The most underappreciated member of anybody’s baseball team is the utility player.
On a warm Tuesday evening in Boise, Idaho, three colleagues and I went to see the Boise Hawks play the Spokane Indians. The Hawks are the Class A affiliate of the Chicago Cubs and play in the short-season Northwest League, about as low as the low minors go. The league is filled with young men who can hit, throw and field – each filled with hope that on the one night the right person is watching, he’ll play the game of his life and move a little bit closer to The Show.
The Hawks play 76 games per year, 38 of them at Boise’s Memorial Stadium, where reserve seats start at $6 apiece, the Polish sausages are hot and the beer is reasonably cold, even in July. Players are very young; the oldest player is barely old enough to flag down the beer vendor, the youngest still showing off his high school ring.
We had terrific seats, half the row of eight known in Boise as the Diamond Club, so close to home plate we could hear the seams buzzing against the air every time a pitcher threw a curveball. The game started like every minor league game in every small city. A recorded instrumental version of The Star Spangled Banner was queued and a young brunette standing on the infield grass just in front of home plate lifted a microphone and let loose an outstanding rendition of the national anthem.
She hit the high F on “land of the free” and finished it off with the broad smile she’d held throughout. But then she did something extraordinary: She handed off the microphone, walked around the backstop, pulled an order pad out of her apron and asked what we wanted to drink.
That young woman was Maggie McCowin, a 26-year-old Boise State student from Idaho Falls who started working for the Hawks in the summer of 2005. An employee of the concessionaire, Home Plate Food Service, McCowin got a job delivering food to fans when she drove her best friend, Kate, to an interview. Home Plate hired them both.
It was fun, McCowin said, even if it only paid minimum wage plus some modest tips, so she returned the next season and worked all the jobs, from waitress to runner to beer pourer. The camaraderie was good and the schedule didn’t interfere with her zoology studies. When the Hawks created the Diamond Club seats for the 2007 season, McCowin’s boss said he needed the most enthusiastic, craziest person on the staff to serve that row, and Maggie was the one.
McCowin discovered in high school that she liked to sing. She entered some talent competitions and when she missed hearing her own voice in college, she signed on with a local church choir where she sang at weekly rehearsals but rarely appeared for the Sunday service. During her first season with the Hawks, the custom was to play a recorded national anthem if the scheduled singer failed to appear by game time. McCowin knew she could do better and convinced the Hawks to let her sing instead.
It only took one performance for the front office to figure out that they had the perfect pinch hitter, so McCowin now gets scheduled to sing once or twice each season and, as she did the night we were there, fills in when someone no-shows.
Maggie McCowin is a gregarious, charming, happy young woman, the type everyone claims as a friend shortly after meeting her. And she made me remember that most of my colleagues have talents that sit untapped because the skill isn’t part of the base job description. It occurred to me that every team is better with bench strength. And the value of a utility player isn’t limited to the baseball diamond.
As for Maggie, she sings the anthem straight enough to keep the purists happy and with just a little flourish here and there to keep it interesting. Mostly she likes to sing it because people pay attention. As she put it, “Even if you’re 12 years old and don’t want to listen, your mother’s going to pinch your ear and make you stand up and put your hand over your heart and listen.”
Play ball.
9/21/2010