Baseball Team’s Cap Rapidly Reaches Peak of Popularity

Latest sports apparel rage: the cap worn by the Bend, Ore., Rockies, the first farm team of the expansion Colorado Rockies.

Jack Cain, owner of the Bend Rockies, was fielding requests for the caps, which show the letters BR against a backdrop of purple mountains, long before the Class-A Northwest League team began play last week.

Describing one request from a man who said he was calling from Brooklyn, N.Y., Cain told the Denver Post’s Jim Armstrong: “He said he had been walking down the street in Manhattan and saw a guy wearing the cap. So he asked him what the ‘BR’ meant. I guess we’re already famous coast to coast.”

The team is certainly ready to cash in, offering mail-order customers 17 souvenir items.

Add Bend: The official spokesman for the team is Dave Rufkahr, a rancher from nearby Alfalfa, Ore., who became a national celebrity of sorts for his role in a folksy television commercial for a wine cooler. Rufkahr did a TV commercial for the Rockies wearing catcher’s gear. His fee: four season tickets.

Last add Bend: The team’s booster club has set up a program through which a local family can invite a player into the home as a means of helping the player familiarize himself with the community. The program is known as Adopt a Pet Rock.

Get lost, sailor: The Erie, Pa., Sailors of the Class-A New York-Penn League are the first farm team for the expansion Florida Marlins, a marriage that makes for an interesting mixture of baseball’s old and new, according to Dan Le Batard of the Miami Herald.

Erie has supported minor league baseball since 1890, when the Sailors played in the Iron and Coal League, and the town has provided the game with some unusual stories.

One involves Steve Mizerak, the Erie manager in 1946 and father of the noted pool player of the same name.

According to Le Batard, Mizerak had an intercom installed between the dugout and the press box and would often contact Betty Peebles, who wrote a local newspaper column called “A Woman’s Angle on Baseball.” Mizerak’s angle: a date.

“I quit speaking to him,” Peebles, now 78, told Le Batard. “He was always asking me out. He would look up at me from the dugout during the game, when all the players could see him. I called him ‘Miserable Mizerak.’ I helped get him fired.”

Added Le Batard: “She got back at him in a far more painful way, too. She married a sportswriter.”

Trivia time: The last time the Erie Sailors won a championship was 1957. That team included a switch-hitting catcher who is currently a manager in the major leagues. Identify him.

Welcome, Matt: Overcome no doubt by expansion fever, Le Batard has begun a campaign to form a Matt Sinatro Fan Club. Le Batard reasons that Sinatro, a backup catcher with the Seattle Mariners who last hit a major league home run in 1982, would be a perfect catch for the Marlins.

Under the headline “Matt Mania: Let’s Get a Perfectly Awful Marlin,” Le Batard wrote: “We already know the team won’t be very good the first year. Why don’t we just have some fun? . . . Why not make the team’s first-ever starting catcher a man who hasn’t hit a home run in a decade?”

Sinatro, who has spent time with Atlanta, Oakland, Detroit and Seattle, was happy to play along.

“My role with the Marlins would be as a veteran who has been around winners,” he told Le Batard. “I catch a great game. I can throw people out at second. And I can keep the locker room loose.”

As for his lack of home runs, Sinatro acknowledged: “I’ve had a drought. Actually, I’m not a home run hitter. I hit one in 1981 off Pete Falcone. My whole family was there.”

Add Sinatro: Sinatro hasn’t exactly been burning up the base paths, either, last hitting a triple 11 years ago.

But he’s not slow. Simply cautious.

Said Sinatro: “You don’t want to get thrown out at third when you play once a week.”

Trivia answer: The Angels’ Buck Rodgers.

Quotebook: Casey Stengel, on why the first player selected by the New York Mets during the 1962 expansion draft was a catcher, Hobie Landrith: “You got to start with a catcher, or you’ll have all passed balls.”