The story of the worst baseball team ever

The ballpark has no dugouts. It has no locker rooms. It has no restrooms, no concession stands and no scoreboard. No warning observe traces its chain-link outfield fence. No plumbing routes run beneath its all-dirt infield or its spartan slab seats.

Set foot within the facility often called Fleming Field as we speak — within the shadow of the town water tower that blares the phrase “YONKERS” in daring blue letters — and you’ll by no means comprehend it really housed an expert baseball group in 1995.

Then once more, you wouldn’t have identified it in 1995, both.

Fleming Field was the appropriately abysmal dwelling of presumably the worst group within the historical past of paid play. They have been known as the Yonkers Hoot Owls, and their story is rather a lot just like the film “Major League” … albeit with out the uplifting arc or comfortable ending. In facilities, in attendance and within the unbiased Northeast League’s standings, the Hoot Owls have been useless final, then useless altogether. They lived for only a single, financially ruinous summer time.

And but, whereas becoming their uniforms in foul territory, mowing their very own outfield grass and touring to street video games on a rickety college bus with no air con, the Hoot Owls fashioned friendships and recollections no report can replicate.

“We sucked,” says first baseman Peter Bifone. “But it was the funnest year of my life.”

This is a narrative in regards to the lengths individuals will go to pursue their baseball goals. It’s the story of baseball in Yonkers. And what a hoot it was.

Independent leagues are the place the undrafted, unnoticed or undesirable go to maintain their baseball careers alive. They are touchdown spots for many who both exhausted their alternative in affiliated Minor League Baseball (MiLB) or by no means had the chance within the first place. The unbiased Atlantic League has even been legitimized sufficient to develop into Major League Baseball’s formal testing floor for varied experimental rule modifications, and the American Association and the Frontier League have additionally develop into official associate leagues with MLB.

But the indy leagues we all know as we speak didn’t but exist in 1991. That was the 12 months the Professional Baseball Agreement (PBA) that governs relations between MLB and MiLB included a brand new sequence of amenities specs for MiLB golf equipment. Standards have been raised for the seating, taking part in fields, clubhouses, lighting techniques, restrooms, and so forth. Minor League cities that have been both unwilling or unable to carry out the required updates misplaced their franchises to cities that might or may.

This growth, mixed with a powerful spectator curiosity in professional baseball, made circumstances ripe for the formation of latest leagues — starting with the Northern League, which was launched in 1993 by former Durham Bulls proprietor and Baseball America writer Miles Wolff — that would faucet into the nation’s thirst for the game with out being sure by the phrases of the PBA. And the 1994-95 MLB strike supplied added alternative to get the eye of dissatisfied followers.

Enter the Northeast League.

Founded by a guide writer named Jay Acton, the Northeast was envisioned as a six-team league with a 70-game season, at a caliber corresponding to Class A ball. All of the preliminary groups have been positioned in New York state, and the 20-man rosters have been principally made up of college-age gamers and people minimize from the Minor Leagues, with a number of former large leaguers sprinkled in.

“We wanted to give the college kids that didn’t make the Draft or were drafted and didn’t make it another chance,” says Larry Massaroni, a former Blue Jays scout who served because the league’s director of participant growth. “Because it’s hard to get a second chance in baseball.”

Former Mets All-Star outfielder Lee Mazzilli was tapped because the commissioner. Team managers included former Indians skipper Doc Edwards (Albany-Colonie Diamond Dogs) and two members of the 1982 World Series-champion Cardinals — pitcher Dave LaPoint (Adirondack Lumberjacks, primarily based in Glens Falls, N.Y.) and infielder Ken Oberkfell (Sullivan Mountain Lions, in Mountaindale, N.Y.).

Yonkers’ skipper was Paul Blair, the previous All-Star outfielder and four-time World Series champion with the Orioles and Yankees.

“Everybody put their real-life experience into it,” Massaroni says. “We all wanted to make it work.”

