August 2, 2010
A baseball lifer, in his own words
by Brett Rudy/
Steve Pinner has been an avid amateur baseball player in the Boston area for years.
The Men’s Adult Baseball League was founded in 1993. Only one player remains in the league from that inaugural season: Steve Pinner. During Pinner’s 18-year MABL career, he has played with 11 different teams. Pinner’s desire to seek out more baseball, year after year, is what amateur baseball is all about. The following is Pinner’s first-person account of his eventful baseball career.
In the spring of 1993, I was working for State Street Bank pricing mutual funds. One of my co-workers, a gentleman by the name of Eddie Guillemette, saw an advertisement in the local paper for the formation of a new baseball league in Boston run by Jon Diamond.
I accompanied him to Cassidy Playground on Memorial Day where approximately 30 players showed up to form two teams – the Red Sox, managed by Kevin Moran, and the Phillies, which would be managed by me. Two other teams joined us in the following weeks to start a league with four. And so began the Boston Men’s Adult Baseball League.
The following year, more teams had joined the league, including the Athletics. The Phillies merged with the A’s in 1995 to form the Astros, and Eric Lotter of the Athletics took over the managerial duties. I would stay with the ’Stros for six seasons, playing 99 games with them.
By the 2000 season, Sean McCarty had taken over as manager of the team. It would be Sean’s last season with the ’Stros. That fall, he joined a group of players including Braves manager Paul Schneider, to play in the MSBL World Series tournament in Arizona. With Sean to the Braves, the Astros had no skipper and were at risk of folding, so I was on the hunt for a new team.
Coming into 2001, a few Dodgers said they were considering retirement, which meant there would be room for me to take someone’s spot – which I did. As it turned out, the entire lot stayed on, so I spent most of that season pinch-hitting and filling in. Unable to find my groove, I managed only three hits the entire year, two of them coming in one game against my former mates, the Astros, who didn’t fold after all when Sean Kennedy decided to step up in the spring of 2001 and take over the managerial duties.
The 2001 season also featured a subset of four new teams that played a smaller schedule just on Saturdays. These four “Saturday” teams were absorbed into the MABL in 2002. Since there was really no room for me on the Dodgers, I decided to attach myself to one of these new teams to help them get acclimated with the league. I was invited to join the Reds. During the preseason, it seemed to be going well, but by the time the season started, there were almost 30 players on the roster and three managers choking the team with infighting for control of the club. After the sixth game of the season, I was cut from the team by one of the three managers after having only one plate appearance.
I inquired around the league for openings, and in July, was invited to a game by the Diamondbacks. They were playing the Cardinals at Boston English High School that night, and I was put in at second base in the sixth inning and flied out to right field in one plate appearance. Unfortunately, I was not invited back to stay with them, either.
A few weeks later, Jason Bressner of the Orioles invited me to a game they had against the Mets. I warmed up with them, but was not put into the game, nor was I invited back to join them. While all of this was going on, another team, the Red Sox, folded due to lack of players. I expressed interest in joining them and even taking over as manager, but the deadline had passed for roster changes and I was ineligible.
That’s how close I came to playing for three or even four different teams in one year, but the season ended, and I found myself once again looking for a place to play. As I did after the 2000 season, I sent out a message to all of the managers in the league. This time, Kevin McGowan, manager of the Athletics, picked me up. The league switched from aluminum to wood bats that year after much debate, and I found myself struggling to make the adjustment. While I managed a 6-for-11 clip in a four-game stretch at midseason, I finished hitting .208 overall with 12 strikeouts. In the spring of 2004, Kevin told me he would not have a spot on the team for me going forward.
I managed to land with an expansion team again. Tom Elsmore of Quincy, Mass., started a new 18+ team called the Grays in 2004, and brought me on board. It turns out that Tom was also managing a Grays’ team in the 30+ division of the league. I was 34 years old at this point. When I had first turned 30, it had not occurred to me to play for two teams simultaneously. I chose to stay with the younger division exclusively because I was familiar enough with my opponents to feel comfortable enough to continue playing against younger people.
That all changed when Tom called me one day and asked me to play for the older squad because he was short of players. I accepted, happy to get additional at-bats in. It turned out to be a good move because facing pitchers who couldn’t throw as fast as what I was used to seeing helped me adjust to using a wood bat, and I hit .381 in my first season in the 30+ division.
Four years passed, and I continued to play for both Grays teams as new managers and players came and went. All four years were losing seasons for both teams, but I was happy to get the playing time, including one day in 2005 in which I played a total of 19 innings at second base between the two clubs. The 18+ squad was particularly plagued by a high turnover rate, and I found myself starting in almost every game despite my poor numbers, simply because we had only nine or 10 men showing up for each game.
By the end of the 2007 season, I had resolved to continue playing with the 30+ squad, but the 18+ squad had finally reached a point where they had a solid roster, and thus no longer needed me to fill in the holes. So when I saw in the spring of 2008 that there was another expansion team, the Brewers, who had only 12 men going into draft day, I saw an opportunity for me there.
I was still playing for the Grays in the 30+ division, and one of my teammates on that club advised me that the 40+ division had a rule permitting each team to carry two 38-year-olds to help keep rosters from getting too thin. So I called John McCormack, the coach of the Grays in the 40+ division, whom I had played with on the 30+ team. He advised me that while he would love to have me all the time, he already had a roster of 18 men and didn’t see any room to get me into games. So I contacted Bob Major, the coach for the Acton Orioles. I chose them because Acton is three towns away from Hudson, where I live, so I figured it would be a shorter drive to most games. I was right, as they had a permit for the main field at Acton-Boxborough High School, where we often play even as the visiting team due to lack of field availability.
For the next two seasons, I played for the same three teams – the Boston Brewers (18+), the Quincy Grays (30+) and the Acton Orioles (40+). In December of 2009, I saw a posting on the league message board by Chad Besegai, a 10-plus-year veteran and manager of the Rangers, looking for someone else to manage the team. I expressed interest, got a blessing from Chris Dowd, manager of the Brewers, and took the offer.
Now, I am in my 18th season in the 18+ division, seventh in the 30+ division, and third in the 40+ division.
So what’s next? After 17 years, I’d like to try and capture a championship, particularly with a team that’s never won one before like the Rangers. Apart from that, my goals include hanging around long enough for my 8-year-old son to come of age and play alongside me, and maybe setting some stat records like being the oldest player to accomplish certain feats. I may have already set one with a three-hit game for the Brewers against the Rangers last season at age 39. I don’t know if anyone age 40 or over has ever hit a home run, so if I can manage to hit another one – I have two career homers, one in 1999 and one in 2000 – I may capture that one.
As for becoming the oldest player in the history of the league to steal a base, my understanding is that Jim Pickel achieved that feat at the age of 53, which means I will just have to stay in shape and plan on playing for at least another 13 years. Whether or not I am still in a Rangers’ uniform at that point remains to be seen.
