Cal notes: Mavericks make last stand

ADELANTO, California -- Last week's news that High Desert is one of two teams being replaced by a Carolina League club next season has not gone down easy for fans who have been rooting for the Mavericks since 1991.

"One of our season ticket holders came up to me [in the late innings Friday]," Mavs general manager Ben Hemmen recalled, "and says, 'Stop playing that damn song.' I said, 'What song?' He said, 'That Carolina song. Do you have to rub my face in it?' I said, 'It's "Sweet Caroline." It's about a woman, not a state.'"

But after 26 seasons of California League baseball, the small but devoted group of High Desert regulars can no doubt be forgiven for emotional reactions.

"This is a decision that was made beyond our control, so all you can do is whine about it," David Martin said, "and we're doing a pretty good job of whining about it."

Martin and his wife, Sharon, have been season ticket holders since 2011, having moved to the area in 2010. Before that, they had season tickets for the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers in the Class A Midwest League.

"We're hooked on baseball," David said. "We like low-level baseball. It's more friendly. It's also affordable, and the players are, well, not so swollen in the head."

The end of the Mavericks is "sad," Sharon added. "We don't want them to go."

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They're not alone. John and Margaret May came to so many games in the inaugural year, they decided to get season tickets in 1992, and they've kept them ever since. Mavericks manager Howard Johnson had May deliver his lineup card to the umpire before a game last week, and Hemmen was touched by seeing her tear up as she went from the dugout to the plate.

"I just love baseball," Margaret said. "We've been faithful participants, and we're very upset with what's happening. We're senior citizens, and for us, it's something to occupy our minds. Right now, I keep score. When the players hit a home run, or the pitchers get a strikeout, we collect money and give it to the player himself. I used to have the players stay at my house -- we were a host family -- and I supported the booster club and I ran that for a while."

Hemmen and most of the front office staff began working in High Desert before the 2015 season, but they're very aware of what the Mavericks have meant over the long term not only to the community, but to the Cal League. The Mavs drew 204,638 fans their first year, setting a league record en route to winning the circuit championship. If not for that remarkably successful showing, things may have been different for the teams that blossomed across the Southland in the late '90s and early 2000s.

"This place was the cream of the crop in '91 when it opened -- the first team with [an annual attendance] over 200,000 in the Cal League," Hemmen said. "It paved the way for Lancaster, for Inland [Empire], for Lake Elsinore. It proved that baseball can work in these communities, and they mimicked this place."

The Mavs' transition from model franchise to one on the chopping block didn't happen over night, of course. As in Bakersfield, which is also losing its team, almost all of the growth in the region over the last couple decades occurred in locations inconvenient to the ballpark, and nearby George Air Force Base closed the year after the Mavericks arrived.

Attendance flat-lined, then plummeted, and the city-owned stadium went without updates. Big league organizations reportedly became increasingly wary of developing talent in an atmosphere that inflated ERAs and encouraged hitters to swing for fly balls that the wind could carry out of the yard. Through the years, rumors surfaced again and again that the team wasn't long for Adelanto.

"We ignored them," David Martin said. "'They're not going to move. They're staying here forever,' at least, that was our opinion. 'That's just rumors -- we've got a contract through 2018. We're good for two more years.' Yeah, OK, maybe not."

The rumors took on added weight over the last year, coming nearly to a boiling point in January, when the Adelanto city council voted to renege on the Mavs' lease of the ballpark. Three days before the start of the season, the club got an injunction from a San Bernardino County judge allowing it to operate as normal until the two parties could come to a mediated agreement

Even without that turmoil, the future of High Desert was questionable. Kinston, a small city in North Carolina, had a written agreement last summer with the Mavs' parent club, the Texas Rangers, to bring baseball to that town in 2017. When an elaborate deal involving the relocation of two other teams fell through, some saw the end of Minor League Baseball in Adelanto as inevitable.

"Everyone's read the articles," Hemmen said. "It came out that the Rangers have had this mysterious lease with Kinston for the last couple years, and everyone's heard the rumblings about Fayetteville [North Carolina], and before I got here, there's been rumors. It's always been kind of out there. These people have always, for the last seven or eight years, known some uncertainty."

Like the Martins, Margaret May ignored that uncertainty as long as she could, not giving it a second thought until last season.

"There was too much friction going on between the city and the owners," she said. Finally, "Ben [Hemmen] called me the other morning, and he said, 'You're one of the first to find out.' Of course, I had a few tears to shed."

Next season, catching Cal League action will be more of a challenge for the Mays.

"I don't know what we're going to do, unless we ... I hate to say it, but maybe we'll go down to Rancho Cucamonga," she said.

The Martins are in the same situation, although neither is excited about driving the extra 40 minutes, and David added that he will miss the more intimate atmosphere at Heritage Field.

Before High Desert fans are forced to jump ship, though, there's more cheering to do. The Mavericks play their final two regular-season home games Wednesday and Thursday night, and they're playoff-bound as first-half South Division champions.

"We're hungry to get a ring," outfielder Scott Heineman said. "We heard that High Desert won a ring in its first year here, so it'd be cool to win one for the last year, too."

In brief

Quakes shake up honors: Rancho Cucamonga placed a circuit-high five players on the Cal League end-of-season All-Star team, led by Pitcher of the Year Josh Sborz and homer leader Johan Mieses. Lake Elsinore's Luis Urias is the MVP and Rookie of the Year. High Desert's Johnson is Manager of the Year.

Talking it out: Mike Gorrasi, the executive vice president of HWS Baseball, which operates the Nuts, told the Modesto Bee over the weekend that the club has entered into negotiations with the city for a new lease on John Thurman Field. The current 10-year lease expires at the end of this season, and Gorrasi expects a new agreement to be reached by some point in October.

Found his form: The Nuts' Ryan Castellani has lowered his ERA by almost a full point -- from 4.41 to 3.65 -- from July 25 to Aug. 26. This month, the Rockies' No. 13 prospect has allowed nine runs -- seven earned -- over 35 innings across five starts. He worked into the seventh or later in four of those outings, going into the eighth twice and finishing that frame once, and he posted back-to-back victories on Aug. 20 and Aug. 26.