Cape Cod - Index

Cape Cod - travel_guide_2008 - Index

■ cape & islands baseball
LIVING A DREAM
For players, it’s a dream come true. For fans,
the Cape Cod Baseball League is one of the
highlights of summer.
BY TIM WELLER • PHOTOGRAPHY BY GEORGE PEET
If you’ve visited the Cape before, you’ve probably heard all about the Cape Cod Baseball League.
Movies, books and articles immortalize the game that’s played here. Baseball fans and pundits
wax poetic about the beauty of the ballparks and the purity and simplicity of the game.
Scan the headlines each summer and you get the idea: “Fields of Dreams,” “Cape Cod’s Perfect
Game,” “The Cape’s Two-Month Love Fest,” “Cape Baseball: Summer Home of Future Stars,”
“Baseball in a Norman Rockwell Setting.”
The league even gets into the act, billing itself as the place “Where the Stars of Tomorrow Shine
Tonight.”
Certainly, the league is all of that: from mid-June to mid-August, 10 teams comprising the best
college players in the country play head-to-head in stunningly picturesque ballparks stretching from
Wareham to Orleans. Admission is free, although donations are sometimes requested. Players use
wooden bats just like the major leaguers and perform before thousands of fans.
But there’s more here than meets the eye.
To pull this off, the league relies on hundreds of dedicated volunteers, many working from
January until the Championship Series ends August 15th. Each franchise needs hundreds of
corporate, business and individual boosters, kicking in amounts ranging from $10,000 to $10. Each
team needs dozens of “house parents,” who are willing to open up their homes and spare bedrooms
so the league’s 200 or so players have a place to live.
And for many of the players–predominately college freshmen and sophomores–a season in
the Cape Cod Baseball League can be a mental and physical grind the likes of which they’ve not
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