A Down-to-Earth Look at ‘Baseball’

You rarely find baseball players on television chewing more fat than tobacco. Yet such is the case on Fox’s fX cable network with the wired-for-sound, camera-ready St. Paul Saints, the other professional baseball franchise in the Twin Cities.

The area’s major leaguers are the Minnesota Twins, an American League team playing in a suburb of Minneapolis, a sophisticated metropolis that adjoins smaller St. Paul the way Beverly Hills does West Hollywood.

The Twins and Saints may as well occupy separate solar systems, however. Far from the posh, tony neighborhood of free agents, fat contracts, salary caps, sky boxes and chartered jets, the Saints travel by bus and bunk together in no-frills motels while playing in the Northern League against such powerhouses as the Thunder Bay Whiskey Jacks, Fargo-Moorhead Red Hawks and Sioux Falls Canaries.

These are not just the minors, but the fairly low minors, a league of independents whose teams have no major league affiliation. Although St. Paul is a city of 272,000, this is small baseball, baseball you can touch.

Which is exactly what gives a new weekly documentary series titled “Baseball, Minnesota” its allure.

The popular Saints and their downsized universe are close to the bone--operating at home in Midway Stadium, where patches of brown peek through the grass and 6,311 is a full house--and thus are easier to relate to than the fancier, pampered, obscenely paid, Rolls-and-Rolexed major leaguers who headline sportscasts and sports pages everywhere.

Not that players in the minors and majors aren’t linked by shared aspirations and other common denominators. Just look at the gleams in the eyes of sandlot tykes from nearby White Bear Lake when visited by a 20-year-old North Carolinian pitching for the Saints in “Baseball, Minnesota.” It’s the same worshipful glow that surely radiates from youngsters eyeing Minnesota Twins players just a few miles away. And the groupies gather and have their hearts broken at Gabe’s, a Saints hangout not far from Midway Stadium, just as they do in endless joints patronized by major leaguers.

There’s an appealing eavesdropping quality to this 22-episode chunk of baseball on the slow track, with big-bellied manager Marty Scott and some of his players packing sound gear that’s hidden from the minicams documenting their 1996 season, snoopy cinema verite-style.

“What state is it in? Minnesota?” a callow hopeful inquires about St. Paul at a tryout. Not to worry, for knowing the diamond’s geography takes priority here.

It’s a varied group of Saints we meet at summer camp, ranging from gregarious former major league star Jack Morris, still pitching for glory at age 41, to youngsters hoping to test their dreams for the first time. One of them, a young outfielder named Chris Evans, assumes he’ll start in right field “if Darryl leaves.”

“Darryl” as in troubled slugger and former L.A. Dodger Darryl Strawberry, who this summer signed with the Saints, beginning a comeback that later would return him to the majors in New York Yankees pinstripes.

It’s clear from what’s said here by promotion-minded Saints owner Mike Veeck, son of legendary baseball owner-innovator Bill Veeck, that he realized that Strawberry’s stay in St. Paul would be brief but signed him knowing that he would draw fans to Midway, where a massive pig delivers baseballs to the umpire and a Catholic nun gives spectators massages for $7.

The Strawberry episode offers some voyeur value, but little else to dig your spikes into. And the documentary’s non-narration, scriptless technique leaves a residue of gaps not immediately filled by a filmmaking team that includes executive producer Gary Cohen, producer-creator Anthony Horn and director Rob Klug.

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What drives “Baseball, Minnesota” are the intimate personal dramas that seductively draw you in during the two episodes made available for screening. When disaster befalls Daryl Henderson, a highly promising young pitcher who Scott says has a “major league arm,” you feel the pain. Just as you’re pulling for Dan Thomson, a hurler labeled “not a major league prospect” but offered a Saints contract after showing “some bop” on his fastball, even while warned that he could be dropped from the squad if a top college player is signed.

There are times when the presence of cameras surely turns the Saints into performers, times also when the lens produces glints of truth that define the typical low-paid minor leaguer’s life of hardship, as when several budget-minded players check out some furniture rentals for the apartment they’re sharing.

“Do we need a kitchen table?”

“No.”

“Do we need a dresser?”

“No, we can just lay our things on the floor.”

Meanwhile, the Saints are bused north for the season opener with the Duluth-Superior Dukes. They wait around and wait around, only to have the game canceled because of fog.

No one said dream-chasing would be easy.

* “Baseball, Minnesota” premieres with an hourlong installment at 7 p.m. Sunday, then will be seen in half-hour segments on Sundays at 7:30 p.m., beginning Sept. 15 on the fX cable channel.