Cape Cod Baseball League: Where the Stars of Tomorrow Make an Impact Today

There were summers not terribly long ago where Boston hero Nomar Garciaparra and Boston villain Aaron Boone were playing amateur baseball as teammates, and Kevin Millar and Jason Varitek competed against each other before winning rings together ten years later with the Red Sox in 2004.

Every summer, the 12-team Cape Cod Baseball League invites the best college baseball players from around the country to spend the summer in Massachusetts. The players are provided with a host family and a job that ranges from bagging groceries to teaching at a local baseball clinic. At night, they put on the uniforms of local teams like the Brewster Whitecaps, Hyannis Mets, and Wareham Gatemen and compete in front of a mixture of local kids, vacationing families, and major league scouts.

This is not just an excuse for these college guys to live near the beach for the summer; the talent is real and deep. The CCBL last year claimed 217 of its alumni as current major leaguers, and 234 players in last year's draft alone spent at least one summer (often more) on the Cape. The 2009 ratio of players in the majors that are Cape League veterans is roughly 1 out of every 7. The talent is so deep that Garciaparra won the "10th Man" award with Orleans as the best player not to be a starter. This is the same guy who won the AL Rookie of the Year only four years later for Boston.

 Many people have heard of the Cape League and are roughly familiar with what it's about, through word of mouth, television shows giving it spot coverage, or the movie Summer Catch. It's a chance to see good baseball as a family for next to no money (admission at most fields is limited to accepting donations, and concessions are reasonable). But there is a more accessible and human side to it as well. The players are a part of the community; they work and hang out in these small towns, most of which have permanent populations below 30,000. For many, it's the last summer that they're just another kid who likes to play ball before they have agents, managers, contracts, traveling on buses all over the minor leagues, and eventually become pros that spend more face-to-face time with reporters' microphones than with fans. This isn't their fault, but it's the last time that regular people can walk up to any of them and have a regular conversation about last night's game in Cotuit, the tides, Cape traffic, and all the other things that go with spending a summer on the Cape.

I was fortunate enough to benefit from this kind of close interaction with future ball players more than most. Every summer between the ages of 9 and 13, I went to the Brewster Whitecaps baseball clinic while my family stayed on the Cape. The players and coaches helped run the clinic during the morning, and at night groups of us kids would go to the game with our families and meet up, eating hot dogs and Cape Cod potato chips, playing pickup games of pickle and wall ball, and cheering the college kids who coached us during the day. They seemed like big brothers rather than future all-stars; they had inside jokes we could only hope to understand, made funny voices, gave us baseball cards and nicknames, and (on two rare occasions) would let one or two of us sit in the dugout during the games. We liked these guys not because they taught us about a game we both loved and were in a place that we still dreamed of being someday. Even as they threw 95 mph fastballs (we would spy over the scouts shoulders' at the radar gun) or cranked home runs, it was impossible to see them as the future Frank Thomas's or Ken Griffey, Jr.'s because they still would make noises with their mouths at camp to make us crack up.

I was never more than a mediocre baseball player growing up, but I have the memories of learning to correctly field a ground ball from former fourth overall pick and current eight-year veteran pitcher Jason Grilli. I can also say that I ripped line drives off of longtime Rays reliever Dan Wheeler, even if the pitches were lobbed underhand and it was only forty feet to first base. I have autographed baseballs at my parents' house with names of former and current pros like Todd Walker, Kip Wells, Augie Ojeda, and all-star 2B Chase Utley. All of it contributes to what are some of my favorite childhood memories.

It's not just about having had a chance to meet major league players, though. My favorite Cape League player ever was a catcher from Georgia Tech who came to Brewster named Tucker Barr. He was one of the Whitecaps' top hitters in '95, and every time he stepped up to the plate at home games, we would sing along with the announcer, "Now batting, the Ramblin' Wreck from Georgia Tech, Tuckerrrr Barrrrr." As a person, he was extremely friendly and generous with his time around us kids. Toward the end of his summer in Brewster, he gave me a broken bat of his that had his name etched into the black wood with gold letters. It was a commemorative bat given to him from an exhibition game that the Yellow Jackets had played against the Atlanta Braves, the kind of item a ballplayer might want to hold onto to remember his days as a top college prospect. And yet he gave it to me, and I still have it.

Tucker was drafted in the fifth round by the Astros in 1996, and in four seasons of minor league ball, he never made it past AA. Despite all the success stories that the Cape League boasts, this is the more typical path of the college baseball player, even ones good enough to be invited to the CCBL. I have no clue if Tucker is still involved in baseball, as a scout or a coach or anything else, but I can tell you that his career as a player, like many other careers of Cape League vets that don't achieve their dreams of reaching the majors, was not without a lasting and memorable impact.