COVER STORY : Long Beach Barracuda, a new baseball team in a fledgling league, hopes to become a hit with fans. But for many of the players, it’s. . . : More Than Just a Game

Chris Gibbs, president of the Long Beach Barracuda baseball team, wants you to know that Willie Mays is signed and committed. “He’s in,” Gibbs says. “No question.”

That’s Willie Mays the pit bull, who will retrieve rubber balls in the outfield between innings at Barracuda home games.

There also will be races between sumo wrestlers (or people wrapped in rubber mats to look like them) and “chip-off” contests for amateur golfers. There will be fireworks and “The King Lives” night, with folks invited to dress up as Elvis or Priscilla Presley.

Oh, yes. There also will be a baseball team, which opens the season Friday in Palm Springs, then returns to Long Beach for the home opener at 7:15 p.m. Monday at Blair Field.

Get ready for Barracuda ball.

Here’s a brand new team in a brand new league, hoping to capitalize on a widespread disaffection with big-league baseball by offering a low-cost, small-town variety of the national pastime.

There are still a lot of uncertainties about the team’s viability in a market saturated with college and professional teams. And, with barely two weeks of practice behind them, there are even questions about the anticipated quality of play, which league organizers say should be the equivalent of other middle-level minor league teams.

But the Barracuda (dropping the s allowed uniform designers to center the team name) will certainly offer an entertaining and accessible brand of baseball, owners and managers insist.

“Heck, from the 20th row at Blair you’ll be able to see the color of the players’ eyes,” says manager Jeff Burroughs (himself a former big leaguer). “In some of those major league parks, you need binoculars to read the numbers on the players’ uniforms.”

The Barracuda are part of the southern contingent of the new eight-team Western League, which stretches from Palm Springs to Surrey, British Columbia. The league is one of half a dozen new independent leagues that have sprouted in the wake of the 234-day baseball strike.

Though most of the new leagues were in the planning stages long before the strike, their sales pitches to would-be fans invariably emphasize contrasts between the “million-dollar egos” in the big league and the hard-working talent in theirs.

Western League teams have a team salary cap of $92,000, meaning that players will earn an average of about $1,000 a month for the three-month season.

“No million-dollar players, no million-dollar egos,” says Burroughs, 44, who was the American League’s most valuable player in 1974 when he was with the Texas Rangers. “No people showing up a half-hour late and looking for excuses. No problem players getting paid more than the manager.”

*

The players aren’t nearly as happy about the pay rates as the manager, of course. But most aren’t in Long Beach for the money. They’re there to make it big.

“I’ve still got a good shot,” says pitcher John Corona, 25, who was recently released by a St. Louis Cardinals farm team after six years. “I’m a left-hander, I throw in the upper 80s, I can go right after hitters. Maybe I can open some eyes. There are a lot of head scouts around the area.”

Pay ranges from $750 to $1,300 a month, team managers say, and team members get food allowances and free lodging for out-of-town trips. For the long trips, such as those to British Columbia or Washington state, the team travels on commercial airlines--a rarity in minor league ball.

Burroughs, a Long Beach native who coached world champion Little League teams from the city in 1992 and ‘93, is fielding a motley assortment of die-hard veterans and raw rookies. What they lack in finesse they appear to make up for in gritty self-assurance. These guys are hungry.

Take Rob Parkins, a barrel-chested right-handed pitcher with 14 years of minor league experience. A couple of months ago, Parkins was part of the Pittsburgh Pirates’ replacement team, scheduled to play at Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium in place of striking major league players. Then the strike was resolved.

“They turned around and released me,” says Parkins, a bristling, pugnacious presence on the mound, scowling purposefully at the batters, a tin of snuff jammed into his hip pocket.

The replacement teams would have surprised people with the quality of their play, Parkins says with smoldering conviction. “After the strike, we said, ‘Let the regular players play the replacement players, and whoever wins goes up North,’ ” he says.

There were no takers, he says.

