Reuniting with long-lost Goldeyes family

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/08/2021 (1570 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Welcome back, you wacky one-of-a-kind league.

There’s always been something perfectly imperfect about the Winnipeg Goldeyes and life in the independent baseball circuit. From athletes playing for peanuts still chasing their faint big-league dreams, marathon road trips, zany in-game promotions and a cast of larger-than-life characters, there’s usually no shortage of quirky and charming to be found.

It only took a few hours into the American Association’s team’s long-awaited return to Shaw Park on Tuesday to be reminded of such, with many of the familiar sights and sounds along with a few new warts just to keep things interesting.

Up first: An afternoon face-to-face with skipper Rick Forney ahead of his team’s much-delayed 2021 home opener. I found the Maryland native in the exact same spot as our last in-person visit approximately 23 months ago, camped out in the home team dugout. True to form, Forney had a massive wad of chewing tobacco in his cheek as we got caught up on everything to do with his vagabond team, his family and just life in general during a nearly hour-long chat.

Forney is the definition of a baseball lifer, a throwback now in his 25th year with the Goldeyes organization including the past 16 as skipper. But two straight summers spent entirely on the road, at least until now, have taken a toll and tested his patience.

Signing quality players, one of Forney’s strengths, has been a struggle, given the nomadic lifestyle the Goldeyes have led which isn’t exactly a strong selling point to free agents. Keeping them in the fold has been even more difficult, with major-league organizations raiding rosters of American Association teams this season to fill vacancies. It’s why arguably the model franchise of the league, one with three championships since 2012, began the day with a very un-Goldeyes like record of 32-35.

They were playing in front of just a few hundred fans a night in Jackson, Tenn., their temporary home more than 2,000 kilometres away. They’ve had five different bus breakdowns during their travels this year, including one on their trip north in the wee hours of Monday morning that involved getting stranded at the side of a desolate highway for a few hours waiting for roadside assistance.

Now, the added challenge of relocating to another country in the middle of a season — during a global pandemic, no less — and having to bid farewell to a handful of players who had been with them during the first 67 games of this unique summer, only to have it come to a screeching halt because they opted not to get vaccinated. As a condition to return to Winnipeg, only the double-dosed are allowed in without the usual 14-day quarantine.

That meant saying farewell to multiple players including star closer Jose Jose, former major-league pitcher Bud Norris and even Forney’s right-hand man, hitting coach Kash Beauchamp, who opted to take his ball and go home.

No surprise, really, to hear a weary Forney admit he’s looking forward to putting this year in the rear-view mirror.

Turns out Winnipeg’s problems in that regard paled in comparison to the team they hosted on Tuesday. In one of those “only in the minor league” kind of stories, the Sioux City Explorers fielded a squad in name only. Due to the fact the majority of their regular players are anti-vaxxers, the 39-29 club signed nearly an entire roster of lower-level independent ball players from something called the Pecos League to fill in for the three-game set, rather than lose by forfeit.

No wonder the Goldeyes opted not to take batting practice ahead of the game. They had a few hours of it as soon as the first pitch was fired shortly after 6:30 p.m., teeing off against the lesser competition early and often on their way to an easy 14-6 victory.

Does it make a mockery of the competitive integrity in the American Association? Heck ya. But it’s also very much in line with that previously mentioned quirk and charm. This is a league, after all, which literally just changed the playoff rules last week, more than halfway into the season, and decided that three teams in each division, not two, will qualify.

I’m told every other visiting team that plays in Winnipeg over the next month will only have a few players, at most, who won’t be able to make the trip.

Confession: I’ve always had a soft spot for the Fish, dating back to my days as a journalism student back in 1994 working as an intern on the radio broadcasts. I was on the field back at old Winnipeg Stadium when they won their inaugural Northern League championship that fall. And I was there in Wichita in 2016, just months into my new gig as a Free Press sportswriter following two decades on the crime beat, when they captured the title against the mighty Wingnuts.

Like thousands of other teenagers in Winnipeg, both my kids landed their first ever jobs with the Goldeyes organization, hawking programs and selling merchandise and learning about hard work and responsibility and the value of a dollar.

There’s always been a family-like atmosphere around the club, and so it was great to see some long-lost “relatives” on Tuesday, from director of sales and marketing Dan Chase to PA announcer Ron Arnst to the hardest working play-by-play man I know, Steve Schuster.

They’d been waiting for this day for a long time, even if it was a bit different than usual. A lack of group sales meant a smaller-than-usual crowd of just a couple thousand fans for the homecoming on a muggy, smoky night. Pandemic protocols were in full effect, with big lines snaking out the doors as patrons, many of them elderly, struggled to produce their QR codes or immunization cards showing they were fully vaccinated.

There was no band playing on the stage outside the ballpark to set the pre-game mood, nor were there any of the usual on-field, between-innings games involving fans. Food service was limited, with fans encouraged to remain seated as much as possible. And the only fireworks to be found, with drought ravaging our community, came from the Goldeyes bats repeatedly pounding the cover off the ball. Which at least gave the hometown faithful plenty to cheer about it.

Sure, the game took more than three hours to complete, due mainly to the Sioux City imposters on the mound being unable to consistently find the strike zone. And yes, the scoreboard intermittently went dark, the result of some kinks that still need to be worked out. A longer build-up, bigger crowd and some of the traditional bells and whistles would have been nice, too.

It was, like the Goldeyes and the league itself, perfectly imperfect. And, quite frankly, we wouldn’t expect it any other way.

mike.mcintyre@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @mikemcintyrewpg