By DAN CROWLEY
Over the course of the 43 games played by the team this summer, the Braves won just nine. Last year the Braves were the Western Division Champions. So what went wrong? Certainly they didn’t plan to finish last.

There are teams in the Cape Cod Baseball League that began recruiting for the 2007 season before the 2006 season began. Now that the regular season is over, they’re all looking at next year. Many have already assembled tentative 2007 rosters. A year ago the Braves had a roster that they thought would allow them to repeat as Western Division champs. Now 12 months later, we can only look back and ask what happened.

There are 10 different teams in the league, and each has its own way of assembling a roster for the next season. In some cases the entire burden falls on the coach or coaches; in others a general manager and coach work together. Whatever route a team takes, it uses that method because it works for them. In Bourne the franchise turns player selection over to Head Coach Harvey Shapiro.

The eighth winningest coach in Cape League history, Shapiro has been around the block. He knows baseball and he knows the Cape League. Over the years he has established connections with Division I college coaches and with professional baseball scouts. When selecting a team, these are the people he consults.

“I’ll call some scouts, ask them who they like, and get all the names,” Shapiro explained. “Then I’ll get a certain number of (names) from certain college coaches. But today there is a lot of Internet recruiting. You look at the high school kids that were drafted, go on the Internet and see who has or hasn’t signed, and then you start to recruit. Some coaches are going to a particular college and saying, ‘I’ll take your top three freshmen every year,’ but I don’t like doing that because you never know what you’re getting.”

Selecting high school players who haven’t thrown their first college pitch, or a high school player who hasn’t swung a bat at the Division I level is inherently risky. It’s a gamble based on information received from professional scouts and college coaches who have watched a player at the high school level and recruited them. But that is what Cape League coaches must do with freshmen. With a sophomore, there is a year of performance at the college level upon which to base a decision.

“I have two national cross-checkers that I really trust,” Shapiro said, “and there is one organization where I know someone involved in the draft process that always has good names, and those players have always had good results playing here on the Cape.”

When the season begins in June, the recruiting should be done with the team in place. Players have signed contracts with the intention of coming to the Cape, but sometimes things don’t go according to plan. Injuries happen and there are illnesses that can delay a player’s arrival. Team USA faces some of the same problems and in order to cover all its bases will hold tryouts for additional players. This can keep a player from arriving in June and sometimes from not arriving at all. A player recruited and signed the winter before the season begins may be required to go to summer school or have a personal situation that prohibits him from coming to the Cape. 

On top of it all, the NCAA college baseball postseason runs into late June, leaving holes in Cape League rosters across the board. In some cases, college coaches will decide late in their season not to allow a young pitcher to throw over the summer, preferring to rest them so they’ll be ready in the fall. And then after claiming that they have no intention of signing, a college player chosen in the June Major League Baseball Amateur Draft may suddenly reverse course and sign a professional contract leaving the Cape League club that was counting on him that year scrambling to fill the void.

Almost all of the above happened this summer to the Braves. It created a revolving door roster that forced the coaching staff to focus on finding players to replace those that would suddenly leave or not show up at all. As a result, when they should have been coaching, Shapiro and his staff were on the phone calling scouts and college coaches in search of players.


“I would go to sleep at night,” Shapiro admitted, “wondering whether I would have enough players.”
By June, the market for the top collegiate talent is dry. The best players have summer league positions. As they do in the Cape League, they sign contracts making it impossible to sign someone already committed to another league.

“In some cases our replacements for the replacements never worked out,” Shapiro pointed out. “Early we didn’t have our pitchers. Once they began to come around, we didn’t have enough hitting to win games.”

Cape League teams have rosters of 23 players. By the end of the 2006 season, Bourne had just 10 players remaining from its original roster.
“When I was at Falmouth one year, of the first 20 players that I signed, we finished with five,” Shapiro recalled. “But back then in the early ’90s I was able to pick up some good players. There weren’t as many summer leagues. Today you can’t do that.”

To some extent. Cape League coaches are finding that they are being dictated to by the college coaches where they might insist on a package deal. A Cape League team might want to sign a school’s number-one pitcher, but the coach will hold him back unless the Cape team also takes another player. When that number-one arm for whatever reason doesn’t arrive, the team finds itself stuck with a lesser player that they might not have wanted in the first place under contract.

“I don’t usually go along with that,” Shapiro said of the package deal. “I don’t think we’re seeing the number-one and -two pitchers from the big schools anymore. We’re seeing number-three or -four. (College coaches) don’t want their guys overworked and they think they’ll be overused in the summer, but part of that is that in some places they’re being overused during the college season.”

As a result, a pitcher who posted strong numbers in the spring arrives on the Cape tired and with a sore arm, something the Braves were forced to deal with by slowing pitchers down, resting them until late in the season before unleashing them on the mound.

“We had a pitcher coming that we were excited about,” Shapiro explained. “(In June) a college coach called me and said they were shutting the kid down and resting him. I said, ‘You knew that a month ago, why didn’t you call me then?’ ”

The school then offered a lesser pitcher it wanted to play on the Cape.

“I think a lot of schools are caring less and less about summer ball,” Shapiro added. “They look at it as just another headache they have to deal with.”

