On July 3rd 2012, I went to a baseball game.It was no MLB game of super stardom and frankly it wasn't even a minor league game. This game that I saw live from a tiny western Massachusetts town of just under 40,000 people was not one with a World Series on the line.
This was a summer league game whose players weren't even directly playing to maintain a scholarship. These were collage kids, playing for the Holyoke Blue Sox of the New England Baseball League. These were collage kids barely playing under the towering illuminating stadium lights of a 3,000 person grandstand high school field. Yet through all that, I walked away that night in awe, shocked at the difference in experience between seeing a game like this and watching a Red Sox game 2 hundred rows away from action.
I went to another such game on July 9th 2013 and while the team I was rooting for ended the night on the wrong side of a 5-4 13 inning final: I walked away with that same feeling of awe.
But nevertheless, there was something else that that screamed for attention amidst my based awe something else.
As of this 2013 season, there are 298 division 1 baseball teams in the NCAA amounting to almost 7,000 varsity players across the nation. Each February, those 298 teams flock to the fields in a 13 week season of nearly 30 games a team.
When those 13 weeks are up, the 64 highest ranked teams in the nation then frantically go at each-other in a 26 day playoff season which culminates in the annual competition that is the College World Series. Nevertheless, once a champion is crowned a whole new set of NCAA rules and regulations kick in.
You see, NCAA baseball is unique in the way that its players are the only players in the world who really do not have an off-season. Once the season ends each of the primer athletes from the NCAA's D-1 schools are divided up across the nation to join upwards of 100 different major summer baseball leagues where those players play anywhere between 10 and 60 games with their assigned teams.
But there is one major road block for deciding where players go. According to NCAA baseball rule 30.5.2 “no more than 3 players from the same institution may play on the same summer team. In addition to that no coach of an institution may be the coach of a summer team with one of his or her players on it.”
Regardless of that, like is prevalent is pro sports there is a certain hierarchy to these leagues.
The smaller, poorly attended leagues are normally destinations for a team’s lesser role players while the more prestigious groups of teams almost always are used as a reward for the more All Star like college athletes.
But nevertheless, one league reigns supreme and that league the one housed in the windy, cool, crisp air and land of Cape Cod.
The Cape League: originally founded in the summer of 1885, the Cape Cod Baseball League as it is officially called was one of the first reliably running summer leagues in the nation.
Nevertheless, as the decades piled up, and the calendar ticked towards the halfway point of the 20th century, this now esteemed club of ball players quickly grew into something far greater than a mere summer league. Following World War Two, the 20 year old military GIs left the Cape and were quickly replaced by a new wave of a skilled genre of young ball players.
Drawn to the state by the introduction of a promise for the presence of MLB scouts, the Cape League was officially sponsored by the NCAA in 1963 and picked up by the MLB a few years later, all before in 1985, a switch was made in the bat category as it was officially sanctioned that all games would be played with wooden bats thus enforcing the major league feel.
Regardless, as the league continued to develop, the presence of pro scouts finally began to pay dividends as in the late 1960’s a large surge of Cape League alums stormed into the MLB and never slowed down as at this point in time there have been 1004 Cape League Alumni to see MLB play, 214 of which are currently active in one of the major league’s 30 teams.
For the longest time, the world of NCAA semi pro baseball was one of mockery and laughter. Yet in the blink of an eye, the little things like the introduction of wooden bats, MLB scouts and offseason summer leagues has done what the big things like the college World Series never could.
In a way, it was little leagues like this that saved the one the ruled them all. In a way, it was leagues like the Cape League and the NECBL (the league that the Blue Sox are a part of) that transformed collage baseball into a year round sport.
And in more than just one way it was small summer leagues like this that brought a since of intimacy back to the game of baseball.
This is the way the game is meant to be played and no matter how long the MLB continues to travel farther away from its roots, one facet of America’s oldest game will remain unchanged.
And after seeing this summer league game amidst the buzzing of the ageing stadium lights and punctuated by the steady crack of each and every pitch striking the leather of the catcher’s mitt I have learned that the awe induced by the driving will of these athletes to reach the ultimate goal of a spot on an MLB roster is that unchanged facet of the great game of baseball.
