Summer league college baseball is a challenging landscape for generating consistency.
Similar to college sports, players graduate and move on every few years. Even when they stay, they are subject to the restrictions put on them by their college coaches; pitchers have inning and pitch limits and players are often recalled to their schools early for training.
Despite this, the Bethesda Big Train has managed to achieve remarkable success year after year in the DMV area’s Cal Ripken Sr. Collegiate Baseball League. Playing at Shirley Povich Field in Cabin John Park, just a short distance from Bethesda’s Westfield Montgomery mall, the Big Train has won 10 championships since the league’s 2005 inception, including six of the last seven.
The Big Train are looking to replicate their success this year as they are in the midst of the league’s playoffs. The team started off their run with a 16-4 thumping of the South County Braves in a play-in game, and then immediately followed it up with 11-2 and 10-3 drubbings of the division leading Gaithersburg Giants to advance to the league’s championship series.
“We have really gotten hot at the right moment[s],” Big Train founder and president Bruce Adams told MCM. “It does fire up the fans.”
Big Train founder and president Bruce Adams
Adams, who alongside business leader John Ourisman, brought the Big Train into existence in 1999, credits the team’s sustained success on the field to coaching.
“The most important [thing] is consistency in coaching,” Adams said. “Sal Colangelo was an assistant coach for the first six seasons, and then for the last 19 he’s been the head coach.”
Beyond just coaching the team, Adams holds Colangelo’s recruiting, a must-have skill in any collegiate sport, in high regard.
“Sal is a master recruiter,” Adams said. “It’s a simple formula. It’s just hard work.”
For the Big Train, the evidence of this has come in the caliber of players the team routinely attracts each and every summer. In a league populated by players from all levels of college baseball, the Big Train consistently rolls out rosters replete with Power Five talent, with players hailing from schools such as the Alabama, Maryland and Kentucky.
Colangelo, who both coaches and works in local education as the activities director at C.D. Hylton High School in Woodbridge, Va., described his recruiting process as a combination of consistency and developing relationships with schools.
“You know, I start August first every year,” Colangelo told MCM. “I get a lot of the same kids from the same universities… I try to just be an extension of the university’s program.”
While the Big Train’s on-field success is certainly something to behold, it is the community and fan base that the team has built that remains the defining feature of the team.
If one was to travel to games around the Cal Ripken Sr. League, most teams have a handful of fans at each game, largely consisting of the families and friends of the players on the team.
This is not the case in Bethesda. The Big Train routinely draws crowds of hundreds of people, dwarfing the attendance of every other team in the league. According to Adams, this is no accident.
“Only 30 percent of the people at a baseball game are content with pure baseball,” Adams said, referencing something he learned from legendary baseball owner Mike Veeck and minor league stadium builder Peter Kirk. “So I tell our interns and volunteers, we’re not putting on a baseball game; we’re putting on an event.”
According to Adams, the team’s dedication to creating a spectacle beyond baseball has also included a concerted effort to reach a more diverse audience, leading to some of the Big Train’s most highly attended games.
“Montgomery County is one of the world’s most diverse and welcoming communities,” Adams said. “I mean, in this divided, conflicted world we live in, people need places where they can go and experience community without all the divisiveness and conflict.”
Adams went on to tell MCM that some of the Big Train’s highest attended games this season included their Juneteenth Classic, a game with a tribute to Latin baseball and a 10 a.m. game that featured attractions for families with younger kids.
The result of this dedication has been the growth of a healthy fanbase, one that creates an environment that players want to play in. What it has also done, along with the team’s sustained on-field success, is make the Big Train the team to beat for other members of the Cal Ripken Sr. League.
“They understand the legacy,” Colangelo said of his players. “People come in and… they beat [us], it’s like [they] just won the World Series, right?”
The Big Train are sure to face the Southern Maryland Senators’ best in the upcoming championship series, starting 7 p.m. Wednesday.
Win or lose, one thing is certain: the Big Train is sure to pull into the station with another dominant performance on and off the field next season and into the future.
Featured image courtesy Esther Frances/Big Train