“Honestly, I think the big league players were worried we’d be successful,” Parkins says, talking about the possible motivation for the decision by the players’ union to end the strike. “They weren’t going to let that happen.”

Under Western League rules, each 24-player roster must include at least six players with four years or more of professional experience and six with little or no professional experience (fewer than 100 at-bats or 50 innings pitched). To a man, the Barracuda players, veterans and rookies, believe they have a shot at making it to “the show,” or Major League Baseball.

The team includes former Dodger Rudy Law, 38, who has been out of the majors since 1986, and Craig Chamberlain, 38, a right-handed pitcher who played for the Kansas City Royals 15 years ago. It also includes Brett Rapoza, 21, an inexperienced left-handed pitcher who, according to the team’s roster notes, has an 89-m.p.h. fastball.

Law, a slim man with a bow-legged batting stance and the focused squint of a ship’s captain, figures he’ll nurse his dream of making it back to the majors for one more year. “Either I do it or I don’t,” he says.

What has kept alive the dream of returning to big league baseball?

Law smiles as if he has been asked a very dumb question. “The crowds up there,” he says. “The way they treat you. The way they spoil you. The pay.”

Blair Field, the Barracuda’s city-owned home stadium, is a 3,500-seat ballpark in east Long Beach with bristly Bermuda grass on the infield and a challenging 400-foot stretch to the center field fence. Often used as a film location, it has appeared in, among others, “Mr. Baseball” and “The Scout.”

*

The team played its first exhibition game there on Tuesday, edging Cal State Long Beach, 5-3.

As part of a one-year deal to use the stadium, worked out with Parks and Recreation Administrator Ralph Cryder, the Barracuda agreed to give the city 5% of gate receipts, parking fees and merchandise.

The Parks and Recreation Commission is expected to approve the deal today.

On Tuesday, the City Council tentatively approved a permit to sell beer and wine at Barracuda games, though the the vote was not in time to permit sales at the home opener on Monday. The council must approve a second reading of the ordinance next Tuesday, making Wednesday’s game the earliest at which beer and wine could be sold. The Barracuda have agreed to give the city 50% of the profits from these sales.

There are no assurances that big crowds of fans will show up, though the team says that sales of season tickets have already reached 1,200.

For the record, however, the team’s management is brimming with confidence.

The market is there, says General Manager Paula M.E. Pyers. “Long Beach [with a population of 430,000] is the largest city in the U.S. without a professional sports team,” she says.

The Los Angeles Dodgers and California Angels are more than 20 miles away and $10 or so higher in ticket price. Barracuda tickets can cost as little as $4.

“A family of four can take $20 to the ball park and still have a couple of bucks left over,” says team Vice President Patrick H. Elster.

Team managers also have worked out some valuable sponsorship agreements with local businesses, including the Queen Mary, whose hotel will house visiting teams, and Universal Care, the Signal Hill-based health care company, which will finance a $400,000 scoreboard with video capability at Blair Field. In return for providing those kinds of services, sponsors receive promotional benefits such as outfield fence signs or logos displayed on team uniforms.

“We’re forging a partnership with the community,” says Pyers, 29, a former USC basketball player and one of two female general managers in the Western League. “I think people are excited.”

According to team president Gibbs, 33, an insurance executive and prominent amateur golfer, the first-year budget for the team will be $1.1 million.

“But we’ll be happy to break even,” says Gibbs, the principal Barracuda investor in a group of five, which includes an ophthalmologist, a commercial printer, an urban consultant and a member of the Scripps newspaper and broadcasting family. For the privilege of owning the team, the group put up a $50,000 franchise fee and, as proof of solvency, a $100,000 security deposit.

The prototype for the Western League is the Northern League, a six-team independent league in Minnesota, South Dakota, Iowa and Canada that is about to begin its third season.

The most successful Northern League team has been the St. Paul (Minn.) Saints, which sold 97% of available seats in its first season, then turned around and sold 98% the next season.

“They’ve been pretty creative with promotions,” says Dan Moushon, the league’s executive director. “They have a trained pig delivering new baseballs to the umpire at home plate.” They also have a Roman Catholic nun, Sister Rosalind, giving fans massages in the stands.

