Four Days in Great Falls

Four Days in Great Falls

Cooper Perkins

The bus pulled into the Day’s Inn at 3:17 am. Typically, the trip from Billings to Great Falls should only take a little bit over three-and-a-half hours, but getting the full team on the bus was a nearly impossible task that night. Players inched across the parking lot one by one. Araujo and Novas shoved their way from the bus’s back row all the way to the stairs at the front, where they met the delivery driver toting their personal pizzas—an ultra-valuable road trip commodity. Domino’s Pizza seemed to tickle the Dominican palate in a way unmatched by most other American fare. Greeting the delivery man was a nightly ritual for these two, whether the rendezvous happened in the team’s dirty motel lobby or whilst blocking the doorway of the team bus. It was a sight to behold and one that I couldn’t have imagined just a couple of months prior as a college student in California. Just seconds later, the bus lurched out of the parking lot and onto another dark Montana highway, players onboard and pizzas in hand.

There is a weird, but unsurprising tension present in minor league baseball clubhouses and on buses, especially at the lower levels. I was young and green, and having grown up in the melting pot of Los Angeles, only peripherally aware of the tension that defined much of the country. The bus ride that night, with a late night and a frustrated driver, was a great microcosm of the larger dynamic that played out in the baseball clubhouse. The separation between American and Latin players. The comical juxtaposition of milky white, country-born good ‘ole boys seated next to the dark-skinned children of profound poverty in the Caribbean. They share lockers and wear the same uniforms, yet once the final out has been recorded, recede into competing views of the world stationed miles apart. I was mostly a bystander, which made my role as the team’s radio voice all the more bizarre. I saw everything, I participated in little, and I spoke on what stood out to my mostly virgin eyes. I did my best, but some aspects aren’t fit for the radio airwaves.

The symphonic rise and fall of Dominican Spanish belted from the back of the bus, always overpowering the more understated and sometimes resentful whispers of English circulating in the front. I spoke enough Spanish to be unbothered by the cacophony surrounding me, but the same wasn’t true for everyone.

At the lower levels, big league teams occasionally offer English lessons for their young Spanish-speaking prospects. Having sat in on several of these classes held on the concourse of the ballpark, I can confirm that they are as remedial as one might expect. Being bilingual is generally an accomplishment and a luxury that has yet to be achieved at the rookie ball level. Even basic cross-language competency was rare. Only one member of the clubhouse was truly bilingual, naturally making him the team’s translator and mayor of the bus. Francis was his name, and he was a gentle giant in its truest sense. A massive Dominican-born, switch-hitting first baseman who had already spent two years playing at the big league complex in Arizona and a prior brief stint in Missoula. His English was hindered more by a prominent stutter than a lack of intellectual fluency. Each sentence hop-scotching out of his mouth, off-balance, yet propped up by the support of a courage impossible to teach and necessary to admire. It was obvious from the first batting practice that Francis had big-league power and a Major League personality. It was equally as evident that he would absolutely never sniff Double-A, let alone the Major Leagues, but clearly the big league club had caught wind of his value organizationally and chose to keep him around despite his age. He was profoundly important, even though he hit just a shade over the Mendoza line.

Francis immediately made me feel seen, and I would have done anything to help advance his career. The stories I told of this deeply fascinating giant served to shape an image of him on the radio airwaves that I hoped (mostly in vain) would make him a Missoula folk hero. His background in the Dominican Republic, his beautiful young wife cheering him along, and his remarkable perseverance made for a glorious cocktail of heroism. He was a storyteller’s dream. As hard as I tried to convince fans to fall in love with Francis, the truth was that the quality of his play didn’t match the behemoth he was behind the scenes. He was just another player to the people in the seats, but on the bus he was a god among men.

