July 19, 2021

By Patrick Kennedy

Canadian Baseball Network

The Kingston Senior Mens League, the county’s lone baseball league, is turning 40.

That’s a noteworthy achievement for any sandlot circuit, let alone for one conceived and configured in a 1981 “car meeting” at Nelles Megaffin’s decaying north-end playpen. More on that pivotal event in a moment.

Birthdays aside, all is not sunshine and roses for the old ball loop. The milestone anniversary is but a quiet nod to longevity and will undoubtedly pass without notice, except perhaps from diehards who played during the league’s baptismal seasons and the scores of players who followed and experienced the boom years of the mid-’80s and ’90s and into the early years of the new century. For players past junior division age (20) but still anxious for diamond time, the league was a godsend. And not only for them but for older guys who hadn’t donned cleats in years. Prior to the league, the city had not had an established men’s baseball house league since the mid-1960s.

Birthday wishes seem trivial in light of the league’s more pressing matters. Survival, for instance. Oh, nothing imminent, mind you, but worrisome signs loom on the horizon, including symptoms of the same deadly malaise that put the Circle Fastball League to sleep and knocked off the Loughborough Fastball League and other leagues in the area. The good doctor is alluding to apathy — the No. 1 killer of adult rec leagues everywhere.

The men’s league limps towards its 40th season opener in less than tip-top shape. It will try hard not to show its four-decade age, which by rec league standards is “elderly.”

Over the past several years, the circuit has experienced a gradual drop in registration, a slide that has effectively halved the number of teams from 12 to the current half-dozen, which will play a shortened 2021 season for the right to have their team name inscribed on the championship trophy. But good luck with that, by the way. League president Sean Wood reports that the last time a winning team’s name was added to the Staff Hammond League Championship Trophy, Derek Jeter was still in pinstripes and “Trudeau” was a front-page name from the past.

“I don’t know why (that tradition) stopped or why it’s never been restarted,” Wood, 46, says in a telephone interview.

“El presidente” the past six years, Wood is among a clutch of long-tenured players with 25 seasons or more in the league. Which means he’s seen, firsthand, the league’s decline. He remembers the popular year-end awards banquets, where the season was recapped and recounted over beef, beer and belly laughs. The top awards (home runs, pitching, batting average, sportsmanship) honoured the stars of yesteryear, respectively, Charlie Pester, Keith Weese, Mickey Compeau and Joe Corkey. Hardware was also handed out to league and playoff MVPs and to each team’s MVP.

Sadly, the banquets stopped years ago (See: Apathy, above). Ditto for the top awards. In fact, Wood says the league isn’t even sure of the trophies’ whereabouts. What happened? For one thing, fewer and fewer teams were interested in statistics and even less interested in compiling them. No stats, no trophies. Wood says the only league awards now up for grabs go to the league pennant winner, the league champion and the playoff MVP.

The league is low on “new blood,” which on any team acts like a two-pronged jolt of energy and eagerness.

“There just hasn’t been that steady stream of new blood coming in, which a league like ours really needs,” says Brendan Fyke, who at 49 can safely be called a league “old blood.”

“It’s not like it used to be,” laments the 30-year league veteran who spent almost half of those campaigns in the largely thankless job of playing manager. “I remember when we use to have tryouts for our draft picks, and they would take batting practice to show us what they had.

“Now, you’re hard-pressed to round up enough players for a game.”

For ballplayers with long memories, today’s league pales in comparison to the one that operated in the circuit’s heyday, when the league routinely fielded a dozen to 14 clubs and the two divisions were named after long-serving minor-ball supporters Staff Hammond and Vinnie McQuaide.

A 22-game regular season schedule was followed by two rounds of playoffs capped by a best-of-five final. Yours truly was fortunate to have played in a few league finals and was an umpire in a pile of others. From either viewpoint, it was baseball in its purest, imperfect form: Exciting, exacerbating, unpredictable, maddening, thrilling, with timely plays, game-changing moments, miscues and moon shots — all wrapped up in a tidy two hours and change. And we didn’t even mention the traditional post-game pops in the parking lot. Outside of an ex-big leaguer’s fantasy camp, the league was the one place where the local rec player — long the backbone of the league — could still scratch an annual itch that came along just around the time pitchers and catchers report to spring training.

For that, kudos go principally to retired players Dan Kasaboski and Ken Cuthbertson, participants in the aforementioned “car meeting.” Back in 1981, Kasaboski ran an ad in the Whig-Standard asking for people interested in starting a men’s baseball league. Cuthbertson was the only one who replied (See: Apathy, above). Meeting in Kasaboski’s car at Megaffin Park, the two tossed up some ideas, batted around a few suggestions and agreed that each of them would field a team. Another ball club was formed to make it a cosy three-team league for the debut. Kasaboski, today a 70-year-old retired accountant, pitched six seasons in the league before life got in the way. Retired journalist and “reformed lawyer” Cuthbertson, now a new septuagenarian grandpa, was player/manager of league charter member and two-time champion 560 Legion. He pitched for 14 seasons until age 44.

In the league’s inaugural season, a registration at Cook’s Bros. Youth Centre provided enough bodies to fill out four team rosters. Just six summers later, the league had 10 teams and a waiting list. The boom years were on.

Not anymore.

Still, the league is resilient. Even the coronavirus couldn’t lay it low as it did rec leagues in so many other sports. The men’s circuit, which started the 2020 campaign with eight teams before losing two, played an abbreviated season in two three-team bubbles.

For Wood the president and for league stalwarts such as Fyke and Mike Chapman and retired mainstays such as Pat Baldwin, Dan Meehan, Pedro Medora, Johnny Mundell, Kevin McArthur and others, there’s reason for optimism. The “new blood” mentioned by Fyke is already being warmed and readied in the Kingston Baseball Association. That organization, ostensibly a prime feeder system for the men’s league, has seen enrolment explode over the past six years, from 150 to more than 600 today. Once those kids outgrow their teens, some won’t be ready to hang up the spikes. They’ll crave more diamond time.

When that happens, the gods of baseball willing, the Kingston Senior Men’s Baseball League, the league that gave grown-ups a second lease on the game, will still be chugging along.