Cape Cod Baseball League celebrates 100 years
>> Pete Alonso didn’t hit a home run the summer he played in the Cape Cod Baseball League. He made a different kind of connection.
On a day off during his time with the Bourne Braves during the summer of 2015, Alonso headed out to Provincetown, at the tip of the New England summer paradise. That’s where he met his wife.
“For me it was a disappointing summer because I expected to play well,” said Alonso, who returned to Florida and played himself into a second-round selection in the next year’s draft. “But I thought it was awesome because I met my wife during that summer, and it was phenomenal.
“You get to play ball and create incredible relationships,” he said. “It’s a super memorable baseball experience for any kid who gets to go out there and play. It’s super fun, it’s a super special place to play during summer.”
For 100 years, the Cape Cod League has given top college players the opportunity to hone their skills and show off for scouts while facing other top talent from around the country. Using wooden bats and riding buses like they would in the minor leagues, they get a sense of what pro ball might be like.
They might learn a few things about life, too.
“Shoot. You’re 19, 20, 21 years old. So you’re kind of figuring out who you are as a man,” said Boston Red Sox outfielder Rob Refsnyder, who played for the Wareham Gatemen in 2011.
Before he came to the Cape, New York Mets manager
Buck Showalter played high school and community college ball on the Florida panhandle. He won the 1976 Cape League MVP award with a .434 average that is third-best in CCBL history.
“Best summer of my life,” Showalter said. “See, I was from a little Southern town and a little junior college and I went up there and all of a sudden they let (us) out there on the beaches and I was like, ‘Oh my God, there’s another world here.’
“That was quite the summer,” Showalter said. “And then I went from there to Mississippi State and I was ready for anything.”
100 years
Like the tourists that stream to the beaches every summer, a century of baseball history has flowed through the Cape Cod League — more, if you count the Fourth of July games held in some towns starting in 1885. The league that formed in 1923 with an Original Four of Chatham, Falmouth, Osterville and Hyannis just finished up its 100th anniversary season, trimming 10 teams down to three rounds of playoffs that start Friday.
College players who are invited settle in with host
families, maybe pick up a part-time job but mostly work on getting the attention of major league scouts. So many of them have: Through this season’s opening day rosters, more than 1,700 Cape League alumni have played in the major leagues; in 2022 alone, there were 377.
Among them: Hall of Famers like Pie Traynor and Carlton Fisk, a handful of MVPS and Cy Young Award winners, and a half dozen current managers, including Showalter.
“You get a taste pretty quick of whether you can hang,” Fisk said.
No wonder, then, that the Cape League is a fertile ground for the MLB draft. Five of the last six No. 1 overall picks were Cape alums, including LSU righthander and former Gateman Paul Skenes, who was picked by Pittsburgh last month.
“I feel like it’s any college guy’s dream to play summer baseball on the Cape,” Chatham Anglers shortstop Chris Maldonado, who goes to Vanderbilt, said before a game against Bourne last month. “Just the history of it. These fields have been the same for a very long time.”