Blaze entering unfamiliar territory by boasting winning record into July
| Thursday, Jul 09 2009 10:45 PM
Last Updated Thursday, Jul 09 2009 11:16 PM
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Felix Adamo / The Californian Bakersfield's Mauro Gomez, second from left, is congratulated by teammates after hitting his second homer of the night against the Modesto Nuts.
Felix Adamo / The Californian Blaze second baseman Matthew Lawson dives for the ball that eventually got by in the top of the third inning.
Felix Adamo / The Californian Bakersfield's Engel Beltre beats the throw to first after a bunting in the bottom of the 5th. Matt Repec is the Nut first baseman.
Felix Adamo / The Californian Modesto's Jeffery Cunningham barely makes it back to first as Blaze first baseman Ian Gac gloves the pick off attempt.
Look at me, look at me/Hands in the air like it's good to be/Alive
-- "Handlebars", The Flobots
The song floats over the loudspeaker at Sam Lynn Ball Park as so many other have, passing the time between innings as the Bakersfield Blaze tangle with the Modesto Nuts in a mid-July game between two average teams in the California League.
But there's something different here, and it has nothing to do with the temperature being below 90 degrees. The Blaze really is alive, and it does feel good.
That was Wednesday, when the Blaze's 10-7 victory made them 42-42 in the Class A professional baseball Cal League. A day later, the team used two home runs from Mauro Gomez and an 11-strikeout performance from Tanner Roark in a 6-4 win to sweep the Nuts and move over .500 for the first time this season. It's also the latest in a season Bakersfield has had a winning record since it was 53-52 on July 24, 2003.
"We've played pretty good baseball since the first three weeks of the season," manager Steve Buechele said. "For me, as long as (players) go out and give an honest effort every night, they stand a real good chance of winning."
This is a big deal around here. The Blaze hadn't been .500 this late in a season since they were 43-43 in 2005. If they reach the mark again, you have to go back to 2003 to find a team that had won as many as it lost this late into the summer.
"I have seen many a lean year," said Tim Wheeler, who recorded his 1,000th consecutive home game as the Blaze's official scorer earlier this year.
Bakersfield's minor-league franchise has been mired in mediocrity more or less since its inception in 1941. In 62 years, the team's name has changed eight times. It has been affiliated with five different Major League franchises. It has seen countless players, managers, employees and front-office staff come and go.
But two things have rarely, if ever, changed: The stadium and the losing.
It's never been easy to be a Bakersfield baseball fan, and perhaps that's why very few of them show up. The Blaze's average attendance, even with seemingly inflated head counts, lags well behind the next-lowest in the Cal League. A good night sees 1,000 people in the stands.
Those Sam Lynn stands, of course, face the wrong way. The park originally was built inside a horse track, and the only way it would fit is with the spectators facing the setting sun every night. Summer night games don't start till 7:45, usually the latest pro baseball start in America.
In his 15 years with the team, Wheeler said, complaints from players are not uncommon.
"People talk about it, but it's people around town; it's not the team," left-handed pitcher Ryan Falcon said. "You might say it's not the best place to play or it doesn't have the best fans, but it comes down to how you play on the field. The bases are still 90 feet (apart) ... and everybody has to play on the same field."
Said Buechele: "It's not an easy place to play for your home field, but I think these guys have done a really good job pushing all that aside."
Whether the excuses are valid or not, historical results have been paltry. This is the 62nd year of professional baseball in Bakersfield, and those teams have made the Cal League playoffs 16 times. That number seems respectable until you consider that more than half of the league's 10 teams make the postseason and even a .500 record often qualifies.
The team's overall record is 4,080-4,458. It has won two championships, in 1970 and 1989. It's been since 2001 that Bakersfield was in the playoffs, and that year the postseason was never completed because of the Sept. 11 attacks. The team's all-time playoff record is 27-43.
Some years -- like 1996, when Bakersfield didn't have a parent franchise to itself -- the team was so bad it was comical.
"They lost their last 22 games, which is still a Cal League record," Wheeler said. "If a player was doing well, his parent organization pulled him out, so (the team) had to sign a couple of local guys."
One of them pitched so poorly, Wheeler said, that as he left the field, his wife took off her wedding ring, threw it at him and stormed off, never to be heard from again.
The team stumbled on until last year, when word came down from Minor League Baseball that Sam Lynn was so inadequate and the crowds so miniscule that Bakersfield was going to lose its team. That's been put off for now, but without a new stadium, the franchise's future in Bakersfield most certainly is in danger.
But this particular Bakersfield team is very much alive. The Blaze started the year 3-10 and was floundering around at 29-36 on June 16. Wheeler's thought from the press box: "Just another year."
But this year, finally, the Blaze heated up with the mercury. It swept a four-game series from Visalia, then extended the winning streak to six against High Desert. Now, after finishing its homestand 5-1, Bakersfield has passed the coveted .500 mark.
"I guess it's a benchmark," Buechele said. "But obviously you don't even want to be in that position where that becomes a benchmark. But it doesn't matter."
The Blaze has excelled behind strong starting pitching -- Ryan Tatusko has taken a no-hitter into the fifth inning in his past two starts (one lasted until the ninth), Tatusko and Richard Bleier have pitched the Cal League's only two shutouts this season, and Roark held Modesto to three runs in 6 2/3 innings with 11 strikeouts in Thursday night's game -- and a great bullpen, led by Falcon (2.25 ERA) and Evan Reed, who is third in the Cal League with 13 saves.
The Blaze's offense, too, has found its power stroke -- Ian Gac and Mauro Gomez each have 15 home runs, and Jonathan Greene has 12 -- and is coming up with timely hits. The team has climbed within one game of Visalia and Modesto for the final wild-card spot in the Northern Division, and it needs to pass just one of those to reach the postseason for the first time in eight years.
"We definitely feel like we're playing better," Falcon said. "After the beginning of the season, we feel like we've done a lot better as a team. ... That's kind of how baseball is sometimes. It just takes some time to get on a roll."
Minor league baseball, of course, is a finnicky thing. Players move up or down, rosters change, and the parent organaztion's emphasis is more on player development than winning games.
But that's not fazing this group of Blaze.
"(We're) not worried about what's happened here in the past," Falcon said, "... A lot of people say it's not important if you win in the minor leagues. We don't think that's true."
And if this goes on much longer, Sam Lynn Ball Park might really feel alive.
"I don't know the players personally, but I do watch them," Wheeler said. "And this is actually a team. Maybe they feel like they're stuck in Bakersfield. Maybe it's, 'You know, we're here in Bakersfield. We're stuck here. Let's just see if we can pull it off.'"