But the Northern League thrived largely because its teams were established in areas that were “starved for baseball,” Moushon says. Some of the Northern League cities had lost minor league teams when the major leagues pared back farm systems in the 1970s.

The Northern League also had some name players, such as former Dodger infielder Pedro Guerrero and former Boston Red Sox pitcher Oil Can Boyd. And, as an independent league, it offered the kind of continuity that farm teams could not.

Most minor league teams serve as appendages of a parent team, feeding players, usually the top hitters or pitchers, to the big league team at key points in the season, whether or not the minor league team is in the midst of a tight pennant race of its own.

But independent league teams are under no such obligation.

“We won’t be abusing our fans’ relationships with the players,” says Barracuda team president Gibbs. “The fans will know the players will be there for the whole year.”

It’s a prime selling point for the Western League teams. “This is something people can see and touch and identify with,” says Western League president Bruce Engel. “They know what the team is.”

Engel, chief executive of a Portland forest products company and a former Northern League team owner, contends that keeping key players during a minor league pennant race is an essential part of player development.

“You’d think that the major league teams would realize that, along with the baseball skills, young players should learn the concept of contributing to a team and winning a championship,” Engel says.

After the 90-game regular season, the top two teams in each division will meet in a best-of-three playoff in September. The playoff winners meet in a best-of-five championship series.

By last week, after a week of practice, the Barracuda were starting to gel.

“There’s a common bond among ballplayers,” Burroughs says. “Whether they’re from Louisiana, Brooklyn, New Mexico or Venezuela, throw them on a baseball field and, in a half an hour, they’ll all be horsing around.”

Burroughs, a low-key personality, likes the banter and fellowship. His team will be “loosey-goosey,” not buttoned down, he says.

“These are grown men,” he says. “We’ll keep a loose rein on them, try to keep them pumped up and built up. I never liked it when managers ripped into me when I was trying.”

In an intrasquad game at Cal State Long Beach, Parkins is on the mound, offering batters a diet of fastballs and curves.

On the sidelines, pitching coach Rick Langford, a former teammate of Burroughs with the Oakland Athletics, is giving one of his pitchers a verbal pat on the back. “You did good out of the chute,” Langford says. “You had good velocity. Now, you’ll pitch again tomorrow.”

Outfielder Anthony Scruggs squats on the bench, instructing a teammate on “reading” a pitcher’s motion in order to steal a base.

The high point of the afternoon for many has come when a batter bounced a ball into home plate and it caromed into his groin.

Then third baseman Corey Kapano, a veteran minor leaguer, steps to the plate. He fouls off a pitch, lets one pass, then nails a change-up. Every man on the team follows the ball’s trajectory, high over the outstretched glove of left-fielder Rudy Law, and watch it plop into the grass on the far side of the fence.

One of Kapano’s teammates gasps out loud, and Burroughs leans back contentedly.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Western League Teams

Southern Division

Long Beach Barracuda

Salinas Peppers

Sonoma County Crushers,

Rohnert Park, Calif.

Palm Springs Suns

Northern Division

Bend Bandits, Bend, Ore.

Surrey Glaciers,

Surrey, British Columbia

Tri-City Posse, Pasco, Wash.

Grays Harbor Gulls,

Aberdeen, Wash.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

About Blair Field Named for former Long Beach Press-Telegram Sports Editor Frank Blair, the field is considered a pitcher’s park because of its deep dimensions.

More about it: Seating capacity: 3,650 Parking: Limited, but will be expanded Grass: Hybrid Bermuda Outfield wall: 8-9 feet high, unpadded brick History: Stadium opened in 1958 as part of effort to lure a minor league team to Long Beach. That effort failed when the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles the same year. Underwent $1.4-million renovation in 1992. Has played host to Chicago Cubs spring training in 1966, and MTV “Rock and Jock softball game. Source: City of Long Beach, Long Beach State University; Researched by APRIL JACKSON / Los Angeles Times