Courtesy of the Niagara Gazette
In Niagara Falls, not everybody equates Powerball with instant riches. The relatively new kid on the baseball block, the Niagara Power, is edging toward the jackpot itself.
In for its seventh year, second to only one other Cataract inter-city ballclub, the team has lit up the New York Collegiate Baseball League with a 10-run inning and a six-homer game, which it lost.
The league, well into its fourth decade, takes its cue from the storied Cape Cod League. Young men with high hopes come from all over the country to play a 40-game schedule.
With other teams in Hornell, Wellsville, Olean, Geneva and Oneonta, it sure looks like the old PONY (later New York-Pennsylvania) League. We imagine long-time PONY prexy Vince McNamara is smiling down.
The Power, which Rocket Man helped name, plays under the auspices of the national Fellowship of Christian Athletes, also a clubhouse force in the majors.
A prayer precedes most games. Some nights Gideon-like groups come in and quietly offer Bibles. It’s pretty low-key, although that element of the populace with chips on their shoulders make sure they get knocked off. Rocket Man calls himself “the designated heathen” and takes much more offense to lottery ads at ballgames than he does to professions of faith.
But it all comes down to the baseball. It’s about an error and a wild pitch a game beneath the level of, say, the Batavia Muckdogs. The games move with extraordinary dispatch. One in Olean the other night finished in less than two hours and it was nine full innings, 8 to 4.
When the Power split at Geneva last week, 2-3 and 6-4, both games finished in less than 1:50.
Almost without exception, everyone runs everything out. At a Bison game last month, Rocket Man cringed as seven out of nine consecutive batters leisurely trotted down to first on ground balls, two of them bobbled.
The Power started slowly, loving their neighbors enough to finish last four years in a row. Things have picked up. The six solo homers at Wellsville Sunday topped the team’s entire total for its first two years in existence. The manager, about 26, slightly violated protocol the other night vs. Hornell, sending a runner home with a 12-run lead in the eighth. He’d never been ahead that far and sort of forgot.
No beer sales – that’s not a team rule, but the way it works out. Concessions are terrific. Home games are played at Sal Maglie Stadium, decently refurbished. Ticket prices run four bucks tops, and parking’s free.
The team’s home this Friday and Saturday, then June 27-29, and July 5, 12, 16-20 and 23, 7 p.m. every time. Call 773-1748 for information and the latest weather-enforced changes.
Fire back to Rocket Man via pollyndoug@hotmail.com
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