The Home Team

The Coltons consider their hometown baseball team family. Robin Colton and her son Tyler are season ticket-holders of the Long Beach Breakers. They are members of the team’s booster club. And Tyler, 8, wears one of his two autographed Breaker T-shirts to every home game.

Also, the team’s starting shortstop sleeps in their spare bedroom.

Despite being last year’s champions of the independent Western Baseball League, the Breakers still can’t afford to pay players a big-league wage. Whereas the average salary in the majors is about $195,000 per month, the average Breaker pulls down about $1,200 a month. Rookies can make as little as $600 per month. So, for Breaker fans, it’s not so much root, root, root as it is put up a roof, roof, roof for the home team.

“I’m glad to do it because these kids don’t make any money,” said Colton, 47, an escrow officer. “Tyler loves it because it’s like having a big brother here, and I love it because there’s an adult to talk to.”

The Coltons were one of a trio from the Breakers’ Blair Field stands to step up to the plate and house their local boys of summer. The practice is not all that unusual. Minor league clubs from hockey to football sometimes tap the community for seasonal shelter. The sports organizations are, after all, businesses, albeit not the most lucrative, and they cut corners where they can.

Clubs like the Breakers sell the lodge-a-player deal to fans by offering free season tickets, discounts on Breaker merchandise, and the firsthand experience of getting to know an aspiring major leaguer. “It’s sort of like having a foreign-exchange student,” said Collin Schoenfeld, assistant general manager of the Breakers, who pairs players with host homes.

A very large, home-grown foreign-exchange student. The Coltons’ new boarder is 6-foot-3, 190-pound Kevin Baderdeen. Even though he speaks perfect English, the polite 25-year-old shortstop with the strong throwing arm still had to learn the language of his new home. His first day, Colton, a single mom who displays the American flag in front of her house and had flags painted on the tops of her big toenails, spoke loud and clear about the rules inside her three-bedroom, one-bath home in east Long Beach.

Make your bed. Put your dishes in the dishwasher. Put the toilet seat down.

“He’s two for three,” jokes Colton, who describes herself as a substitute mom for Baderdeen. “He’s good with the dishes and the seat, but not the bed. But that’s OK, he keeps his bedroom door shut.”

Not far from the Coltons’ house, Harold Ray had the “house rules” chat earlier this summer with his Breaker player, relief pitcher Joe Isaacson. The 82-year-old retired grocery store manager welcomed the company. After 57 years of marriage, his wife, Ada, died a few years ago. Other than his volunteer work as a driver delivering meals to seniors, and going to Breaker games, Ray doesn’t have much contact with others. He lives alone in his quiet house a couple miles from the ballpark.

When Isaacson, 24, arrived in early June, Ray told him what he told the player he housed last season: “I don’t expect you to clean up my mess, and I don’t expect to clean up yours.”

The talkative Ray, who dons his Breaker ball cap for every home game, immediately liked Isaacson. “He’s a great kid. He’s clean and neat,” said Ray, who served in the same military unit during World War II as legendary St. Louis Cardinal Stan Musial. “He’s a little bashful, but I’m trying to draw it out of him.”

Another Breaker player, Matt Harrington, was also hosted by a local family, but the former Palmdale High pitching star declined to talk about it. Had the young talent played his cards differently, he might have been in a position to shelter a struggling ballplayer himself--in beachfront digs.

In 2000, Harrington was the Colorado Rockies’ No. 1 pick in the draft and was offered $4 million. He turned it down, hoping to get $4.95 million. He didn’t get it and reentered the draft the following year when he was offered $1.2 million by the San Diego Padres. He rejected that as well. Eventually, the once-hot prospect tumbled his way to the Breakers. But less than midway through the Breakers’ 90-game schedule, which ends in August, Harrington was released from the team for performance reasons, according to Schoenfeld.

Such roster moves are common. Last year, the Breakers, who usually carry a little more than 20 players, made nearly 30 personnel changes, Schoenfeld said. The team is on pace for similar numbers this year.

The reason is simple: The organization wants to win and players want to move up, namely to a minor league baseball team affiliated with a Major League club. A few Breakers have made it, but most do not. When management sees a player who isn’t contributing, he’s cut. From there, released players may seek other independent leagues in the States, go to Mexico or quit.

“Baseball players are vagabonds,” Schoenfeld said. “They’ll usually go anywhere to play.”

