Requiem for Staten Island

Or at least for professional baseball within the borough

I have something nice to say about Staten Island. No, really. I do.

Still with me?

For three straight years, from 2015-2017, I traveled to Richmond County Bank Ballpark — home of the Staten Island Yankees — to scout players in the short-season New York-Penn League. While only about 16 miles from Yankee Stadium, affiliated baseball on Staten Island was a long way from big leagues. The road was made significantly longer last month after Major League Baseball’s hostile reorganization of Minor League Baseball that included the reduction of 42 teams.

The Staten Island Yankees were one of the forty-two. One of the 42 cities and towns around America that won’t be offering minor league baseball this summer.

Just add water

A couple of the subjects I have thought about exploring in future posts are the scouts who spent their lives at these ballparks and the pieces of America that disappear with contraction. I’ve found that the news cycle and reporting around MLB often leaves stories untold — events I witnessed, participated in, or learned about within the industry — while the next unsubstantiated rumor commands attention. Today’s player analysis is often weighed down by obligatory analytics that are devoid of the spirit of the game. Distilling players to metrics leaves a lot of the story left to tell. It dehydrates the characters. I’m here to add water.

So let’s get back to the forgotten borough.

There were on-field highlights during my time at the Staten Island’s ballpark: slick-fielding shortstop Kyle Holder, who was recently selected by the Phillies in the Rule 5 Draft; high-velocity pitcher Domingo Acevedo, who was easy to like at the time, but hasn’t made me (or my scouting report) look good; 2015 first-round pick James Kaprielian, who was sent to Oakland as part of the Sonny Gray trade; hard-throwing Jorge Guzman, whom the Yanks acquired for Brian McCann and later sent to Miami in the Giancarlo Stanton deal. The visitor’s dugout provided talent, too, including Cleveland’s Triston McKenzie, who looked destined for the big leagues as an 18-year-old for Mahoning Valley. Scouting the Yankees teams was fun because there was talent.

Jorge Guzman lit up the radar gun, but the appeal of Staten Island baseball was more about the journey.

But the beauty of covering games at Staten Island wasn’t about the players or the playing field. Like all other professional baseball games (at least for now), the bases were 90 feet apart, and the pitching rubber was 60 feet, 6 inches from the rear of home plate. The journey to and from the park is what made it special.

Another week, another commuting story! A mid-afternoon NYC subway ride in late summer can evoke memories of George Brett’s jeans after a meal of fresh crab legs in Vegas (“black bucks, no socks”). The crowded, hot subway is a pre-pandemic memory that, frankly, I’m almost nostalgic for these days. Maybe that’s because it was the air-conditioned express train, and I was early enough to beat the rush-hour crowd to the Staten Island Ferry. The ferry! I was taking a boat to go watch baseball. And look who I passed along the way.

I took this photo from the ferry on August 21, 2017 during the solar eclipse.

In most stadiums, especially at a well-attended game, scouts pack up their bags in anticipation of the last out of the game. Some watch the end of the inning from the concourse. Some are on their way while the final batted ball is still in the air, not yet secured in the glove of the fielder. Staten Island games added a new wrinkle: rooting for the game to end in time to make the 10:00 pm ferry back to Manhattan.

The calculating began for me around the 7th inning. I’d consider the pace of play up to that point, try to predict which bullpen arms would be called into action (the Staten Island Yankees had excellent bullpens, albeit sometimes with guys way too old for the league), and — of course — factor in whether the home team was winning. While I had no rooting interest in the games from a loyalty standpoint, on many nights I was rooting for the Yanks so we didn’t have to play a bottom of the ninth.

On the nights when it all lined up, it was magical. A 9:40 pm finish gave me plenty of time to gather my belongings, enjoy (or tolerate) the seven-minute walk along the water to St. George Ferry Terminal, and stop at the bodega to procure refreshments for sailing the fair seas. I don’t know who St. George was, but you’ll have a tough time convincing me he isn’t the patron saint of tallboys.

From behind home plate, the Lower Manhattan skyline lends hope and inspiration.

Today, there are no Staten Island Yankees. Like the rest of their New York-Penn League rivals, they are out of affiliated baseball. I can’t help but think of Terence Mann’s speech at the end of Field of Dreams. I’ll spare you the “People will come” drama — especially since people not coming was presented as part of the problem — and skip to the constant that baseball has been. At a time in our history when America rolling by “like an army of steamrollers… erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again” feels raw and real, 42 communities have lost that reminder of “all that once was good and… could be again.” Where do we go? How will baseball reach the kids in Billings, Montana, or in Salem-Keizer, Oregon, and in Burlington, Iowa? Iowa for goodness sake.

Let’s add water.

Thank you all for reading, and thanks to all who have subscribed. I received a lot of support over the past week, and it’s been energizing and uplifting. Subscribe now to have Warning Track Power delivered to your inbox every Thursday. And next week I promise: no more commuting stories or movie quotes.