The league wished a group in Westchester County, close to sufficient to New York City to garner media protection. Because it falls throughout the territorial rights of the Yankees and Mets, Westchester had not had a Minor League group since 1949. But it was honest sport to an unbiased just like the Northeast.

Originally, the plan was to put Westchester County’s group in Mount Vernon and to call it the Hoot Owls, with dwelling video games at Memorial Field — the constructing the place the well-known Coca-Cola industrial that includes “Mean” Joe Greene was filmed.

Then an issue arose: Memorial Field, which had been inbuilt 1930, was condemned by the town.

The focus shifted to Massaroni’s hometown of Yonkers, where he had political connections. There was excitement about bringing pro baseball back to New York’s fourth-most populous city, which had not housed such a team since a Hudson River League club in 1907. Adele Leone, a literary agent and associate of Acton’s, paid the $50,000 franchise fee to own the Yonkers club and wanted to name it the Blue Bandits. But some Yonkers City Council members, leery of the negative connotation of “bandits,” shot that concept down. So towards her needs, Leone’s group took on the nickname of the aborted Mount Vernon group.

The Yonkers Hoot Owls have been born.

And fairly the habitat awaited them.

Field of Nightmares

Fleming Field sits simply eight miles north of Yankee Stadium, and nobody would confuse the 2. But with neither the funds nor the time to construct a brand new facility, Yonkers didn’t have a lot else to supply the Northeast League.

“It had the all-dirt infield and no water,” Massaroni says. “There were a lot of restrictions to it. But it was a good ballpark in that you could seat a lot of people [with a capacity north of 1,000].”

Yonkers common supervisor Randye Ringler had the tall job of creating Fleming Field palatable for skilled baseball. An harmless sufferer of MLB’s work stoppage, Ringler had been laid off from her place because the Mets’ director of promoting a number of months earlier. And previous to her 15 years with the Mets, she had been the assistant GM of Class A Charleston and the gross sales and promotions director for Double-A Memphis. So she had loads of expertise to attract from and contacts to make the most of.

She’d want all the assistance she may get.

“Everything was done on the fly,” she says. “It was not the way you want to run a team. But if you didn’t have to worry about money or having a future career, it was quite the experience.”

Fortunately, Leone sprung for lights, resolving one challenge.

Mostly.

“The lights were so low,” Bifone says. “If they hit a pop fly, you couldn’t see the ball. Thank God for the infield fly rule.”

The lack of plumbing created the necessity for transportable bathrooms and a few help on the upkeep entrance.

“My family were all firemen and policemen,” Massaroni says. “So my cousin Hank provided water from the hydrants to wet down the field.”

Folks in neighboring homes let the Hoot Owls use their spouts to replenish water coolers, which got here in helpful.

“That was a hot summer, and there was no shade,” Bifone says. “After BP, we’d be drenched. So we’re pouring the coolers on each other while changing before the game.”

With no locker rooms and no fan limitations, altering was awkward.

“You’d try to have a friend stand in front of you,” says infielder Brian Moeglin, “so you could put your sliding shorts and jock strap on.”

It was a lot the identical with the dugout, which was not dug however was very a lot out. All that separated the gamers from the followers was a chain-link fence. The Owls have been caged.

“The positive spin on it,” says coach Scott Nathanson, “was that you get to see the players in the dugout during the game! It was marketing, you see.”

With no scoreboard, Ringler arrange a dry-erase whiteboard on the outfield fence, “operated” by an intern. And as a result of the ballpark wasn’t positioned within the most secure of neighborhoods, the whiteboard and all different signage needed to be taken down after each sport and hung again up the following day.

“They went through a lot of strip ties that summer,” says LaPoint, the Adirondack skipper.

Adirondack performed in Glens Falls’ East Field, which had housed the White Sox Double-A affiliate within the early Nineteen Eighties. It was a extra typical indy league venue with locker rooms, a press field, a scoreboard and wraparound seating for as much as 6,000 followers.

