Abandoned: Prologue

 The Quincy College Baseball Team opened their 1989 season on May 13^thwith a home doubleheader against the University of Missouri-Saint Louis.

Thirty-five years later I began a series of phone calls and social media connections with the Quincy College players from that ’89 squad. They were no longer the 19, 20- and 21-year-old young men from their collegiate playing days. Now they were men with mortgages, children, and several with grandkids. These 54,55, and 56-year-olds now had successful careers, many that were directly tied to their college studies.

Their baseball coach on that Opening Day was no longer a mustachioed 33-year-old with seemingly endless energy to hit fungoes and throw batting practice daily. I was now gray-haired, 69 years old, and still eager to swing a fungo bat and throw batting practice every day, but countless swings of the bat had become a no-no and my right elbow continually announced that tossing b.p. had been reduced to a once-a-week activity.

Contemporary technology had allowed me to stay in occasional contact with six or seven of the guys, but I had only seen two of them in the 21^st century. Yet, the first communication with each player in March 2024 and that initial, “Hey Coach, how are you doing?” immediately brought back vivid images of each player.  I immediately saw some in the batter’s box, on the pitcher’s mound or all 19 together posed for the team picture.

I passed along my writing plans detailing the complete 1989 season. I wanted to tell the entire story of what these players were forced to needlessly confront during the entire academic year and baseball season. For many it began at the end of May in 1988, continued through the summer and extended nearly through the end of the 1988 fall semester into December. Then there was a reprieve of a few months until the nightmare moved to the game field. 

The apathetic deportment of persons whose jobs were to supervise, oversee, and administer to all the Quincy College athletic programs guided the baseball team with a completely detached and plainly uninterested behavior. It was a classic example of the Peter Principle concept. Their inactions began to dismantle the baseball program brick by brick.

When I contacted the players from the 1989 squad, I told them their story would be written in the manner and context that I believed in then. Thirty-five years later, my respect for the 19 players has only gathered strength through all the years that have passed. Recent conversations and the baseball events that have followed the ‘89 season have only enhanced that belief.  These players would be written about individually and as a team from a commendatory viewpoint, simply because that’s the way it was.
 It is a story worthy of acute attention, identifiable by few and startling for most.

 The 1989 Hawks were not a championship team or a squad that played at the break-even level or within telescopic sight of that mark. It is not a story of amazing come-from-behind upset wins or a campaign filled with exciting nail-biting games that brought hundreds of fans out to watch their exciting brand of baseball. 

It is a chronicle of a collection of young players who were forced to break the game down to the grassroots level seeking to compete in conditions that had been unreasonably tilted against them. Unfair doesn’t begin to describe the inescapable position these 19 athletes were placed in. 

I consider it a long-awaited opportunity and a favorable time to relive that year with our 1989 team and inform others about a college baseball season that may have been almost inimitable in the treatment and challenges these young men faced. I’m very fortunate and grateful for having the right set of factors aligned that allowed me to coach the Hawks’ baseball team and now be able to affirm what they accomplished during their college years and over the last three and a half decades.