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Drummondville - It’s the top of the sixth inning, and nothing is happening. First baseman Dann Kesten sits on the top step of the dugout and peers west across Pillsbury Park at the shape of catcher Timon Baeza, who is swinging a weighted bat in the on-deck circle.
“Big T!” he calls out, and Baeza cocks his head over his shoulder. “Don’t strike out this time.”
Baeza spits into the dust and turns back to the plate where career Batteryman Sun Formella is facing a 2-2 count. Formella is having a good year, hitting almost .300 and impossibly leading the team in homers despite his 190-pound frame. He has a single in the second inning and now he walks. He trots down to first, clapping his hands, trying to summon some energy for the team.
Baeza, whether he listened to Kesten or not, does not strike out. Instead, he swings at the first pitch and grounds to second, ending the half inning. Drummondville leads 5-1 and is about to score 2 more in the bottom of the inning. The Doughboys will win the game 7-1 and collect their 57th win of the season. Port Hope will lose. Again.
Things used to be very different on the banks of the Erie.
Two seasons ago, Port Hope was coming off an appearance in the Battle for the Beer, sporting a young lineup and top-notch pitching staff, and looking for all the world like a dynasty in the making. The Battery had never had a losing season since the inaugural year of the CBL, and had won an incredible 219 games in two seasons, two division championships, a Fisherman Championship, and an array of team and player awards.
The next season, though, things began to unravel like a Behind-the-Music documentary. Owner Chris Jones traded off an “underperforming asset” in SS/3B Cleo Purdy, who went on to become an All-Star in Toronto. Then there was the injury to ace lefty Aron Faville, the pouting of star catcher Archer Joecks, and eventually, a slow slide from excellent into decent and finally to average. In 2010 Jones pulled the trigger on a whole raft of trades that cleaned out every starter but Formella and flooded the team with 11 new draftees. The number of under-30-year-olds rose from 11 out of 50 to 29 out of 50 in one spasm of re-invention.
That year, Port Hope lost 95 games and finished last in the division for the first time ever.
This season will be worse.
It’s Wednesday now, in the middle of the afternoon, and the Batterymen have arrived back at Pillsbury Park for the third of the four-game series in Drummondville. The uniforms are still crisp, the drills purposeful, and there’s that crack of the bat in practice that always seems to take some years off. But there’s an odd lack of pregame tingle here, like a 40th-place car in the Daytona, lapped several times, still on the track and circling, but no longer attached to the race itself. Port Hope trails Drummondville by 27 games. It’s still July.
“Never been a part of this kind of thing before,” says Manager Shug Shaughnessy, in his fifth year at the helm. “Always in this organization we’ve had something to play for at the end of July. Not this season.” He still keeps an eye on the veterans - there are a few of those left - but it’s the kids he’s watching most closely. That’s where the action is. The kids are playing for something still. They’re playing for the chance to be a part of the next big thing, when Port Hope rises from the ashes.
Nobody here admits to any doubts that they will. The current roster is peppered with the former hopes of other teams, like SS Wyatt Stubenrau from Yellowknife and RF Dale Averill from Creston, players who in a few year may carry a franchise, but who right now are as green as Kermit the Frog and still play like him sometimes.
“Oh, we’re going to be good again in a couple years,” Kesten says, spitting his sunflower seeds and gazing from his perch out at the field. It’s the fourth inning if the next game, and the day isn’t lost yet. Drummondville got two early, but Averill has just hit a deep triple off the right-field wall and Formella is up. “Be too late for me, of course, but there’s some good kids here. Port Hope will be back. If we get some pitching,” he adds.
Formella bounces the ball through the left side and Averill scores to tighten the game up. The bench cheers and rises to applaud from the dugout steps, but it feels oddly unenthusiastic somehow, as if this is not real enthusiasm but a fax of a fax of enthusiasm, and the players know that it’s not worth getting out the original this year. This scene is, after all, a familiar thing this season. Formella, who was left for dead on the roster two years ago after he commanded no trade at all, is only 31 and he’s resurrected himself in a leadership role with the new team, hitting the ball all over the park and leading the team in stolen bases, batting average, hits, runs, and homers.
“I’m not here to complain, or to resurrect the ghosts of 2008,” he says later over dinner. Port Hope has lost again, 5-3, after leading in the sixth. “My role is bridge. I’ve been around enough to know how the veterans feel, but I’m still a kid. I can be here when these kids start to get it. I can be a part of that.”
It’s hard to tell if he’s serious, since everyone knows that Jones traded for hotshot kid Marc Frobel specifically because he wasn’t sold on Formella either offensively or defensively. Formella has hit almost .300 ever since and this season has made just 4 errors. Will that be enough? Perhaps. Jones has been doing some thinking, it appears.
“I made some big mistakes,” Jones says from the owners box the next day. “Shug deserved better as a manager, and I especially feel bad for the pitchers.” Port Hope averages an anemic 3.89 runs a game. “I pulled the trigger too fast, and I gave up on some guys before I should have.” He gazes out at the field, where Port Hope is jogging in at the end of the 5th. There’s no score and aging career Batteryman Bernard Langbehn has allowed just two hits so far. “I got greedy, figured the days of 110 wins were forever. I lost perspective. We could have been really, really good for another 5 years.” He sounds wistful and sad, which is appropriate, though some fans have suggested he should be a lot less wistful and a lot more apologetic.
