King Kaufman's Sports Daily
Video: Reaching for the bottom rung. A day at an open tryout for an independent pro baseball league.
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April 14, 2008 | The Golden Baseball League, a minor league unaffiliated with Major League Baseball, held tryouts in San Francisco last week for its 2008 season.
This is as far away as it's possible to get from the big leagues in professional baseball, and a collection of players with college and minor-league experience showed up to try to reach for that bottom rung.
We showed up too, with a camera, to get a look at this slice of the minor-league life. (More below the video.)
The Golden League was formed in 2005, one of a handful of circuits operating independently from Major League Baseball and its farm system. Crowds are small and so are salaries, but independent baseball generally offers great entertainment for fans. Prices are low, the atmosphere is intimate and, unlike in affiliated minor-league ball, the home team's objective is to win games, not train players.
And of course the independent leagues are at least as enthusiastic about wacky promotions and stunts as the affiliated minors. Golden League commissioner Kevin Outcalt said it was his idea two years ago to trade 60 cases of beer for a player, a move that made small headlines nationwide. The player was Nigel Thatch, the guy who played "Leon" in those Budweiser commercials a few years back.
Thatch was a pitcher as well as an actor, toiling in the independent Northern League for the Schaumburg Flyers, near Chicago. He had requested a trade to a Los Angeles-area team so he could pursue acting work, so Outcalt agreed to arrange for a trade between Schaumburg and the Fullerton Flyers of the Golden League.
Outcalt says that when his Schaumburg contact told him that Thatch wasn't much of a player, he said, "'Then let's have some fun with it.' So I offered to trade a pallet of beer for him. And then he got all bent out of shape about it and refused to report -- which made it an even better story!"
You might recognize the Schaumburg Flyers as the team that lets fans vote on lineup changes and such through a Web site.
For all the fun, the independent leagues are serious business, especially for the players. Men who have washed out of affiliated ball or who have gone unsigned use them as a summer-long audition for big-league scouts, who pay attention. The Golden League sells about 20 contracts a year to big-league clubs, and while the relatively new circuit has yet to graduate a player to the majors, other independent leagues have sent a steady trickle of talent to the show, mostly relief pitchers.
Next page: Ex-big leaguers find work as independent-ball managers