No Season in the Sun for the Cape Crusader : Baseball: After failing to be selected in the June draft, Jeremy Carr returned for a second tour of duty in the Cape Cod league.

Jeremy Carr is summering in Chatham.

It’s one of the nicest towns on Cape Cod, a delightful little burg where only the beaches are whiter than the picket fences.

Not the typical tourist, though, Carr plays for Chatham’s entry in the Cape Cod Baseball League, a Massachusetts summer league for collegians.

Yet Carr, a former El Segundo High player and senior at Cal State Fullerton, would rather be sweating the summer out making long bus rides around the Arizona League or playing in the forgotten towns of the Appalachian League.

In short, Carr would rather be playing professional baseball.

After batting .359 to help Fullerton finish second in the College World Series, Carr was ignored by pro teams in the June draft.

Instead of beginning his dreamed-for pro career this summer, he finds himself back on the Cape for a second season.

“I tell myself I’m going to hit .400, steal 50 bases and do whatever I can to make (the pros) take me,” Carr said.

Just call him the Cape crusader.

Carr’s dissatisfaction arises not so much from dislike of Cape Cod baseball--he readily acknowledges that he enjoys the experience--but from a desire to be paid for playing. This summer he is instead being paid for working at the Chatham youth baseball camp, a plum job in Chatham but far from pro baseball.

“I’d rather be playing in the minors,” Carr said. “I’m looking to further my career.”

Carr came to the Cape this summer carrying more baggage than the luggage he checked on the plane. His first season at Fullerton was bittersweet. He started only 34 of 65 games, but the Titans advanced to the NCAA title game.

Losing the title to the Waves was a disappointment.

“I lost to those guys and I couldn’t wait back home; I couldn’t sit around,” said Carr, who has two Pepperdine teammates in Chatham. “The sooner I could get that out of my mind the better. I needed to get back playing and have some fun.”

Carr is in his second season at Chatham. He made the all-star team and batted .299 in his first season on the Cape. This year, he helped Chatham qualify for the four-team playoffs, which begin Sunday, and he is batting .284 with a league-leading 42 steals. He also started in center field and led off for the East in the all-star game.

“I was the young guy, the non-Division I player,” Carr said of coming to the Cape in 1991 after attending Cuesta Junior College. “You go, ‘God, these guys are great.’ Now I go, ‘God, these guys aren’t as good.’ ”

Many players come to the Cape league to use wood bats--a league rule--but the experience often leaves their confidence more shattered than the bats. It nonetheless gives them a leg up in professional baseball.

More than 100 Cape alums were on major league rosters in 1991, and Carr is excelling in a league that has helped Chuck Knoblauch, Chris Sabo and Jeff Reardon, among others, reach their pro potential.

“Every year in his life he’s just gotten better,” Chatham Coach Rich Hill said. “Jeremy is a poor man’s Lenny Dykstra. He plays the game with the same reckless abandon. He’s a rat.”

Carr has freedom to run whenever he wants on the basepaths, and he often disrupts games with his slashing, bunting style. He’s playing to show that he doesn’t belong on the Cape.

“It’s not that I’m bitter,” Carr said. “I just feel I’ve got a lot to prove to people.”

After his first season at Texas A&M;, the only guy Robert Lewis is trying to impress is himself.

Lewis, from Rolling Hills High and Harbor College, is catching for Hyannis and rounding into form after spending his first year at A&M; as an academic redshirt.

“I just came into the summer hoping to get back into shape,” Lewis said. “I just wanted to get back to where I was before I took the year off.”

Lewis has also been forced to get into the swing of things using a different bat. He last played competitively with aluminum bats, but returned to the world of wood bats.

“It wasn’t bad,” said Lewis, who was chosen the Cape’s batter of the week for June 28 to July 4. “The first five or six games were tough, then it fell together.”

Lewis is batting .232 with three home runs and 22 runs batted in.

Catching on the Cape can be demanding because teams play a heavy schedule with games four out of every five days, but Lewis also carries more than twice the normal workload of a typical Cape Cod player.

While most players have difficulty squeezing a 20-hour workweek around baseball, Lewis is working 45 hours a week. He toils from 6 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. every weekday at the local golf course, then changes into his catching gear for a night behind the plate.

“I wish I didn’t have to do it,” said Lewis, who is earning money to pay for school. “I come to the ballpark tired.”

Summer vacation it isn’t, but Lewis said he plans to start next season at Texas A&M;, and “I wanted to come here because I knew I’d get better.”