Thanks to his combined physical and social stature, Francis was afforded a luxury on the bus reserved for only the most special of players: his own row of seats on which to spread out his massive six-foot-five frame. It was a fitting throne for the team’s king. Conversely, I couldn’t have been further from royalty in this world, but was similarly fortunate that I didn’t have to share a row of seats with anyone else on these bus trips. It was an item of great fortune. A little bit of extra space to stretch out on an overnight jaunt through the punishing highways of the Big Sky was extraordinarily valuable. Just a little bit of extra leg room might make the difference between a searingly miserable next day of exhaustion and a moderately less miserable next day of hangover-like tiredness. I was grateful to have space not afforded to everyone else. But nothing in life is truly free, and my bonus legroom was no different. As the team’s radio broadcaster, I learned quickly that I was the only true outsider of the 34 team-affiliated individuals on the bus. Always present, telling a story, reacting to the events that play out around me, easily dismissed and even more easily forgotten.

On this rookie-level short-season team, there were four categories of people. There were the players, the coaches, the support staff provided by the team’s Major League affiliate, and the employees of the actual minor-league affiliate. I was the lone representative of the last category on road trips and an outlier amongst teammates.

In truth, my relationship to the team was probably closest with the two support staffers. That dynamic could most accurately be described as “distant.” I felt that we were contemporaries, but they were visibly hesitant to agree. One was a video coordinator tasked with setting up cameras at each minimally equipped ballpark, cutting the video into digestible chunks, and transmitting it back to the Big League club’s headquarters. The other was a translator. A Princeton-educated statistics whizz who had studied abroad in Brazil and brought on to serve as the Portuguese translator for a flailing top prospect born in Rio De Janeiro. Neither of them were considered part of the team, but that didn’t really matter. They were employed by the big club. They were sent to Montana together. This summer in the Big Sky was only a transient experience for them before being sent somewhere more exotic come wintertime. Both of them were certain they were one phone call away from joining the front office. Meanwhile, I was a radio announcer employed by a rookie-level minor league team. As far as they were concerned, I was at my final stop, on my way to nowhere..

Yet, we rode the same bus and slept in the same hotels. We’d arrive at the ballpark at similar times, and each of us was beholden to pre-game responsibilities, and postgame chores. Where our experiences diverged most was during the game itself. The two of them faded into the background, becoming the bit characters that their roles required. There was little need for an interpreter in the dugout while the struggling young Brazilian outfielder patrolled center fielder. Similarly, the video coordinator wasn’t much more than a glorified fan during game time, sitting behind home plate, charting pitches like an elderly baseball lover keeping score by hand. For them, work was mostly done by the time the game began. For me, work didn’t truly commence until the first pitch was thrown. Our roles were opposite and our experiences of the game competing. They were spectators and I was a participant.

In my world, game time was everything. All of the pre-game and post-game deliverables for which I was responsible were merely prices that I paid to get on the air. Once those were handled, I was afforded with the privilege of plunging myself into the divine depths of storytelling that surround baseball like the diamond around a mound. Those three hours on the air were mine. And they were magical. Each game broadcast was blessed with a life unto itself, and I was the force that shaped it into being. The players threw the ball and swung the bat. The umpires called balls and strikes. And my words spoke their actions into existence. For listeners back in Missoula, the game only existed as it flowed from my lips. Devilishly precise words pulled from the ether constructed the scenes with razor-sharp detail. The emotions bubbling from the foundation of my soul painted the drama of the game. I was an artist of description and a translator of feeling, disseminating the truth as I saw it across the Montana airwaves. I gave myself to every broadcast with a completeness and an adoration that would be passed between old friends. When the game was over, I returned to my modest position writing game recaps and drinking beer alone in my hotel room. It was the duality of a minor league broadcaster.

Getting to Great Falls that night wasn’t in any way special or spectacular, which in itself made it notable. The Montana air was warm and silent. The streets were dead. The strip club around the corner was lit, but even the most gung-ho of patrons had largely called it a night. Great Falls was asleep, yet the ball club was just introducing itself to the town. Hotel check-in happened just a few minutes before 4am as all parties dispersed to their shared rooms for a short night’s sleep before the early bus to the ballpark the next day at noon. The rooms were exactly what you would expect from a run-down and unkempt Day’s Inn. A budget hotel option provided by the home team. Hard mattresses with bead spreads of questionable hygiene. A valid fear for the presence of bed bugs. Sheets closer to sandpaper than silk. A bathroom that likely hadn’t received a deep clean since the start of the year. A chipped white sink that would quickly become an ice chest for the beer that would otherwise go in a mini-fridge. A coffee maker that can only be described as the wounded great grandfather of the single-cup brewing Keurig. If you were looking for reasons to be excited for the next four days in town, they would have to come from somewhere other than the hotel. As the team introduced itself to Great Falls with a smile and an extended hand, the town offered back a scowl and a nod of begrudging acknowledgement.

