Salt Lake City Wins 27th in a Row to Tie 85-Year-Old Record

It isn’t the record as much as the recognition. It isn’t the streak as much as the stage it represents.

Undrafted out of college and basically unwanted by anyone in baseball, the Salt Lake City Trappers have equaled the longest winning streak in the game’s history.

Baseball’s orphans, the only team without a major league affiliation among the eight teams in the rookie Pioneer League, the Trappers defeated the Pocatello Giants, 7-2, Friday night to make it 27 straight victories.

Only the 1902 Corsicana Oilers of the Texas League and the 1921 Baltimore Orioles of the International League produced comparable streaks.

Tonight, the Trappers can make it 28 straight. Also scheduled tonight is a promotional visit by baseball clown prince Max Patkin, who has been told to subordinate his performance, the game being the thing.

“If we had lost tonight, it would have been like bowling 299,” Manager Jim Gilligan said after Friday’s win. “Now, we can go after the 300.”

A crowd of 7,657 saw the Trappers win again with a six-run, first-inning outburst in which outfielder Jon Beuder, a Division II All-American from Cal State Dominguez Hills, hit a grand slam.

“Tying is nice,” Beuder said of the streak, “but it will mean more to have it to ourselves.”

There were smiles, back slaps and Coors Extra Gold in the clubhouse, where Gilligan announced he was waiving all previous fines. But maybe it will take the one more win for the Trappers to shed the restraint with which they’ve approached the streak.

There is an inherent motivation among the Trappers, who are always out to prove they belong, that mistakes were made in the draft, that they are worthy of a contract with a major league organization.

Sharing a line with Corsicana and Baltimore in the record book is memorable stuff, but the bottom line is that the streak has attracted scouts, media and national notoriety. It has proved they can play.

“All of these kids are on a mission,” Gilligan said.

“They’ve been told they can’t play, and all of them can.”

A sign hanging from a grandstand wall at Derks Field salutes the Trappers for their Pioneer League championships in 1985 and ’86. The 1987 team is 30-3 and leading the league’s South Division by 13 games. Beuder pointed to the sign and said:

“We’re the best team in the league, and it seems to be the same story every year. We’re the national all-star team of unwanted players. Every one of us expected to be drafted and was disappointed when we weren’t. Now we have something to prove.

“I mean, I see guys who I played against in college and who come through here now with affiliated teams and I know I can play as well as or better than they can.

“You want to say, ‘Why me?’ but that’s life. No one said it was fair.”

The Trappers, of course, represent a response to unfairness, a halfway house, perhaps, on the uncertain road to a career in baseball or the nervous choices of the real world.

Outfielder Jon Leake of Sacramento and the University of Miami has written “9 to 5” in his baseball cap and says he uses it when he gets tired or frustrated as a reminder of “how close I am to a lunch pail.”

Said catcher Frank Colston, a Louisiana Tech product and the league’s leading hitter:

“It’s a last-chance organization, that’s what it’s all about. If we weren’t here we’d be home playing summer ball in an amateur league and trying not to think about work.”

Ironic isn’t it? The rejects are on the verge of compiling the longest win streak in baseball history. The Mormon Tabernacle? The Great Salt Lake? The imposing Wasach Mountains? Now the city has another landmark.

Who knows? Actor Bill Murray, who has 5% as one of the 16 co-owners, may be jetting in from a Paris filming at any moment now.

So the last-chance Trappers are composed of hungry and angry former college players who play 70 games in 72 days, get $500 a month in salary--about $200 less than affiliated players--and $11 a day in road meal money and take scenic bus trips to Billings and Butte and Pocatello and Medicine Hat, which is in Alberta and a mere 18 hours away if the tires don’t have to be replaced.

There are guys like infielder Neil Reynolds from Lamar University and a grandson of Hall of Fame member Carl Reynolds; pitcher John Groennert of Southern Illinois and a nephew of Jim Kaat; infielder James Ferguson of New Haven, who made the team as a tryout camp walk-on and could be playing second base in the majors, said Gilligan; infielder Anthony Blackmon, whose career at Oklahoma State included a suspension during the 1987 College World Series for mooning needling fans, and catcher Ed Citronnelli of Southwest Louisiana, who at 6 feet 3 inches and 200 pounds is “stronger than a garlic milkshake,” according to the manager.

“Look at him,” Gilligan said of Citronnelli in batting practice. “Listen to the sound when he hits it. Don’t you think he’d look good in a big league uniform? Tell Lasorda. This kid’s better than just about anything he has.”

There also are pitchers Koichi Ikeue and Yasuhiro Hiyama, who are on loan from the Kintetsu Buffaloes and whose ballpark meals are catered by a local Japanese restaurant.

Ikeue will pitch tonight when the Trappers go after the record. Gilligan smiled and said: “I’ll tell you what, he doesn’t speak English but he can sure pitch American baseball.”

The Trappers can sure hit it, too. They have a .348 team batting average, 50 points higher than the team that is second in that category, and the league’s six leading hitters all play for Salt Lake City. Thirteen players from the 1986 team sustained their careers by signing with established organizations, which is the goal of all the Salt Lake players.

The sales and negotiating rights to Trapper players are held by Van Schley, co-owner and personnel director who is in charge of scouting and signing the players through a network he calls Texas Star Baseball.

