Team Owner Darin Williams Featured in Post-Star

For the love of the game

Darin Williams risked everything to save baseball in Glens Falls. Can he pull it off?

By TIM McMANUS
tmcmanus@poststar.com
Sunday, August 3, 2008 1:20 AM EDT

GLENS FALLS - Call Darin Williams crazy. Go ahead, everyone else does.

Tell him he's nuts to mortgage his house, to throw his retirement savings at a baseball team too few people go see play. Tell him he's insane to give the team a loan to keep it afloat. Stop him before he does it again.

Tell him to think of his kids. Tell him he can't keep up the 20-hour days forever, that the next time his back goes out, it might be for good.

Tell him to get out before it's too late -- as if it isn't already. Tell him to work a few more years at the prison and then drift into retirement.

Tell him saving baseball in this city is a fool's errand, or at the least, a rich man's.

And he isn't either.

Tell Darin Williams he's crazy. Go ahead. He's heard it before.

"This is my big gamble. Take it or lose it," he says. "It's like you're in a Texas Hold 'Em tournament and you've got that big pile in front of you. I'm all in."

But does he have a winning hand?

On the field, the Glens Falls Golden Eagles are an unmitigated success. No team in the New York Collegiate Baseball League has won more games since Williams bought them two years ago. This weekend, they're playing in the Eastern Division playoffs.

Off the field, the books are a sea of red ink. The franchise lost $60,000 last year and is on track to lose at least a quarter of that this year.

Still, Williams toils on, banking that the city will warm to the team, that the sponsors will pull out their checkbooks, that the financial situation will turn around.

If you must, go ahead, call Darin Williams crazy. But he's not folding that easy.

- -

Before he threw his life into the Golden Eagles, Darin Williams was a guy with a "For Rent" sign.

That's how this all started, in 2004, with a sign in an apartment window. He owned a property on Bay Street, a one-time flop house he bought as an investment and to make sure the previous tenants never again disturbed his family.

He made a decent living as a sergeant at Great Meadow Correctional Facility, dabbled as a landlord, and was steam rolling to retirement before 50.

Then he got a call about that sign: would he be willing to loan his apartment to an assistant coach from the town's new summer baseball team?

Sure, he said, on one condition: if my son can be the bat boy.

By the start of the second season, he and his wife, Sheri, were hosting two players in their home. By the start of the third, Sheri coordinated the host-family program and Williams was the official scorekeeper.

By the end of the third, the whispers started. Roger Ames was shopping the team. All options were on the table, including moving the team.

Glens Falls was headed for another baseball breakup, the way it had with the Tigers, the White Sox and the Lumberjacks. Different leagues, different times, same story.

His solution was the same as when the flop house came up for sale. Buy it.

"I wanted to keep baseball here," he says. "So for me it was a no-brainer."

On the surface, it hardly seemed that way. Then 41, with two children not even in high school, he was five years away from retirement eligibility under the corrections system. He had no business experience.

The league itself isn't exactly a bastion of stability: Glens Falls, Saratoga, Bennington and Niagara have all entered the 14-team league in the past five years.

"In this league, in this town, you have to be kind of (crazy) to try to keep this baseball team here ..." says Jeremy Winig, who has spent the last two summers volunteering with the club and handling as many of the day-to-day operations as anyone outside the Williams family. "Most people wouldn't put themselves in this situation, putting his whole family on the line. You've got to respect what he's doing, even if you wouldn't do it yourself."

Out of respect to the previous owner, Williams won't say what he paid. But the price tag was more than the $25,000 it takes to buy into the league from scratch.

"What I'm looking at is this. If I don't have something to do after I retire I'm going to go crazy," Darin says.

But why this? Why here?

He grew up big and fast in Elizabethtown and wore the bull's-eye that comes with being a town's biggest kid. He had an impish side, the kind of guy who'd later string a dead bear over the high school goalposts as a joke, and a side that angered quicker than he liked.

He spent summers in Fort Edward with family. He'd borrow a 10-speed and ride the days away. Nights he pedaled to East Field to watch minor-league baseball.

"When I was younger, I got blamed for a lot of things," Darin says. "I used to sit here and just watch. Just the idea of getting out and enjoying myself, no pressures."

He sees himself in the kids at the ballpark.

"Just the idea of seeing the kids, the bright faces after getting an autograph signed or catching that foul ball. And just seeing, my son, it's satisfying," Darin says.

And then there's that word: satisfying. It's a word he doesn't get to use at his day job, where as a grievance sergeant he mediates an endless chain of griping prisoners. He never went to college and has toiled in prisons since his early 20s.

"All we see is the bad part of society," he says. "If you're a carpenter, you build a house, you can go back and look at what you've built. What do we do? We keep human beings from other human beings. What is your sense of accomplishment?"

Is this team then about building something tangible? About building something a whole city can be proud of? About leaving a legacy?

"This is my chance, my chance to do something more," he says.

- -

Jonathan White, an outfielder for the Golden Eagles, walked up to Darin Williams, held out the shriveled hot dog and shook his head as if to say, "Can you believe this?"

No, Williams couldn't, and for the first time this night, he's mad. But hold that thought for a minute.

It's been a perfect late July night for baseball at Shuttleworth Park in Amsterdam, and Williams has remained stoic through a 5-4 loss.

In many ways, the baseball experience at Amsterdam is the benchmark Williams hopes to create in Glens Falls. The park is small and intimate. Down the right-field line, fans enjoy the Coors Light beer deck. High behind home plate, pizzas get delivered to the air-conditioned skybox where televisions are turned to the Yankees game.

