Last summer in Montana I went to a home game of the Missoula Osprey -- not Ospreys, Osprey -- who play(s?) in the Pioneer League. The Osprey is/are a farm team of the Arizona Diamondbacks, but attending their games feels pretty independent -- certainly it's pioneering. Their tiny high-school park is almost impossible to find, and the team 'clubhouses' are trailers behind the bleachers. (It's as if they go on road trips by simply hitching the trailer to a semi.) I keep picturing Dirty Al Gallagher in such an environment: after a tough loss to Idaho Falls, he holes up in a tiny boilerroom office. He calls and books the motel for tomorrow's road trip; then he lights up his eighth Vantage of the day -- he's been trying to quit for decades -- and updates player stats. Next morning, he comes in at 8:30 to do payroll and call in his concessions order for the upcoming homestand, and it's Dirty Al who answers the phone when you call and says yes, your cell phone turned up in the lost and found. He's originally from San Francisco, but since the Giants sent him packing in 1973, Alan Gallagher refuses to go Home Again.
Independent leagues like the Northern tend to attract marginals: guys ignored by the big league clubs; also-rans trying to get back in the race; fringe characters -- like I imagine Dirty Al is -- who'd rather buck the system and have more fun than money; and has-beens giving it one more shot, including the Bulls' erstwhile nemesis Daryl Strawberry.
In 1983, just two years after graduating from Lynchburg, Strawberry was the National League Rookie of the Year. At age 29 he had already hit 270 home runs, and he looked like a sure Hall of Famer. But his thirties were plagued first by injuries and then drugs. By the early 1990s he was nearly washed up, and he finally got suspended for 60 days in 1995 after testing positive for cocaine. Shunned by major league teams, Strawberry resurfaced in 1996 with the Saint Paul Saints, in Dirty Al's Northern League. After tearing up the pitching staffs of such powerhouses as the Gary Southshore Railcats and the Schaumberg Flyers, he signed with the New York Yankees. He helped them win two World Series but couldn't straighten out. He played for the Yankees sporadically while enduring more injuries, drug relapses and rehabs, and arrests. When he stepped to the plate, he was often serenaded with a derisive chant -- "DAAHH-ryl! DAAHH-ryl!" -- that somehow seemed to condense all of his mistakes into one melodic taunt. He finally retired in 1999. Since then, he's been busted for tax evasion, spousal abuse, and soliciting a prostitute. Between these misadventures, Strawberry contracted and recovered from colon cancer, and in 2002 he went to jail on yet another cocaine conviction. Nonetheless, he remains Yankee owner George Steinbrenner's favorite lost cause, and when Strawberry got out of prison this past April, Steinbrenner had a public relations job waiting for him at New York's training complex in Tampa Bay, where Strawberry lives. He turned it down, though, in order to start an outreach program with his church. Last month, a bizarre rumor surfaced that Straw had been found dead in a Florida hotel room. He's alive, but that's the sort of craziness that dogs him even when he's on relatively good behavior.