Schley, 46, a successful businessman, was once a blossoming artist with a bigger passion for the box score than the easel. His grass-roots affection may have started as a youth in Vero Beach, Fla., where he had a spring job changing numbers on the Dodger scoreboard at Holman Stadium.

At any rate, there he was in the Woodlawn Hills’ Hamburger Hamlet in 1977, digesting a burger and a Sports Illustrated article that informed him that the Texas City franchise in the Lone Star League might be available. So much for Picasso.

Schley, who now has homes in Malibu and nearby Park City and whose financial independence allows him to pursue his passion (he also is a part-owner of the Durham Bull and Pittsfield Cubs), attended a league meeting on a whim and emerged as the Texas City owner, which he now claims was like “learning from below the bottom.”

He went on to own the Victoria Blues, the Grays Harbor Loggers and the Utica Blue Sox, an educational odyssey during which he developed important contacts among scouts and college coaches, among them Gilligan, who spent 14 years at Lamar in Beaumont, Tex., and was the youngest Division I coach ever to win 500 games.

He might still be there, in fact, if budget cuts hadn’t convinced him his program was in jeopardy and he hadn’t become more interested in representing athletes than in coaching them.

A partner is currently baby-sitting an organization they call Star Bound while Gilligan, 40, spends his first and last season as manager of the Trappers, adjusting to the nuances of the pro game.

Could he have anticipated that a course designed as preparation for his future work as an agent, would evolve into a history-making event?

Gilligan smiled and shook his head. He then said there were several factors in his favor, primarily talented players with built-in motivation and the freedom as a manager to make the same demands he had as a college coach.

“I’m not working with high-priced bonus babies who are required to play X amount of innings,” he said.

“You also have to be lucky to win this many games in a row,” Gilligan added, and cited win No. 23, a 13-10 victory over Pocatello in which the Trappers trailed, 10-5, heading into the seventh inning, when a persistent rainstorm seemed to threaten the game’s conclusion.

The storm ended as abruptly as it had started, a rainbow appeared and the Trappers rallied for eight runs in that seventh inning.

“Maybe there’s been more to it,” Gilligan said.. “Maybe we’ve had a 10th man working for us.”

Maybe it’s all relative. Gilligan has one brother who is a priest, another who is a bartender and still another who is a country-western singer.

“I’ve got it all covered,” he said.

And has it been fun?

“Who doesn’t enjoy winning?” he answered. “When you’re 3-23 it’s work.

“I mean, there’ve been two very positive things about the streak. The first is that it’s drawn a lot of attention to the players and improved their chances of moving on. The second is that when you play every day, and a lot of these guys never had before, it’s easy to get tired and to get down. The streak has helped keep everyone up.”

Including the fans, of course. This had been the Angels’ triple-A home in the Pacific Coast League from 1971 until 1980, when the Seattle Mariners moved in. Financial problems led to shift of the triple-A franchise to Calgary in 1984. The Trappers were created a year later.

Now Steve Pearson, the 29-year-old general manager, as leader of an aggressive and imaginative organization, is being ballyhooed as a candidate for minor league executive of the year.

The Trappers set a Pioneer League attendance record last year, averaging 3,106 a game. That put them 22nd among the country’s 154 minor league teams. The current combination of the streak and a nightly schedule of promotional events--Economy Builders Supply Painters Cap Night and Bullseye Barbecue Apron Night are still to come--has raised the average to 5,900. Only three of the country’s 26 triple-A teams surpassed that average last year.

Schley estimated that a franchise that cost the current ownership $125,000 is now worth more than $1 million, though it’s greatest value may be in the opportunity it has provided players who otherwise wouldn’t be getting one. Which is not to paint a picture of stability for the players. It’s more or less only a summer job, a foot in the door.

No player can spend more than two years with the same rookie league team. No team can bring back more than five players. The decisions are difficult. Each of the Trappers must weigh his options.

Beuder, for instance, is close to a business degree. He has experience in computer sales. He will be 21 soon.

“I’ve still not worked it out in my mind,” he said. “Do I come back here if I’m offered the chance? Do I go to tryout camps? Do I quit, go back to school and start to work? I’m getting old for the lower minor leagues, but I just don’t know yet.”

What he does know is that he was a first-team All-American and that there are many players with affiliated teams who weren’t.

“Is that frustrating?” he said. “Very much so.”

The streak rolls on, solace for the frustration, fodder for the opponents.

Some of the affiliated clubs are said to be determined to have the league address the Trappers’ dominance, their argument being that by using strictly older, college players they have a distinct experience advantage over teams composed primarily of high school draft choices or teams that are a combination of the two.

Supported by the figures, Schley called it a myth. The Trappers do have the league’s oldest average age of 21.2, but the majority of the other seven teams are within a half year of that.

Does that alone explain 27 in a row and 30-3?

“The real problem is that everyone expects an independent team to finish on the bottom, and it generally happens because they’re put together as an afterthought,” Schley said. “They don’t have the contacts and don’t make the effort we do to get the best players.

“The enlightened organizations understand that the draft is an inexact science, that you can’t see every player and that mistakes are made. There are other organizations that just won’t accept it.”

Said a Trapper regular, requesting anonymity as he smiled, shook his head and reflected on the break-up-the-Trappers movement: “Funny, isn’t it? First they don’t want us. Now, we’re too good for them. Sounds like jealousy.”