Despite the late night, waking up the next morning was easier than it would be any of the next three days. Those mornings would be met with splitting headaches and mild nausea provoked by the six-pack of local beer that I guzzled alone in the hotel room the night before. I wasn’t invited to dinner by the coaches or support staff, but that didn’t stop me from drinking myself happy. Extended periods on the road were lonely, and I was a long way from home.

The first day in town was instead characterized by a more traditional and less sinister or pathetic tiredness. Even such, I wouldn’t make any effort to catch the second of the two team buses to the ballpark. I liked to situate myself at a local establishment, writing my stories for the day, updating game notes, and absorbing some kind of flavor from my temporary new home. A long walk from an uninspiring coffee shop provided a look at what Great Falls really was. The town that was shrouded in darkness the night before was now lit up and piercingly hot, burning from a sun that seemed to occupy the entirety of the Big Sky above. It had to have been close to 100 degrees.

Great Falls had the feel of a faded old-school bastion of the American Dream. Single-family homes lining the street. The occasional establishment with an “open” or “hiring” sign in the window. Yard after yard, overgrown and begging for attention. As my walk continued, I was surprised to be greeted by a series of massive industrial structures lining the two-lane roadway to the stadium. It was a cereal manufacturing plant, owned by breakfast giant Kellogg’s.

Immediately I imagined the local population filing in and out of their factory jobs, just as their parents before them. Retreating to houses with splintered wooden porches and peeling white paint. Stealthily unwrapping whatever secrets they kept behind closed doors. I was a child of Los Angeles and my elusive dream of calling games in the Big Leagues had hoisted me into an unfamiliar position overlooking strange terrain. I understood the big city, but was just learning about the plains. Great Falls wasn’t a place in which I wanted to spend prolonged time, but it was unwittingly a great tool of education. It provided one data point in a larger experience of learning about the America that was, not the one that I thought it to be. It was a dying town in a minimally populous place, but it carried the spirit of Americana in a way that a city like Los Angeles is incapable. The kind of homogenous belief in an elusive ideal that isn’t possible in regions of significant diversity. It was foreign to me, a 22-year-old, straddling the line between city-dwelling kid and blossoming voice of America’s pastime. I was baptized by Great Falls and ushered into a world unfamiliar.

Centene Stadium was built a year before the United States entered World War Two. Its facade had been updated at some point in the early-2000’s to sterilize whatever character it had originally. Little had been done elsewhere in the building. The clubhouse wasn’t fit to house a high school JV team, let alone a group of Major League-affiliated professionals. Sure, the Pioneer League was short-season rookie ball at the time, but Centene Stadium was closer in look and feel to the fifteen-hundred person American Legion ballparks that pepper the Midwestern states like North Dakota and Wyoming, where high school baseball is either an afterthought or outright non-existent. For some of the American-born guys on the team, their most recent baseball experiences had been against the backdrop of packed, state-of-the-art 15-thousand person stadiums in the Southeastern Conference of college baseball. For others, they’d last played before the draft in complex-like junior college fields scattered around Arizona and Florida. But for the Latin players, most of whom in their first state-side assignments, Centene Stadium must have been interesting. Its disrepair was impossible to ignore, but its four-thousand-person grandstand (albeit featuring a generously announced eight hundred patrons) was in some ways a shrine to the sport that gave them life. A quasi-religious location dedicated to baseball, the game that gave an impoverished life purpose and possibility. A real-life manifestation of the hope that they held through youth, never able to count on a pair of shoes, but always able to count on baseball.