He is not, though. “I did the right thing ultimately,” Jones says in a rare burst of good feeling. Kesten has just rattled a double off the center-field fence and the Battery lead 2-0 in the seventh. “We’re going to be better at the end of this than we were at the beginning.”
Observers would say that that is close to impossible. Sainted RF Riggs Babiarz will be a beast to replace, they say, and indeed it’s hard to see even the potential for that in the collection of teenagers in the minors. And who does Jones see doing the work of Joecks and his 50 homers a year? Or Kirk Smolder? Kenny Mahlum? Deniz Szafranski?
“The kids are out there. They’ll be able to do the job,” Jones says in the lobby of the hotel as he watches his ballclub board the bus for the airport. Port Hope has won for the first time in a week, 3-0, behind Langbehn, once-great lefty DeLeon Maurin, and free agent pickup Shayne Bechtel. The three are 35, 38, and 41 respectively. So talking about kids seems slightly out of place.
There’s a weird disconnect on this team, almost like a segregation, between the pitchers and the hitters. They ride on the same bus, but the hitters are all up front and the pitchers all in back, like Montgomery Alabama before Rosa Parks. Age is the issue. The average age among the hitters is 27; among the pitchers it’s 34. The four “young” pitchers, Chris Schlei, Larry Severson, Syd Castrator, and Oddibe Barfield, sit about halfway back in their own group. They are not having good years, any of them. Their combined record is 5-20, and only Castrator has an ERA under 5.
“We were supposed to be the next generation, you know, coming up after the young guns,” Schlei says. The Young Guns (we capitalize these things in Port Hope) were Dev Shimp, Sandy Uzzle, Teva Tovmasyan, John Haney and Mel Lowry, five outstanding pitching talents that were supposed to carry the Battery to title after title. Haney went first, but all are gone now after just one championship. This is a hard thing for some players - and some fans - to forget. The “Next Generation” - or in the bitter joke at Battery Park, the “Lost Generation” - was supposed to fill those mighty shoes. But not so soon. It’s hardly the fault of these guys that they had to be rushed to the bigs before they were ready. Unfortunately, the abuse they’ve suffered because of it may make it impossible for them to ever be ready.
“Yeah, I remember what that was like,” Schlei says from the dark of the window seat as the prairie rolls by. “We were good, man, we were so hot. Nobody was ever good as us.” Schlei is a bit of a mouth, but he was part of the 2008 team that steamrolled the FSH on the way to the Beer, and he talks about it all the time. “We couldn’t never lose, man. It was like, pow, a homer and pow, rack up the Ks. We was awesome.” He punches the window. The glass rattles, but never threatens to give way. It seems a metaphor for the season. “Now, man, look at us,” he says, waving his long arms at the sleeping team. “We suck and nobody cares.”
This isn’t of course, true. Someone does care. There are still tens of thousands of fans at Battery Park every game who care tremendously, who can remember the breathless chases after perennial division champ Ottawa and the heady, almost drunk days of September 2007 when Port Hope finally caught them, then passed them, and the promise of titles forever was finally at hand.
“My faith never wavered,” says Bob McGaughey, a permanent fixture on the front row behind the plate. The players call him Cap. “I knew we’d get there and finally take those expletive Milk Maids out behind the bleachers and give them what they deserve. ‘Course,” he says, shrugging, “they’re getting their own back now, ain’t they?” He remembers the 19-inning game with Windsor in 2006 that he says started it all. “That was the day we knew we could do it. You could see the guys finally say, ‘hell with this’ and just went out and won. After that, things were good for a while. Really good.”
Cap is optimistic about the hitters, but he’s not sold on the pitching. “Gotta have arms. These Lost kids might have been good on paper, but out here on the dirt, well, I have more faith in my wife’s ex-husband.” He still comes to the games, and he says he will forever, but he says it like a man who’s heard in the elevator that the company is bankrupt. He’ll keep going to work, what else can he do, but he’ll spend his days knowing it’s not going to help.
Kesten sits, as usual, as always, staring out at the field. We’re in Blackwater now, for the first of three, and it seems a lot like we never left Drummondville. The Kolts, who are in last place, started the game with 6 runs in the first 3 innings against Severson, and though youngster AJ Mahoney plugs a 3-run shot in the 4th (it will be their only extra-base hit of the day), Kesten knows there isn’t that much comeback in this club. He appears philosophical about it. “I know what we can do, and I can see us getting better,” he says. “Everybody is doing his best, even those of us that know we’re only here to take up space and time. We can give the kids something, you know, something they can shoot at. Raise the bar, make them reach for it.” Kesten speaks like he has roots in Port Hope, though he only came here two years ago. Many have tabbed the 34-year-old 1B as the next manager, if and when Shaughnessy retires.
He stands up and moves toward the bat rack. The veteran is hitting .292, right around his career average, like one of the men in the string quartet on the deck of the Titanic, playing brilliantly as the ship breaks slowly apart. “Just because you’re not going to win a championship doesn’t mean there’s an excuse for doing less than your best work,” he says, shouldering the bat and heading out to the on-deck circle. Behind him, in the corner, you can see Averill and Stubenrau watching. And listening.
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