Maybe more important is the ubiquitous presence of local businesses. The outfield wall is plastered with advertisements. Between every inning, there's some promotion. Businesses hawk everything from shipping via UPS, to Ford Trucks to dogs at the SPCA.

It's the kind of operation you can run when you have a wealthy owner, a full-time general manager and stadium crew that on this night seems to be a couple dozen.

By comparison, the Eagles have Williams, his wife, Winig and two other interns. A cast of volunteers works the concession stand and the gate, and Williams picks up the slack.

Amsterdam is second in the league in attendance, averaging more than 1,200. In the cozy park it feels like more.

Glens Falls, third in attendance, averages a little less than half of that. In the cavernous, 8,000-seat East Field, entire sections of rickety bleachers remain empty.

Amsterdam draws big families and the businesses who pony up for a night out. Glens Falls draws hardcore baseball fans, the kind more likely to keep score than drop a 20 at the concession stand (which doesn't offer beer anyway).

You can guess which field draws more revenue.

Despite the disadvantages in revenue, the Eagles have an operating budget that exceeds $100,000, putting them near the high end of the league.

Some of that is borne of necessity. While many teams in the Western Division play on rent-free school fields, East Field rents at $750 per game, though the Eagles get a slight break. Field rental costs are the biggest line in the budget.

But there's also a large part of the budget that's discretionary. The second-largest item is travel. With soaring gas prices, many teams have cut back to sending their teams on road trips in personal cars. The Golden Eagles go everywhere by coach bus.

"I could save money and go without the bus," Williams says. "But how would I feel if one of these kids got in accident? If I had to call someone's parents ... how could I sleep at night? How I could tell someone's parents that something happened because I didn't want to spend the money?"

Which brings us, finally, to the hot dog.

At the start of the season, the NYCBL issued a noble mandate. At the end of the game, the league asked if the home team could feed both teams, not just itself.

And so Williams cooked pulled pork, bought pizzas, paid restaurants to cook lasagna. He made real meals, the kind athletes need. But all too frequently, other clubs reneged, offering the concession stand's leftovers.

That's the case on this night. While the Mohawks eat real food, they've offered the Eagles only the overdone, limp hot dogs White shows to Williams.

Seething as they pile into their SUV, Sheri says, "It makes me want to not feed them when they come."

But the threat is toothless. In the next few weeks, they plan several elaborate meals.

"If I can't do this the right way, I won't do it all," Darin says.

John Mayotte, who's coached the team since its inception and has been with both professional and summer teams, including the prestigious Cape Cod League, concurs.

"He's made a sincere commitment to do things the right way," he says. "It puts a greater demand on him and Sheri. You can always run into people who try to take shortcuts. I know it's extremely difficult financially to do those things. But in the long run, it's the right way and it will separate him from the pack."

But how much longer can he do it? After the team's $60,000 loss last season, he seeded the team with a capital loan against his retirement savings. Because the team is swimming in red, many of the niceties are out-of-pocket expenses.

"I'd be lying if I said (quitting) hasn't crossed my mind," Sheri said. "He will continue going and going. He's such a giver he will do everything he can for that team and pull money out of some place to maintain. Do I ever see myself, times I wanted to say (quit) to him? Yes. Would I ever? No. Because his love is there."

Though he's far from throwing in the towel, Williams concedes that if help doesn't come from somewhere -- more fan support, renovations of East Field -- he can't write checks ad infinitum.

"I'm coming pretty close to being done," he says.

- -

If ever baseball were to thrive again in this town, it'd look much like this early July night. Aside from a passing shower, the night is cool and slow. The summer, in all its pregnant possibility, stretches lazily ahead. Autumn feels a long ways off, and the crowd at East Field senses the evening is special.

On the mound, a left-handed whiz kid named Shane Davis, a player Williams lives with and cares enough to call his "summer son," carries a no-hitter through eight innings.

Williams, the man most responsible for it all, hasn't seen a pitch. He's hovered over a grill in a sweaty, smokey shack tacked on to the concession stand.

The cook didn't show, so Williams flips burgers while others enjoy the game.

It's a typical day. On days with home games, he's up before 6 a.m. to make roll call at Great Meadows. He's out of there by 3 p.m, and to the park where he'll be awake well past midnight, until the last sack of laundry has been dropped at the cleaners.

He's cooked, installed phone lines, credit card machines, repaired broken water pipes, painted bleachers; whatever it takes.

Williams has made business mistakes -- things like buying 13,000 custom programs his opening year. Nine-thousand sit unsold in boxes in an East Field office. But no one questions his work ethic.

Those who work with him, however, wish he'd delegate more. A disc in his back slipped out last season. While his team played in the NYCBL championship series, Williams laid in Glens Falls Hospital. He was bedridden again for four days last week.

"He's not afraid to try something. He's a working guy," says Phil Tucker, chairman of the Glens Falls Area Baseball Hall of Fame and member of the city's baseball booster club. "But I thought I'd be able to do more for him this year. He needs a real GM, real staff, to start delegating responsibility. I think he's trying to take on to much himself."

It's a fear those who care about him echo.

"If you've got one person trying to do everything, it doesn't work out," says Mayotte, who considers the Williams family close personal friends.

Williams will never get rich from this team. But if he can break even, travel to see his ex-ballplayers play professionally, and give something back to the community, he says, he'll be happy.

To quit would be to let down the city, the kids, the players. He won't, he can't, consider failing.

"I've put so many hours, so many days, and now working on years of my life to this," he says. "(Failure), would be like saying you just spent those years on nothing."

Go ahead, call Darin Williams crazy, if you still think so. Tell him he's nuts.

See if he cares.