Minor Detail

Here in the low-rent district of professional baseball, where players travel by bus from town to mountain town, eat at Taco Bell and borrow a few bucks to make it to the next payday, word that millionaire major leaguers might go on strike Aug. 30 seems as weird and remote as chatter from outer space.

“If they strike, they strike,” said Vance Spinks, the Johnson City Cardinal general manager who quit a lucrative computer job eight years ago for a minor league career that started as a ballpark usher. “It wouldn’t impact us. If anything it could help. We could make the pitch: ‘The majors aren’t playing anymore. Come on out and see us.’ ”

It is an hour to game time. Spinks, who is also the team’s public address announcer, is in the tiny press box, fiddling with some wires. His assistant GM is grilling hamburgers near the ticket booth. Fans are trickling into the 2,200-seat park, many carrying two cans of food for the homeless as part of a free-ticket promotion. The usher, Don Stephens, a retired railroad worker, knows all the regulars by name.

In an era when baseball’s major leagues are beset by work stoppages, reports of widespread steroid use, debt-burdened teams, stagnant attendance, sinking TV ratings and soaring salaries, the Appalachian League, where Johnson City has fielded a team on and off since 1921, harks back to a bygone time half a century ago when the French-born author Jacques Barzun advised, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball....”

The fields in the 10-team Appy League, as it is known, are named for local civic leaders, not corporations. Everyone stands hatless and still during the national anthem. For $20, a family of four can see a game, buy hot dogs, sodas and a program and leave with change. Parking is usually free. Players earn $850 a month and they all show up when the local church or chamber of commerce puts on a picnic for them.

One young infielder, now in his second season with Johnson City, said he was sure he’d move above the poverty line one day. Yes, a visitor replied, if he played 40 seasons in the Appy, or until he was 61, he would have ended up earning, in all that time, what Alex Rodriguez of the Texas Rangers does in a day.

“Say again, please,” the young player said.

Pitcher Tyler Adamczyk, 19, of Westlake Village, was unconcerned.

“I never really looked at baseball in terms of money,” he said. “Every kid dreams of having this opportunity.”

Added Mitch Maio, 23, a University of Utah graduate, “Even if all this ended tomorrow, my time in the Appy League wouldn’t have been wasted. I can always tell my kids someday I was a professional athlete, that I was paid for doing something I love. No one can ever take that away from me.”

“Well said,” said Matt Lemanczyk, 21, of Rockville Centre, N.Y. “I couldn’t have put it better myself.”

To be sure, the words of young men who do not yet wear the perfume of heroic deeds. Here in the lowest level of the minor leagues, on the first step toward a major league dream few will fulfill, these players remain a world apart from fame and fortune--and the devilish influence those twin companions exert on those who flirt with them. But the dream is real. Just ask the 14 major leaguers who once labored for the Johnson City Cardinals in the long summer nights of the Appalachian League.

“If someone offers you $40 million, you can’t blame players for taking it,” said hitting coach Tommy Kidwell, a 1998 graduate of Yale University, who had shown up at the park lugging his dirty laundry from the trip to Pulaski, Va., to dump into the locker-room washing machine.

“But to be on strike Sept. 11, when the country is trying to put everything in perspective, I think it could be suicide for baseball. Because part of that perspective is to understand that we just play a game.”

Decades before the major leagues ventured west of the Mississippi in 1958, towns across America, particularly in the then-isolated West, considered having a baseball team a mark of progressive spirit and civic pride, just as Appalachian League communities in Tennessee, West Virginia and Virginia do today.

“Salt Lake has for a number of years fostered the game of baseball,” editorialized the Salt Lake Tribune in 1887. “In fact our city would not be up in modern ideas did she not do so. In these times baseball clubs are almost an imperative necessity.”

By the late 1940s, 464 minor league teams stretched from coast to coast and so many prospects showed up at the Brooklyn Dodgers’ spring training camp that players wore uniforms with triple-digit numbers. Forty-two million Americans attended minor league games in 1949. The golden age died with the advent of television and within a decade, teams were folding faster than afternoon newspapers. Attendance plummeted below 9 million.

Today the minors are again a hot-ticket item. Spurred by affordability, savvy marketing, new ballparks and a sense of intimacy, attendance has increased 29% since the 1994 strike that interrupted major league baseball for 232 days and forced the first cancellation of a World Series in 90 years. Major league attendance rose 3% in that period. The 160 teams that are the training ground for prospects paid by major league affiliates and reach from Rancho Cucamonga to Winsooki, Vt., are expected to top 38 million in attendance this season.

“I come out here with my wife and son, and it’s like sitting on your front porch--but with entertainment,” said high school teacher John Freeman, 56, who spent $60 for a season ticket and dutifully records each play of the Cardinal-Ranger game at Calfee Park in Pulaski. “But I’d have to acknowledge football is king now. People my age may think of baseball as the national pastime, but I don’t think young people do. Major league baseball has cut its own throat.”