So when the Lumberjacks arrived at Fleming Field for his or her first go to, they have been surprised. As if the sphere circumstances weren’t uncommon sufficient, the Hoot Owls didn’t even have the “L-screen” that batting-practice pitchers stand behind to guard themselves. While awaiting the supply of a display, the make-do resolution was to stack one metal rubbish can on high of two others.

“I told my guys, ‘Boys, we won’t be taking BP here,’” LaPoint says. “I’m 6-foot-3, and each drum was 3-foot tall. Those extra three inches are not where I want to get hit by a baseball.”

With no groundskeeper, gamers tended to the outfield grass themselves, borrowing lawnmowers from their newfound buddies within the neighborhood or from members of the family within the space. And whereas the all-dirt infield was not distinctive to Fleming Field (Japan’s Koshien Stadium, utilized by the Hanshin Tigers of Nippon Professional Baseball, has the identical), the Hoot Owls didn’t have the correct tools to rake it.

“We had some rough hops,” third baseman/outfielder Drew Jemison says. “Lots of rocks.”

To (actually) clean issues over, Ringler purchased supplies from a close-by Home Depot to make her personal infield drag mat. And earlier than, throughout and after video games, she was usually the one tending to the infield in her Easy Spirit pumps.

How did she maintain her sanity?

“Who says I did?” she jokes.

The Bad News Owls

OK, so the setup was horrible. What in regards to the baseball?

Well, not significantly better, sadly.

While the Hoot Owls managed to make a lot of their video games aggressive, they’d bother holding late leads and, maybe as a product of their irritating subject, avoiding harm.

Their roster was largely comprised of locals. Guys like Jemison, who hailed from throughout the Hudson River in Nyack and didn’t get drafted out of Mercy College.

“I had done a [Northeast League] tryout in the winter, and then, right before the season starts, I get a call that I made a team,” he says. “We had maybe a week to go through practices. It was a ridiculous contract, like $700 a month.”

Ringler remembers some gamers making lower than that — nearer to $500 monthly. Just a few have been signed straight out of a tryout camp held shortly earlier than the beginning of the season. The roster was uncooked.

(Multiple on-line sources record one-time Reds outfielder Leo Garcia, a local of the Dominican Republic, as a member of the Hoot Owls. But it’s the mistaken Leo Garcia. The Leo Garcia on Yonkers was from Tarrytown, N.Y.)

“I don’t want to say ‘rag-tag,’ because we weren’t rag-tag,” Nathanson says. “But we didn’t have the money to pay our guys what the Albany team or the [eventual league champion] Lumberjacks had.”

One of the few members of the Hoot Owls with earlier skilled expertise was Bifone. He had signed with the Padres as an undrafted free agent out of Bellarmine University in 1993, solely to lose his spot in A-ball to first-round choose and eventual All-Star Derrek Lee. When Bifone heard in regards to the Northeast League, he drove throughout the nation, had a tryout and signed on the spot. He spent the following month working the telephones, making an attempt to promote tickets and sponsorships prematurely of the opener.

“I’m calling all these local businesses,” he remembers with amusing. “‘Hey, this is Pete Bifone! We’re playing baseball in Yonkers! Wanna buy a banner? What do you wanna pay? A hundred bucks? Deal!’”

Because Fleming Field was not but prepared (and in fact, would by no means be prepared), the Hoot Owls spent the primary two weeks of the season on the street. Things began out effectively. On Opening Day at Adirondack, Yonkers scored some early runs and right-hander Mike Maerten threw a whole sport in a 5-3 victory.

That evening, as fireworks hailed over Glens Falls in a postgame celebration of the launch of the Northeast League, a teammate turned to Bifone and remarked how superior the expertise had been.

“Brother, don’t get used to it,” Bifone responded. “I don’t think this is going to happen very often.”

He was proper. Though the Hoot Owls gained a handful of video games within the season’s first month, actuality caught up with them. They misplaced 15 in a row at one level.

“To be honest, the Hoot Owls could have won a lot of games,” Massaroni says. “They just had no bullpen.”

