Good ol' country hardball

Sporting News, The, August 15, 1994 by Dave Kindred

Wouldn't it be nice to own a minor league baseball team? We'd have a nice little team in a nice little town. We'd sell tickets for two or three bucks. We'd have discounts for families, and old folks would get in free as long as they brought a glove to catch foul balls.

At the city limits we'd post mug shots of those weasels Bud Selig and Richard Ravitch. Our nice little town's Barney Fife would be told to arrest them on sight on charges of blaspheming baseball. They'd be held downtown without bail and we'd dare Robert Shapiro to set foot in our courthouse.

Our nice little team would play what Joe Garagiola calls good ol' country hardball. We'd play it every night all summer. There'd be no agents and no superstars and nothing in the morning paper about revenue sharing. We'd just hire 20 kids and turn them loose to have fun chasing dreams.

Anyway, the other day I saw an ad:

FOR SALE

Professional Baseball Franchise

Frontier League

(Class A/Short Season) Independent

Only serious inquiries please!

The Frontier League is not in THE SPORTING NEWS Baseball Guide. Its standings aren't in USA Today's Baseball Weekly.

All I could find about the Frontier League came in a Baseball America note quoting catcher Travis Barbary, who contrasts his current job in the Pioneer League to his Frontier experience of 1993.

"You don't have to worry about your paycheck being on time," he says. "Here we're riding a bus with a VCR. In the Frontier League we had to drive our own cars. You were supposed to get money for gas, but they gave us coupons for Hardee's or something like it."

Barbary also says he had to stay in some "horrible...just terrible" fraternity house in West Virginia.

If these quotes suggest Frontier life was a bummer, Barbary is quick to say otherwise. "I think that's why it was so fun, because things like that made everyone pull together. It was really, really fun. I had a great time."

Now we're getting somewhere. We're seeing the Frontiersmen rattle up and down Ohio highways in search of a Hardee's at midnight. Now we're talking country hardball under dim lights on a rocky infield. Every fresh-faced kid wonders if there's a real big league scout in the park. He wonders if there's any girl who would know, like Annie Savoy in "Bull Durham," that there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and 108 stitches in a baseball.

So I find the ad, make a telephone call and learn the Frontier League is two years old and has eight teams, five in the Ohio cities of Portsmouth, Lancaster, Newark, Zanesville and Chillicothe. The others are in Parkersburg, W.Va., Pikeville, Ky., and Erie, Pa.

It has a payroll limit of $43,200 for 22 to 24 players 18 to 24 years old with no more than one year of professional experience. "Independent" because it has no connection to the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues -- it has less stringent, and cheaper, standards -- the Frontier plays a 68-game season from June through August.

The team for sale is the Portsmouth Explorers. The price is $200,000. The sales pitch by Steve Sturgill, one of the Explorers' five owners, includes this remarkable sentence: "We think it's the best bargain in professional sports."

A 39-year-old former college first baseman, Sturgill is director of the Portsmouth county education employment and training program. He also is the Frontier League president and says "four or five teams are doing very well." Those teams average over 750 fans with $3 tickets, $1 hot dogs and $1.50 drinks.

At Portsmouth, attendance is down from 500 a night last year to 400 for the slumping Explorers. They fired the manager 10 days ago. Despite the struggles, Sturgill says, Portsmouth would be a nice little town for baseball if it could afford full-time front-office staffers instead of depending on volunteer moon-lighters.

I ask, "Who are the best players in the league?"

"I might be prejudiced," Sturgill says, "but we've got one of'em."

So I call the Portsmouth Ramada Inn. Joe Miller is in his room, looking out his window at the Ohio River a few feet away.

He's an outfielder from New Jersey who has played baseball every summer day since high school. No pro scouts wanted him, so at 23 he was about to get a real 9-to-5 job. Then he heard about the Frontier League. It's pro ball, he said, a last chance to prove something.

His first month with Portsmouth, Miller hit .416 with five home runs. He is unimpressed. He says Portsmouth's fences are only 344 feet away. He also says pitchers are in the Frontier League for the same reason he is: They're not all that good. As for the Explorers' attendance problems, he says, "We're 15-22. I wouldn't come watch us, either." He hasn't heard from any scouts.

The Frontier may be the least of the pro leagues and Joe Miller, at $1,000 for the summer, $14.71 a game, may be the lowest-paid player in pro baseball. That's fine with him.

"I'm not in baseball to get paid," he says. "Guys making millions to play a kid's game and going on strike, that's hard for me to swallow. Thousands of people would play for the fun of it. That's what I'm doing. I just want a chance to play at a higher level."