Diamond District

From Brooklyn to Buffalo, the summer game of choice is minor league baseball

By Franz Lidz

The Class A Cyclones play at Coney Island, with a view of the Atlantic and the site's old amusement park rides. AP

From his redoubt in the stands behind home plate at Falcon Park in Auburn, N.Y., Richard Malinowski stares at opposing Class A pitchers in an unpleasant, boiled sort of way: lips tight, eyes bulging in their sockets like irascible snails. Malinowski is a fan of the Auburn Doubledays, and it soon becomes apparent why he's known as Mouth. Whenever the other team's pitcher is yanked in mid-inning, Mouth emits an earsplitting howl: "WHOOP WOO! WHOOP WOO! WHOOP WOO!"

Sometimes Mouth's whooping and wooing lasts for five minutes, sometimes 10; once it went on for nearly half an hour. "Everybody gets mad at me," says the retired mill worker, who's been whooping it up at Falcon since 1980. "Umps yell, 'Hey, Mouth, shut up already.'" But Mouth keeps mouthing off for the Doubledays, the baby farm team of the Toronto Blue Jays. "I'm showing my thanks to the players and the ballpark," he says. "When I walk through the turnstile, I leave my troubles behind. Of course, when the game's over and I walk back through the gate, I pick 'em up again."

Fans tend to have serious attachments to their teams and stadiums in New York, a state whose borders enclose some serious baseball country. Besides Yankee Stadium in the Bronx and Shea Stadium in Queens, there's the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

To find the seriously serious fans, though, you have to beat the bushes. And New York has a lot of bush to beat: three Triple A teams (the Buffalo Bisons, the Rochester Red Wings and the Syracuse SkyChiefs) and one Double A club (the Binghamton Mets). But the state's most dedicated diehards -- its Mouths -- go to games in the New York- Penn League, the longest continuously operated Class A alliance.

Crammed with just-drafted college players, the league starts its 76-game season in mid-June and ends it before Labor Day. The seven New York teams range from Batavia, near the Canadian border, southeastward to the Big Apple. "Staten Island crowds are crazy about their Yankees," says John Belnavis, a Richmond County Bank Ballpark regular, "but we're not insane about them, like Brooklyn crowds are about their Cyclones."

Though the Cyclones have been around for only four seasons, their following is the most ferocious in the five boroughs. Since Opening Day 2001 the team named after a Coney Island roller coaster has sold out all but three games in 7,500-seat KeySpan Park. "Brooklynites love the Cyclones because we grew up with baseball all around us," says Joe Guastella, the 47-year-old Coney Islander everyone calls Joe G. "My father talked about the Dodgers and the Yanks and the Giants and then, in 1962, the Mets."

A plump, short-legged retired paramedic ("bad heart"), Joe G. grew up across the street from KeySpan in a six-story tenement. Back then Coney Island was a Cote d'Azur for the masses. The slip of sand on which the stadium now squats was Steeplechase Park, a tangle of freak shows, shooting galleries and mechanical horse races. The compound closed in 1964 and became a ghostly huddle of unridden rides, then a vacant lot. Six years ago New York City's mayor, Brooklyn-born Rudolph Giuliani, gave the go-ahead for the $39 million ballpark. "I watched it go up brick by brick," says Joe G. "It took 18 months."

He swans around the House That Rudy Built in clothes the color of a ripe persimmon. He usually wears one of his 30 baseball hats ("I've got one for almost every home game") and his Cyclones jersey, the one that says number 1 fan. "Really, all Cyclones fans are Number 1," Joe G. says. "I call them my KeySpan family."

His KeySpan relatives include Disco Maniac, Cowbell Man, Party Marty, the Beach Bums, Stanley the Seagull, Pee Wee and Monkey Lady. Like the settlers of Coney Island these Cycloniacs are a cosmopolitan bunch. "We have every possible nationality and religious persuasion," Joe G. says. "Nobody's fighting, nobody's arguing. It's one big ongoing party, and everybody watches out for everybody."

KeySpan's carnival atmosphere is as electric as a circus catch. The famous Ferris, called the Wonder Wheel, peeps over the fence in left. The 262-foot-tall Parachute Jump -- Brooklyn's Eiffel Tower -- looms over the wall in right. The stadium's floodlights are encircled by bright neon.

The stadium is now as synonymous with Brooklyn as Nathan's and cheesecake and Italian ices. "It's Coney Island!" exults Joe G. "It's family entertainment!"

Upstate at Damaschke Field, the New York-Penn outpost in Oneonta, Sam Nader takes a sober view of family fun. "I run the only stadium in organized ball that doesn't sell alcohol," says the president and general manager of the Tigers. "I don't think kids should have to sit next to some drunk with a dirty mouth and an open fly. Do I drink? Hell, yeah. But at Damaschke we're purists. Or something. Or nuts."

Twenty-three hilly miles from Cooperstown, the field has seen pro ball since 1905 -- Babe Ruth barnstormed through in '20. The minor leagues came to town in '40 and left in '51. Nader was mayor of Oneonta in '66, when he led the movement to bring back a Class A franchise. In the years since -- 32 of which Damaschke served as the home of a Yankees farm club -- Nader has resisted numerous offers to sell out to investors he feared would hawk beer and "McDonaldize" the joint.

A vital man of 84, Nader devotes his life to preserving Damaschke from progress. Both clubhouses are behind the grandstands; to reach the field, players must mingle with fans. The concession stand has no cash register: Money for sausage-and-pepper sandwiches goes straight into a wooden lock box that would make Al Gore envious. Nader takes no salary. Any profit is plowed back into the team. "One season Dad saved all the pennies from the snack bar," says his son, John, a college professor and the club's unpaid business manager. "At the end of the season his take was 18 cents."

Sam and his sister-in-law, Susan Plantz, often watch the action from a ground-level box just past the home dugout. "I love the players' eternal hope," he says. "They really believe that someday they'll make the majors." During the Nader Era more than 150 have. There were Amos Otis, Bernie Williams, Al Leiter, Bob Tewksbury and Jorge Posada. There were Don Mattingly and Willie McGee, the 1985 American and National League MVPs, respectively. And there was John Elway, a perfect gentlemen who could throw perfect spirals. "John batted .318 here in 1982," Nader recalls. "He was a hell of an outfielder."

"Don't be fooled," cautions Plantz. "Sam says everybody's a hell of an outfielder."

Nader honors former Oneonta players with unfailing kindness and welcomes newcomers to Damaschke with unpretentious support. "When a Bernie Williams makes the Show or a Bob Tewksbury stops by the stadium with his kids, those are great moments," he says. "To me, that's what minor league ball in New York is all about."

Issue date: May 31, 2004