The huge expertise Blair delivered to the ballclub solely went up to now. Especially with Blair lacking the season’s opening sequence due to prior commitments, lacking seven video games due to a suspension for shoving an umpire and lacking a number of different video games as a result of he was named the overall supervisor of New Orleans’ entry within the United League Baseball (a deliberate “third Major League” that folded earlier than a single sport was performed).

But Blair, who handed away in 2013, was round sufficient to impart knowledge and supply context.

“I was sitting next to him one game, and he started calling out each pitch before it came through, just from watching the pitcher,” Moeglin remembers. “I said, ‘How are you doing that?’ He said, ‘That’s the difference between where I played and where you’re playing.’”

The roster continuously advanced. The Hoot Owls had a brand new proper fielder nearly each homestand. When a participant was launched after a sport, he would hand over his uniform (Yonkers had just one uni, used for each dwelling and away video games) in order that his substitute may put on it the following sport. Players routinely fought by way of accidents out of worry of getting launched or benched.

Those who managed to stay round fashioned friendships, a few of which have lasted a quarter-century. They’d blow their paychecks on the Original Crab Shanty on City Island within the Bronx. They’d crash on the flats of their teammates’ girlfriends in order that they might sleep in air con. And as a result of they have been the Hoot Owls (and extra precisely, as a result of this was the summer time of 1995), they’d sing alongside to the tune that grew to become their unofficial anthem — Hootie and the Blowfish’s “Only Wanna Be with You” — and alter the lyrics to replicate their report.

“We’re only 6-22!”

For Love of the Game

Let the report present that the report is mistaken.

Several on-line info portals — from the ordinarily dependable Baseball Reference to the not-as-reliable Wikipedia — peg the Hoot Owls to a closing report of 12-52. But a search of newspaper data from that interval reveal this to be a gross mischaracterization of their would possibly.

They have been really 14-54.

Alas, even after this uptick within the win column, Yonkers remains to be left with an ugly .206 successful proportion. It’s not the worst in historical past. A search of Baseball Reference’s database discovered 31 skilled groups since 1900 (none from the Majors) who performed at the very least 50 video games and had a decrease proportion. But the mixture of faultiness with the sphere and futility on it actually places the Hoot Owls in some uncommon, rank air.

“I hate the fact that we might be remembered as one of the worst teams ever,” Moeglin says. “That saddens me. Because as far as the people are concerned, it was one of the best teams ever.”

They did exit on a heroic word, beating the Newburgh Night Hawks, 11-7, within the Aug. 31 season finale at Fleming Field by solely giving up 4 runs within the backside of the ninth. But by that time, it had develop into a foregone conclusion that the group wouldn’t be again for a second 12 months.

Despite the Hoot Owls’ effort to attract followers from throughout Westchester County (their cap emblem was a Y over a W, for “Yonkers of Westchester”), their only a few wins had only a few witnesses.

Northeast League groups went into ’95 hoping to attract a mean of at the very least 1,000 followers per sport with the intention to be financially operable. Yonkers drew about 170 per sport. (It didn’t assist that attending a sport at Fleming Field required parking two and a half miles away and shuttling over.)

The bancrupt state of affairs acquired to the purpose the place group proprietor Leone and league founder Acton, who comingled their funds, started dismantling the Hoot Owls earlier than the season even ended. Acton confirmed up someday and fired most of Ringler’s workers. Bifone, considered one of Yonkers’ finest gamers, was traded to the Sullivan group owned by Acton for 3 reduction pitchers launched by the Hoot Owls inside days.

“We were so close-knit,” Bifone says, “that guys [on Yonkers] were threatening to walk off the field to protest the trade.”

Amid rumblings of Yonkers workers and contractors not being paid correctly, John Purcell of the Glens Falls Post-Star caught up with Leone late within the season to handle the monetary considerations.

“Green [money] takes care of everything,” she instructed him. “That’s all I have to say, now run along.”

But just some weeks later, Leone, who handed away in 1999, admitted to The New York Times that her monetary losses from the Yonkers funding have been “considerable.”

