By Natasha Earl
A cool breeze drifted through the Arnold Field baseball stadium late Friday afternoon. Fans of all ages populated the stadium’s bleachers as children pointed out their favorite players and adults drank beer from plastic cups. Everyone seemed content ending the week with an in-person baseball game. After all, fans had been waiting two seasons for the return of their favorite local team – the Sonoma Stompers.
On this night, the Stompers defeated the Solano Mudcats with a 5-4 win. It marked the team’s eighth victory of the 2022 summer ball season. According to 19-year-old pitcher Kyle Dickey, it certainly will not be their last.
“What distinguishes our team from others is the culture,” Dickey says. “We have a great team, great coaches, and we compete really hard. I don’t see a lot of other teams showing up early every day to work like us.”
Born in Cypress, Texas, Dickey will enter his sophomore year at Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi next month. Like the rest of his Stompers teammates, Dickey plays for his college baseball team. He first learned of the Sonoma opportunity when his assistant coach at Corpus Christi connected him to Stompers Field Manager Zack Pace. Fast forward a few months later, Dickey sports number seven on the field as he enjoys a summer of California sun.
According to Pace, the recruitment process is accomplished primarily by word of mouth. “The baseball community is a big-small world in a sense. I try to talk to people who I know, and trust their recommendations.”
While most are recruited by the coaching staff, players will occasionally reach out themselves to vie for a spot on the team. Pace expects this to happen more frequently in future years once the team establishes a better name for itself.
Though the Stompers have been around since 2014, the team recently endured a major transition: during their two-year COVID hiatus, they decided to rebrand themselves under the California Collegiate League (CCL).
The CCL comprises eleven teams stretching from Northern to Southern California. Typically, college players will join the league for the summer season to develop their skills before returning to their college teams in the subsequent academic year.
“For a lot of these guys, their college season is number one,” said Pace. “Summer ball is more second tier.”
Before the pandemic, the Stompers played in an independent league called the Pacific Association of Professional Baseball Clubs. The PA disbanded in 2020. In October of 2021, the team transitioned to the CCL.
Stompers Acting General Manager Eduardo Mora-Loera described how the team felt an obligation to bring baseball back to the Sonoma community in the wake of the pandemic.
“With the CCL, we now have the infrastructure to allow the Stompers to plug in and recruit players while building the fan experience and continuing to have baseball in Sonoma.”
According to Pace, the greatest difference between professional and collegiate leagues is the gap in compensation. While games generate some money for the team, the individual players themselves are not getting paid.
“Compared to the independent guys who were trying to get their last innings in and survive in the game, these guys all know that they’re going back to college to play. They’re just trying to get better for their college season,” said Pace.
The Stompers play games five to six days each week and practice almost every day. For California-born Davis Cop, a rising senior at the University of Utah, summer ball is vastly different from his college playing experience.
“At school, everything is incredibly structured, but here it is a little bit more free-flowing and less intense,” said Cop. “It really just comes down to having a lot of fun which is what baseball is all about. Getting to play games again takes me back to feeling like a little kid.”
Though most players are California locals, only one calls Sonoma his home. The rest are scattered around the state, and four – including Dickey – have come all the way from Texas.
Houston native Tucker McEnroe, who attends school with Dickey, has enjoyed his first summer in California, living with a host family.
“The CCL has been awesome. It’s one of the top college leagues in the country, and every night we get to go against top arms from all over the state. It’s definitely been a challenge so far, but it’s going to make me better because of it,” said McEnroe.
According to Mora-Loera, the CCL has a fifty percent draft rate, which means that many of the Stompers will go on to play professional baseball.
But while going pro may seem like the obvious end goal for college players, several Stompers seem more focused on simply playing the sport rather than pursuing it as a career.
“My future plans are to see how far baseball will take me – hopefully, the draft in a year or two. If that doesn’t work out, I’ll have a degree in business management, so I’ll go into the management side of things,” said McEnroe.
Like McEnroe, Dickey has a backup plan in the event that baseball doesn’t work out for him. At college, he studies mechanical engineering in addition to playing for the school’s baseball team. While he hopes to play through to his senior year, Dickey suspects that a career in engineering might be more likely than one in professional baseball.
Regardless of what the future holds for players, most seem happy to live in the moment. Being a part of the Sonoma Stompers allows them to enjoy the sport and wider community without having to look too far down the road.
“This is my third round of summer ball,” Cop says. “Would I love the opportunity to come back to Sonoma? Absolutely. But if that’s not how things end up working out, I’m going to be very grateful for my time here.”
Natasha Earl, a second-year journalism student at Northwestern University, is The Sun’s summer intern.
About the cover
This week’s cover picture of Arnold Field was painted by Andy Brown during a Stompers game in 2018, one of 24 ballparks he painted during a tour of minor and major league stadiums around the country. He’s now done 110 ballparks, painted live during each nine-innings game, in 12 different countries. “I loved Arnold Field,” he recalls. “I remember it was a beautiful bright and sunny Californian day. A puppy parade was the pre-game entertainment, and one participant (a dachshund?) relieved itself on second base as the song ‘Who let the dogs out?’ was playing. Wonderful.” See his work at Andybrownstadiums.com
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