With the recent rise in collegiate summer baseball and new leagues popping up every year, the talent pool is diluted. While the Cape League is arguably the first choice of many college players, they can’t all come here. Other leagues are just as aggressively scanning college rosters for the best talent available. Once a player signs a contract in another league, he is off the market. The one window the Cape League maintains is the early June tryout where teams caught short of on-field personnel can add to their rosters. In this case, top players may delay signing with another league until they have the chance to get picked up as a temporary player by a Cape League team. Once on the roster, these players work diligently for a permanent spot.

“This year we had no catchers,” Shapiro explained of the two catchers originally signed. One went to Team USA and the other suffered a late-season injury. “I picked up two temporary guys, but you have to be honest, you have to tell them the chances are that they won’t be staying.”

This year the catching position epitomized the roster struggles the Braves faced. Before the season ended, the team signed or resigned 12 catchers, two of them twice. By the midpoint of the season the Bourne coaching staff was beginning to wonder what they had to do to find and keep a catcher. And it’s not just the constant turnover behind the plate. The pitching staff, which struggled early, didn’t have that everyday guy back there to provide continuity and build confidence.

Around the Fourth of July holiday, the Cape League rosters are frozen. Teams with 23 players are allowed just four additional moves. This year the Braves lost two players immediately following the roster freeze.

“If we had known a little earlier, or if the injury had come a week sooner, we could have made some moves before then,” Shapiro pointed out.
Bourne used all four moves and still finished the season short three players.

Another curveball the coaching staff had to deal with was tossed by Mother Nature. Postponements because of rain or field conditions bunched the remaining schedule. By late in the season, coaching staffs were struggling to keep pitching arms fresh as teams played every day and on some days played doubleheaders. Shapiro and pitching coach Brian Pugh managed their pitching so as to allow Tom Farmer (Akron) and Andrew Carignan (UNC) the opportunity to pitch in the All-Star Game, but not every team did, with some of the pitchers sitting it out because they had thrown recently or to be rested for the regular season stretch run.

“With all the games we had, I was trying to save the pitching staff,” Shapiro said so that Farmer and Carignan could pitch, but not everybody else did. “As the manager (of the Western Division All-Star team) I was forced to use positional players (to pitch). I think that what we did (at Bourne) we did for the right reasons. We are watching out for the health of our players and to give our all-star pitchers a chance to pitch in the all-star game.”

Because of the lack of available pitching, coaches and the league were criticized by Major League Baseball scouts and fans after the game. While the Braves had done the right thing, Shapiro once again came under fire as, by virtue of last year’s Western Division championship, he was in charge on his side of the field.

Last year, when Bourne won the Western Division Championship, as a team they hit .225 and compiled a collective ERA of 2.27. They also scored 190 runs. This summer, the Braves hit .201 with an ERA of 3.95 and scored 113 runs – 77 fewer runs than last year for a total of 1.75 fewer runs per game in 2006. That coupled with 69 more walks given out this summer means fewer wins.

While scoring 113 times this summer, Bourne allowed opponents to score 205 times. In 2005 while scoring 190 runs, the team allowed just 136 runs.

This summer they committed two fewer errors (63) than last year (65), but with opponents outscoring the Braves by more than two runs per game, this year’s victory became elusive. Thirty-nine runs scored against the team this season were unearned, an average of nearly one per game.
“Our hitting is similar to what it was last year,” Shapiro pointed out. “We were hitting under .200 most of the season last year and this year. But last year we had everybody in early and we only lost a couple of guys. We were able to build some team chemistry, we had some days off, the guys had some fun, and they were a team. I’m not sure we had that this year. Some guys weren’t here long enough to establish any team chemistry.”

As a team, you have to be able to pitch in the Cape League or you won’t win. That’s why many think of the Cape Cod Baseball League as a pitchers’ league. In the past it has always attracted the best college pitchers in the nation. All things considered, pitching became the Achilles’ heel of the Braves in 2006.

“Our pitching, at times, was not what it should have been for the Cape League,” Shapiro admitted. By the end of the season Bourne had left just six of the original 13 pitchers signed and, of those, two didn’t arrive until the middle of July and two others experienced sore arms. The other seven missing pitchers from the original 13 for various reasons never joined the team.

“It hasn’t been fun,” Shapiro added. “I feel bad for my wife, it’s her summer, too, and she has to put up with me. I’ve been cranky. I’m up half the night trying to figure it out, but that’s the nature of being a coach.”

The Cape League has honored its contracts with players; however not all players have chosen to do the same, something the league overlooks. Discouraged, or for whatever reasons, the Braves had players walk out this summer, further taxing the roster. As the season limped to a close for Bourne, those who stayed remained because it was their responsibility by contract, but mostly because they put the game above everything else. Most of the scouts left the Cape after the All-Star Game as they usually do, but they didn’t stop watching. One of the toughest things for scouts to measure in a player is character. They can watch them play and mathematically calculate skills, but they have no way to measure a player’s makeup. If a Major League club is going to spend a lot of money on a player, one thing they want to know is that that person has the strength of character to stand up to the rigors of professional baseball. Sometimes it’s not all about winning. Sometimes there are other lessons to be learned.