“Initially, bills had been paid,” Ringler says. “Only in the last couple months did we realize the money had run out. The team was supposed to be sold to make everyone whole, but the league played games with us.”

The Hoot Owls have been declared dormant. They have been successfully changed within the Northeast League in 1996 by the Bangor (Maine) Blue Ox, who went a good 46-33 with the assistance of none apart from Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd. But the steadiness sheet didn’t switch to the Bangor possession. Any excellent money owed in Yonkers have been allegedly ignored.

Nobody acquired burned as badly as Ringler. She had routinely put in 14-hour days for the Hoot Owls. She ran each side of the group, from designing the group emblem to ordering tools to raking the sphere and faxing outcomes to the league workplace after video games. Ringler says she accrued about $20,000 of team-related credit-card payments that went unpaid.

“When you’re dealing with independent teams [at that time],” she says, “there’s no governing body. You have nobody to appeal to.”

Though 4 of the six groups from the Northeast League’s inaugural 12 months both relocated or folded, the league survived three extra seasons. It then merged with the Northern League for 4 years and returned for the 2003 and ’04 seasons earlier than getting absorbed by the Can-Am Association, which is now merged with the Frontier League.

So the DNA of the Northeast League nonetheless exists, marking a considerably profitable run.

The Hoot Owls, although, have been unsuccessful in each respect, {and professional} baseball has not returned to Yonkers — or anyplace in Westchester County — since.

(Well, apart from a 2011 Can-Am group that was technically primarily based at Westchester Community College however performed each sport on the street. They have been known as the New York Federals, and, not in contrast to the Washington Generals who perennially oppose and lose to the Harlem Globetrotters, they existed solely to present the league an excellent variety of groups and to develop gamers for the opposite golf equipment to pilfer. The Federals used 82 gamers in 93 video games and went 15-78. But that’s one other story …)

Still, whereas the Hoot Owls train us a lot about how not to construct a baseball group, their members have been a refreshingly pure instance of devotion to the game and to one another. In 1996, seven core Yonkers gamers, together with Nathanson, performed collectively underneath Oberkfell on a brand new Northeast group, the Elmira Pioneers.

“It was the same league,” Bifone says, “but a beautiful facility and host families and the way it should be run.”

The tales from Yonkers, nonetheless, are what endure for Bifone (a school and highschool umpire), Moeglin (a vice chairman in advertising), Jemison (proprietor of an embroidery business), Nathanson (managing within the unbiased Empire League), Ringler (who went on to carry varied roles in horse racing, enviornment soccer, tennis and sports activities advertising) and others.

And there’s one story that finest will get to the guts of the Hoot Owls’ expertise.

The aim of the Yonkers gamers — the explanation they embraced their outrageous association and the nightly comedy of errors — was to succeed in the very best degree their expertise would enable. So in an effort to get her gamers the publicity they wanted, Ringler known as in a favor from a buddy.

That buddy was Joe McIlvaine, a longtime scout and government who, at the moment, was the overall supervisor of the Mets. His phrases carried weight with scouts within the space. With McIlvaine’s help, Ringler was capable of organize a midseason showcase, of kinds. A date was circled on the Hoot Owls’ dwelling schedule. As standard, there wouldn’t be many our bodies within the stands that evening, however this time the small viewers would come with a handful of massive league evaluators, individuals whose suggestions may change a participant’s course.

It was all arrange. One shot. Catch a break on this evening, and all the eccentricities endured by the Hoot Owls would have been effectively definitely worth the whereas.

But that, after all, was the evening a lightning storm hit Fleming Field.

With the sport known as off, with the scouts scattered, with the gamers having returned to their humble properties, Ringler sat within the trailer that served as her workplace and had what was a recurring thought in that summer time of ’95.

“Are we really this snakebit?”

The reply, clearly, was sure. And that tragicomic twist worthy of Neil Simon himself completely epitomized a baseball group that was misplaced in Yonkers.