Young Bucs
By Brendan Joel Kelley
http://www.anchoragepress.com/site/basicarticle.asp?ID=755
It’s been a rough summer for the Anchorage Bucs.
In June, just before a stretch of 28 games in 26 days, the Alaska Baseball League club showed up to Mulcahy Stadium to find the team bus demolished by vandals. The windows, headlights, and taillights were smashed in; the engine and a battery compartment were set afire.
It was a total disaster. Money that the club had spent this spring and last year fixing it up went up in smoke. The loss was estimated at $25,000, and the team had to buy another bus. (Luckily, a former general manager of the ABL’s Peninsula Oilers owns a bus charter company, and had one to spare.)
Thus far, no one’s been nailed for the crime. “I don’t understand why someone would want to vandalize our bus like that,” says pitcher Gavin Logsdon, from University of Louisville, in Kentucky. “To put them in a pinch financially, and [the team’s] mood even, that’s unreal.”
And the same “summer” weather that’s been bringing everybody in Anchorage’s spirits down is even tougher on the Bucs. They’ve struggled to play on wet fields, suffered rain-outs, and endured poor attendance. Add to that a mid-season losing streak that’s kept the Bucs near the bottom of the ABL standings.
Still, the young men on the team—college players who didn’t want to spend any time away from the regimen—are good-spirited and happy to be in Alaska playing for the Bucs in what’s one of the premier summer wood-bat leagues in the nation. Despite the vandalism, despite the weather, despite the losses, the Bucs have soldiered on like the pros they hope to become soon, and individual players have racked up impressive stats.
The night of Friday, July 18—the first day of the annual Major League Baseball Scout Showcase—Drew Gagnier of Santa Cruz, California and local boy Chad Nading together pitched the sixth no-hitter in the club’s history. The last Bucs pitcher to rack one up was Jered Weaver, now a star pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.
And Bucs pitcher Christian Bergman, who went to the College World Series last year with the UC Irvine Anteaters, was recently ranked tenth on a major scouting website’s rankings of summer league players (he’ll be eligible for the 2009 MLB draft, the site says).
“The real baseball fans won’t be able to see a more competitive sport than exists in the Alaska Baseball League, even in a major league park,” says Gary Lichtenstein, who holds the title of Director of Baseball Operations for the Bucs. Still, the sparse attendance—which affects the other five teams in the ABL as well—is worrisome. “At some point, the concern of the league is how do we maintain without a fan base to keep us going,” Lichtenstein says.
The Bucs have always been a scrappy team, out of necessity. Originally formed in 1980 as the Cook Inlet Bucs, led by coach Dennis Mattingly (who’s still with the Bucs as general manager), the team was part of the Anchorage Adult League. But Mattingly’s team was dominating the city league, so he strove to play games against Alaska Baseball League teams. It took some wrangling, especially with the preexisting Anchorage ABL team, the Glacier Pilots, but Mattingly fought the team’s way into the league by 1981.
Sportswriter Lew Freedman, formerly with the Daily News and now at the Chicago Tribune, chronicled the Bucs rise in his 2000 book Diamonds in the Rough, a history of baseball in Alaska. Since its publication, history continues to be made by the Bucs (and by players throughout the ABL, for that matter). In 2008’s MLB draft alone, 21 former Bucs were picked up. Besides the aforementioned Weaver, a number of Bucs have been making their mark in the major leagues, including Colorado Rockies pitcher Jeff Francis (“He wasn’t even spoken about before he played for us,” Lichtenstein says) and Baltimore Orioles pitcher Garrett Olson (“A scout came up to me in Wichita [where the National Baseball Congress holds its World Series] and said, ‘who is that guy?’” Lichtenstein says).
For the college kids who play for the Bucs—and the rest of the Alaska Baseball League—the experience is primarily about exposure. A great deal of the league’s prestige comes from the amount of attention it receives from major league scouts.
Hank Buenrotro, a pitcher from Lewis & Clark State, was offered a spot on the Bucs midway through this summer’s two-month season. He’d played in the annual Midnight Sun game up in Fairbanks as a member of a visiting Southern California junior college team. After he was back home in Santa Ana, California for about a week, one of his coaches from Lewis & Clark called and mentioned going to Alaska. Buenrotro was interested, and about ten minutes later he got a call from Mattingly, the Bucs’ general manager. Buenrotro was asked how quickly he could get up to Alaska, and he told Mattingly to just set a date. Mattingly said he’d like Buenrotro there that night, and within a couple of hours Buenrotro was at the airport.
“I was stoked,” Buenrotro says on a rare sunny Saturday afternoon during the scout showcase. “This is a really prestigious league up here. A lot of good ball players played here, a lot of big names. It just gives us players a chance for more exposure.” Buenrotro thinks he’s got a shot, at least to play in the minors, if he continues to play consistently. “With the scouts being here, it gives me a chance to showcase what I’ve got.”