But right now Baderdeen is in Long Beach--another stop on the road to the majors--and is gratefully living with a host family. If not for the Coltons, the affable infielder would have had to commute from his grandmother’s house in Ontario or his sister’s home in Brea. “I would have had to spend my whole paycheck on gas,” said Baderdeen, who played three years with a Cincinnati Reds farm team until he broke his jaw and was released in 2000.

Although Baderdeen probably could have pooled his finances with other players and gone in on an apartment--players stay with host families for free--he realizes hanging out with a bunch of young athletes after the ballgames can be hazardous to your sleep and other things.

“If you’re living with a family, it keeps you out of trouble,” said Baderdeen, who previously lived with a host family in Dayton, Ohio, when playing with the Reds’ minor league team. “You feel a responsibility to help out, to behave yourself, especially if they have little kids.”

Though he’s not home too much given the team’s grueling schedule, which allows for only 10 days off this summer, Baderdeen so far has fixed the VCR, an exercise machine, folded loads of laundry and regularly wrenches the cap off apple juice bottles for Tyler. And then, there was the TP episode.

Late one recent night, Baderdeen and his girlfriend, who was in town for a visit, returned home to find it had rained toilet paper. Tissue was hanging from the trees like streamers, wrapped around Colton’s car, everywhere.

“Robin works too hard to come home to that,” said Baderdeen, who cleaned up the mess in about 20 minutes.

“It must have been your ballplayer friends,” Colton teased the next morning while making a pancake and eggs breakfast. “Tyler’s friends don’t stay up that late.”

“Yeah, maybe it was somebody who saw me go 0 for 4 last night,” replied Baderdeen, referring to a recent batting slump.

The close quarters often result in close relationships between host and ballplayer in which traits not readily apparent are gradually revealed. After a few days, Ray began noticing something funny about Isaacson’s diet.

“I never seen a guy eat so much tuna in my life,” said Ray, patting his ample belly. “ Me, I eat whatever you put in front of me.”

Isaacson, a left-handed pitcher powered by his fastball and slider, soon learned that his octogenarian roommate was once an athlete too. Ray played baseball and football in high school--until a broken leg in a football game landed him in a bed for three months. Ray also had a cousin who played for the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1960s.

And he’s a sports nut who traveled halfway around the world to be at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Australia. He’s also been known to videotape water polo matches.

“He’s a super guy,” said Isaacson of his host. “He’s got a lot of stories to tell and he really gets around for a guy in his 80s.”

Baderdeen and Tyler have developed their own rapport. The pro shortstop is a big brother of sorts to the Little League catcher/left fielder whose bedroom is just a wall away this summer. Baderdeen has given Tyler a few pointers on his game, which helped the youngster lead his team to the championship series this year. He also plays pool and throws the football with his housemate.

For his part, Tyler has been a typical little brother--at once admiring and annoying. He notes that Baderdeen sleeps too much and snores when he does. But on a recent night in the stands, Tyler beamed as Baderdeen scored from third after a base hit.

“Go, Kevin!” he shouted.

During a morning battle on a Nintendo game, Tyler’s penchant for resetting the score every time he lost the lead tried the considerable patience of Baderdeen, whose good humor was fortified by growing up with four siblings. After about the 20th reset, Baderdeen threatened a work stoppage.

“If you do that again, I’m quitting,” he said. It worked. They finally finished a game and like any big brother worth his salt, Baderdeen was victorious.

“I tell my friends I have two boys,” Colton said. “A big one and a little one.”

The Breaker players are all part boy, still motivated by a dream born in ballpark summers long ago. They endure bad days at the plate and in the field, low pay, a grueling schedule, scrambling for off-season jobs, and uncertain futures all in hopes of wearing a major league uniform one day.

“I want to be on TV someday,” Isaacson said.

But that dream will have to wait. He was released just before Father’s Day. The bad news capped a week in which he rear-ended a car, got a speeding ticket, had a credit card stolen and gave up three runs in one inning.

“They told me they didn’t see anything in me,” said Isaacson, who is back living with his parents in Santa Barbara, where he’ll decide whether to continue pursuing a career in baseball.

One of the hardest things about the day was telling Ray, Isaacson said. “He was as blindsided as I was,” Isaacson recalled. “I had to tell him three times before he understood that I got released.”

Said Ray, who is not sure whether he’ll put up another player this season: “I’m going to miss that guy around here. It’s real quiet when you live by yourself. He was a nice fella, and he kind of took the void spot out of the house.”