The Holyoke Giants moved to Lynn last year, after their best season. In their place come the Holyoke Sox, with new ownership, management, personnel, and players. Formerly the Concord Quarry Dogs, of Concord, New Hampshire, the Sox' new website is here.
The team's schedule is set, they've announced their coaching staff, and have been assembling the roster, a process that can go well into a summer college team's season. Their depth chart, above, is currently missing a right fielder and a center fielder.
Last summer, I wrote about the Giants. Like the Giants, the Sox are still part of the New England Collegiate Baseball League. A PowerPoint slideshow describing the Sox' promotional packages is loaded with exclamation points and already available for download. A college baseball team lives and dies by community enthusiasm and volunteerism, and the excitement of the new staff already seems very apparent.
In a sport known for monolithic contracts, baseball's underclass is pretty transient. Teams leave town, change names, change who they are on a yearly basis. There are no players to form long relationships with, no management for which to build up years of contempt. The fascination with a college team, it seems, is in its degrees of separation from the floodlit, bright-green Majors, its statistical narratives abruptly cut short, the names of those who Make It. Joe Nathan; Matt DeSalvo. Maybe it shouldn't be that way.
Still, there's an enticing thing about connections and parallels. For instance, the Sox' head coach Darryl Mohardt was the Marietta College pitching coach from 1999-2005. Under his coaching, five pitchers signed professional contracts, among them Matt DeSalvo, who went to the Yankees.
I watched DeSalvo's first major league game, on May 7th last year, against the Mariners. His pitches floated, dipped - Frisbee-like swales, all of them - but he gave up only 1 run (a Raul Ibanez single to score Ichiro) and three hits over seven innings. It would've been his first win, had Kyle Farnsworth and Mariano Rivera not blown the lead in the 8th and 9th innings.
The rest of the season, DeSalvo got just short of shelled, and the Yankees left him for the hounds at the end of last season. But DeSalvo, a 27 year-old kid from Pennsylvania, also loves to read. He likes the classics: Confucius, Camus. His reading list is over 400 books long. During Spring Training last year, he'd read 17 of them. By May, he'd read 200. He's written an unpublished novel, called "Love's Travels," which he told the New York Times was about "the way a person's concept of love changes over time."
DeSalvo is currently in the Braves minor league system. But there's a passage from last year's New York Times article, pertaining to DeSalvo's days in the minors and Spring Training with the Yankees, that seems appropriate to baseball or any career:
In literature, or writing a novel, or most things people dream of, as long as your mind works, there's still a chance for you. In baseball, your body reaches a point where it can't keep up with your ambition. To that end, in the way all lists are compelling in a weird way, here's a list, from the Dead Ball Era, of baseball players and what they did afterwards.