The Bucs’ third baseman last year, Tommy Mendonca, was the Most Outstanding Player of the College World Series this summer with his Cinderella-story Fresno State Bulldogs (Mendoza hit a record-tying four home runs and drove in eleven runs in the series)—which, in a way, sucks for the Bucs. He was expected back here to play another summer season. “It’s one of those things where you root for the kid and their team to win, but there’s another part of you that says, ‘hey, don’t go too far because we have a season going on,’” Lichtenstein says. After his CWS victory, Team USA’s collegiate team picked up Mendonca, and he’s been playing games around the world this summer. “It was a major blow to our team that he wasn’t on third base, but that’s what happens a lot,” Lichtenstein says.
That’s the risk for Bucs management. If a college kid is too good, or his college’s team is too good, you have to estimate the chances of the team going to the College World Series, which cuts into the ABL’s season. But then again, they do manage to corral talent, like Bergman, who’s playing his third summer with the Bucs.
“It’s like coming back to my summer home,” 20-year-old Bergman says. Despite the team’s record this year, Bergman and other Bucs players say that the wins aren’t necessarily what they’re here for.
“To me, if I go out and have a good outing and don’t get a ‘W,’ it doesn’t matter as much as if I were to get it but not pitch well,” says Ben Rosen, who’s from Chugiak and headed for the College of Idaho this fall. “You just have to go out and play your game; some days it works out, some days it doesn’t.”
The Bucs’ coaches don’t mess with a player’s style too much—if they did, they’d have to answer to the player’s college coaches, who the ABL teams like to keep a good relationship with. Quite a few college coaches have been Bucs themselves, or coached for the team, so the ties remain strong.
During the scout showcase, as the Bucs prepare to play the Athletes in Action Fire, there are a couple dozen middle-to-older aged guys clustered in the stands behind home plate, with cushions, notebooks, and speed guns. When Bucs pitcher Paul Bargas takes the mound, the scouts raise their Stalker Sport radar guns in unison, clocking the speed of his pitches. One of the Fire’s coaches comes by the group of scouts and tosses them a bag of Werther’s caramel candies, saying he wants to sweeten them up.
Dave Dangler, the Pacific Northwest scout for the Balitmore Orioles, is here for the second summer in a row. He and the others take notes, return to their offices, file reports into computer systems, and hope to find some talent. “Scouting is kind of like fishing,” he says, “you put your line in the water and you never know what you’ll catch.”
Although this is only his second year scouting the ABL, Dangler’s relationship with the Bucs stretches backs a long way. When he was a coach at Yavapai College in Arizona, Bucs’ GM Mattingly would send players who were looking for a warm weather school down there, and Mattingly’s son played for Dangler there.
Over the scout’s showcase weekend, the scouts seem relaxed, almost on vacation, flitting in and out of the stands. Meanwhile, if the Bucs players are anxious about the scouts watching them, they’re trying not to show it. “There might be [extra pressure] for some guys,” Rosen says. “But I don’t really think it’s an issue for our team. We just go out and play the same game we always do.”
“A lot of people would say [there’s more pressure],” Buenrotro says, “but for me it’s just like any other ball game.”
By the final game of the showcase weekend Sunday night, there are only about a half-dozen scouts left in the grandstand. Some of them are likely squeezing some real fishing into their Alaska trip, too.
A Bronx native who grew up two blocks from Yankee Stadium, Gary Lichtenstein’s been involved with the team since 1985. He was president of the Bucs’ board of directors for years (like all of the ABL teams, the Bucs are a non-profit entity) until about seven years ago when he decided give up his local psychology practice to snowbird and spend half of the year in Puerta Vallarta, Mexico.
“When I started with the Bucs there was no cable TV, no sitting at home using the remote to watch any game you wanna see,” Lichtenstein says. “When the Bucs were established there was no Aces, there was no Wild; there were very few choices for live sports in Anchorage, or Alaska. So we benefited from that in attendance.”
Attendance has fallen steadily over the years at ABL games, despite free tickets to Bucs games that you can print out off of their website (www.anchoragebucs.com). That’s caused the team to rely on other sources of income for its operating budget. Although their season is only two months long, running the club—which falls to GM Dennis Mattingly—is pretty close to a year-long job. There are sponsors to gather, ads to sell, radio spots to create, and then you have the scouting and recruitment of the players.
For money, Lichtenstein says, “we have the sponsorships, major sponsors like Pepsi and Budweiser and Blockbuster, and the pulltabs are very important to us.” The Bucs have a concession stand and a beer stand, as well as a pulltab stand at the Dimond Center, and Tudor Road Bingo utilizes some of the Bucs’ gaming permits, including one for its gerbil races—valuable, because new permits don’t allow gerbil racing.
Lichtenstein says that changing the trend in attendance is a continuing issue, but neither the Bucs nor the other five ABL teams are in danger of extinction yet. “The ABL still keeps its status as one of, if not the best competitive summer leagues in the nation. The scouts still come up en masse.”
As the season draws to a close—there are only a few games left before everyone goes home—the players have put the stresses of the bus vandalism, the bad weather and this summer’s losses out of their minds. “I think of it as a chance to come up here and improve your game,” Bergman says. “Who doesn’t like to win? But I think of it as a chance to come up and get better.”
bjk@anchoragepress.com
