Laconia Muscrats player Danny Collins
broke various NECBL records this year.
(from Laconia Muscrats website.)
As we watch this awful Boston Red Sox season fade into oblivion, my mind keeps going back to a warm evening in August.
I threw a lawn chair in the back of the Subaru to head for the Robbie Mill Sports Complex. I was going to see my first Laconia Muscrats baseball game. It turned out to be the highlight of my summer. The blue sky, a soft breeze, the friendly crowd... It was like someone took a huge dollop of an idyllic Lakes Region summer day and dropped it on top of the hill on Meredith Center Road.
Now, seeing a game at Fenway Park is a unique experience, one everyone should get to do.
But the Muscrats are something else… Far away from the “Big Show,” you experience the romance of baseball that helps you understand why Americans so love this game. The pace is relaxed, which is suitable for summertime activity. Children run around the sides of the field. And you’re close enough to the field to hear the pitcher scrap the dirt with his shoe, to see the batter mumble a complaint to the umpire about the last pitch.
The neat green grass shines up at the azure sky as you enjoy that distinctive seasonal food known as the “hot dog” slathered in mustard
And you’re not watching a Little League game here.
The Muscrats are part of the 10-year-old New England Collegiate Baseball League. That means some of the country’s best college players – guys who will be drafted by big league teams, and likely be in the ballparks in three or four years. For instance, NECBL ‘graduates’ include Stephen Strasburg, the Washington National’s ace pitcher; Brian Wilson, the former New Hampshire resident who became a star during the San Francisco Giants’ World Series a few years back; and, a recent Red Sox acquisition, top relief pitcher Andrew Bailey.
In all, almost 40 big league players spent a summer in NECBL and 85 recent alumni were chosen in this year’s major league draft, including a pitcher named Pat Light who the Red Sox picked in the first round – making five years in a row now that NECBL players were picked in the first round.
To understand what makes the league so special, you have to think of the famous Cape Cod League. That league is made up of several teams that, like the NECBL, that feature top college-aged baseball players. “The level of play is often considered the equivalent of a high-A minor league baseball team,” according to Wikipedia. “Along with the Cape Cod Baseball League, Northwoods League and the Coastal Plain League, (NECBL) is considered one of the top summer leagues in the country.”
But you should know that the Muscrats owners are somewhat disappointed in attendance so far. And if things don’t improve next summer – and they’re likely to, with the new availability of beer at the games – they may be forced to pack up and move.
That would be a shame. Laconia, in particular, has a long and amazing history of local baseball including hiring the first black man to every manage a professional team in America back in the 1940s. John “Bud” Fowler “knows more base ball than any more that struck this town before,” wrote a newspaper.
Come out and see the Muscrats. It will become an important and wonderful part of your summer.
