summer leagues like the Jayhawk League in Kansas, the Cape Cod League in New England, and the Alaska League have been around for decades.
They are primarily a setting for college coaches and scouts to see junior college players seeking to move to four-year schools, and juniors and seniors hoping to latch on to professional independent leagues, or the pie in the sky, affiliated baseball.
“There are 15 scouts in Amarillo and the Dallas area, and I tell our guys, you never know who’s watching,” Jenkins said. “All it takes is one scout to see you do something wrong or not play the game the right way, and that’s it. They tell everyone else.”
The uniqueness of the Southwest League is the two divisions. There are four teams in the Metroplex Division, and four—the Eagles, Palo Duro Dillas, Canyon CageRats and RedDirt Rattlers—in the Panhandle Division.
The 24-player teams play 36 intradivison games that began on June 2 and conclude on July 17. The two division winners then meet for the right to advance to the NBC World Series in Wichita, Kan., starting July 29.
“The biggest conflict in a lot of these leagues is the travel,” said Barrett Weaver, the league commissioner and head coach of Arlington Baptist College. “So we’ve cut that out to make it more accessible to work or go to school.”
Weaver estimated about 40 to 45 percent of players hold down a part-time job, but let’s face it, most drive hundreds of miles and pay anywhere from $900 to $1,500 for one thing— to play baseball.
Ideally, college players in summer leagues live with host families, but there’s roughly 80 players on these four teams, and not nearly enough families. Most are staying two, sometimes three, to a room at the Kiva Hotel, a 2½-mile drive to the aging old Memorial Stadium.
Considering the state of the stadium, all dressing and showering takes place in their hotel rooms, not for what passes as a clubhouse. Enter that at your own risk.
The league uses wooden bats, not metal. It gives scouts a better idea of how hitters connect with wood and not the inflated power of metal.
The league has contracted with B45 Birch Bat Co. Each player gets one free wooden bat. Break that one, and they must pay for any more, but, hey, they do get a discount.
“I’m going to play as long as the game will let me,” said Garr, a senior outfielder who plays at Rogers State, a Division II school in Claremore, Okla. “I want to put off the real world for as long as I can. I love the game. It’s a good opportunity, like a summer showcase.”
Four players from Mississippi piled out of a white GMC Sierra on a recent Thursday. Lucas Scott, who drove, calculated it was 825 miles and 13 hours for him, Austin Moffett, Brody Bray and Jonathan Turner to drive to Amarillo from Pearl River Community College in Poplarville, Miss.
The four, all Mississippians, played their last college games one month ago, May 2. They had been in Amarillo about a week—a baseball adventure to be sure.
“Bunch of nice people,” Moffett said. “Amarillo has some of the nicest people I’ve met.”
The four play for the CageRats, which might be the most diverse team with players scattered from across the country.
“It’s a pretty easy transition,” Bray said. “About the only thing different with us and everybody else is our accent.”
An hour before the first game—rescheduled from the day before because of rain—a total of two filled the stadium. Dean and Terisa Scott were here through last weekend to watch their son—and to make sure there really was an Amarillo, Texas—before heading for home in Lucedale, Miss., a mere 913 miles.
“Right now, his motto is to play baseball and go to school and keep doing that as long as someone will let me,” Scott said. “Lot of times you got one chance in life, and to play baseball is not long.
“When it’s over, it’s over. So go as long as you can.”