I didn’t share the reverence for this decrepit old ball yard. The staircase to the press box creaked with each step, not in an endearing way that demonstrates character, but in the kind of disconcerting way that makes you question a building’s structural integrity. If you’d told me Centene Stadium was to be condemned, I would not have been surprised in the least. But I still likely would have set up my equipment and called the game as planned, savoring every moment as if it were the ninth inning of the World Series. I had a responsibility to the game that no broadcast setup could skew. Calling games isn’t a gig that offers flexibility. Opportunities and on-air reps are so sought after that missing even a single game with the flu inspires deep fear of being Wally Pipped. If I were to take my headset off even once, I knew another bright-eyed, aspirational young man would sprint to take my place. There was no room for complaining in an ecosystem so defined by competition and scarcity of opportunity. After all, I was fortunate to have gotten the job calling games in the Pioneer League at all. Of the 200 applicants for the position, I represented the entirety of the 0.5% of applicants that were hired. It was an appropriate distillation of the broadcasting business at large: the odds are never in your favor.

The press box at Centene Stadium was situated on top of the grandstand overhang, overlooking the diamond with a vertical, almost bird-like view. The dirt looked dry. The grass was yellowing and dying in places. I wondered if the home team had neglected its grounds crew in the same way that the team’s owners seemed to shamelessly ignore the state of the ballpark at large. Or maybe it’s just that grass doesn’t want to grow in Great Falls. The town’s aura is not one of liveliness and expansion. In the same way that my walk to the ballpark illuminated a dying community, Centene Stadium’s disrepair seemed to foreshadow the dying of Pioneer League baseball as we knew it. A proud, long-standing short-season league with teams throughout the Big Sky of Montana, the mountains of Utah, and the mesas of Colorado, the Pioneer League embodied the spirit of Minor League Baseball. It was 2017, but clearly the tides were shifting against the institution that had fostered a love of America’s pastime throughout the far-reaching corners of the USA. Minor League Baseball’s days were numbered, and it was clear to everyone willing to observe the signs. It was no more obvious than that day at Centene Stadium.

Calling games in Great Falls was a chore in its own way. The miserably small, open-air visiting broadcast booth was a perfect parallel to the awful conditions of the visiting clubhouse that greeted the players. The wood was splintering on the countertop. The garage-style window cover struggled to stay open. The filth was so deeply ingrained in the wood planks that I wondered if it was possible to clean the press box at all. Even if it were, the home radio broadcaster and press box steward clearly was not interested in doing so. I did not think highly of him. His respect for the sport seemed paper-thin. His self-importance hardly a rarity among young broadcast talent jockeying for a small handful of opportunities each year. His extraordinarily loud shouting at every minor in-game development echoed through the press box and flooded my crowd mic. The sound quality was as hollow and echoey as Great Falls itself—a town built on the past with relics and remnants reverberating into the present.

Through four days in Great Falls, the town did little to reveal more of itself than was displayed from the onset. It proved to be an oddly transparent place that perfectly encapsulated the low-level minor league baseball experience. It was not a particularly pleasant trip, nor was it a place that I looked forward to visiting later in the season. But in boarding the bus after the series finale and setting out for Ogden, I was left with a weird sense of beauty. A feeling that Great Falls, in all of its crumbling glory was exactly what made Minor League Baseball beautiful. The town was both dead and brilliantly alive. There were few fans, but the ones in attendance cared deeply. The stadium was a relic and a shell of a bygone era, yet still a cathedral built to the hope embodied by poverty-stricken people many miles away. Minor League Baseball was never about development. It was never about winning and losing. At its core, Minor League Baseball was about the complexity that defines the foundation of what it means to be human. All together, the dualities and the contradictions, the parallels and the juxtapositions, boarding the bus and heading to Ogden for the next stop along the road trip.

Cooper Perkins (“Four Days in Great Falls”) is a television and radio play-by-play broadcaster who began his career riding the bus and calling games on the summer collegiate baseball circuit and in the grind of Minor League Baseball. While he’s moved on to covering a wider array of sports, baseball remains his first love and truest passion in the sporting world. He’s originally from Los Angeles, but now resides in New York City.

Jason David Córdova lives in Puerto Rico as an illustrator and painter. Some of his art can be seen on Instagram at @jasoni72. You can visit his shop on Red Bubble.

The Twin Bill is a nonprofit organization with 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. You can support The Twin Bill by donating here.