Jonathan Dziomba’s run of bad luck started late in his 2009 season with the Grand Prairie AirHogs, an independent team in Texas. He was standing in the bullpen when a teammate lost control of a ball while warming up and nailed Dziomba in the face, breaking several bones and bringing his first season of pro baseball to an early end. Over the next two years, the Florence Freedom, in Kentucky, released the infielder because the league lowered its quotas on experienced players, and the Laredo Broncos let him go to free up room for the signing of Jose Canseco. “No one introduces me as the guy who’s played four years of professional baseball,” Dziomba laughs. “It’s, ‘This is the guy who got released for Canseco!’”
By mid-July 2011, he was back home in Buffalo, doing maintenance work for the highway department while on hiatus from his master’s degree in sports medicine. He was also calling every person he knew in independent ball who might give him a shot, the first step toward achieving his dream of cracking a minor-league roster. As he was leaving work one afternoon, Dziomba listened to a voice-mail message from a player coordinator he knew: “I’ve got a place for you to play.” It was the Lake County Fielders, an independent team based an hour north of Chicago, in Zion, Ill., and they needed him right away—as in, the next night. “I was ecstatic,” sighs Dziomba, now 25. “The best opportunity you could ask for is somewhere to have everyday playing time where you can put up good numbers and get your name out there.” He immediately circled back to work to tell his boss he had a chance to play pro ball again, then stuffed his belongings into his grandfather’s handed-down Oldsmobile Alero. He waited long enough to say goodbye to his dad before hitting the road, crashing overnight at his girlfriend’s aunt’s place near Cleveland.
When Dziomba reached the ballpark in Zion early the next afternoon, he wasn’t sure who to ask for. He looked for the clubhouse, but all he saw were a couple of trailers marooned on a patch of gravel, so he went back to the parking lot. Two more players pulled in beside him, also very confused. A woman walking by stopped to ask if they were “the new guys.” They were no-names, so why were they already famous? One player piped up: “Guys, I don’t know about you, but I’ve heard some crazy stuff about what’s going on.”
By the time the other players—almost all new and also bewildered—and the recently signed manager gathered in the trailer that turned out to be the clubhouse, it was obvious: They hadn’t been signed to join a team that needed an extra body or two midway through the season—they were the team. That night, the Fielders consisted of just nine position players and a pitcher, but they pulled out a 4–2 win. The group would come to think of themselves as “the second team.” There would eventually be a third.
Dziomba and his new teammates had just walked into one of the most bizarre, dysfunctional seasons in the history of professional baseball, a true story you’d have to tone down in order to craft a plausible screenplay. Players weren’t being paid, coaches were walking out in disgust and would-be fans were fed up—and the real turmoil was just getting started. By the end of the season, 73 players cycled through the roster and several people associated with the team had become convinced it was cursed. But before the whole thing turned into a nightmare, the Lake County Fielders started out as a perfect baseball fantasy.
A few years earlier, Zion’s director of economic development, Delaine Rogers, had approached Richard Ehrenreich, the owner of an independent team in nearby Schaumburg, to pitch the idea of bringing a team to Zion, pop. 24,500. Ehrenreich had met Kevin Costner through mutual friends and the silver-screen Ray Kinsella had agreed to be his minority partner in a baseball team; before long, Rogers was on local radio telling Lake County its very own “field of dreams” was about to rise out of the ground. “It was a good thing on paper and it got us all excited,” says Amos Ramon, a third baseman on that original team in 2010. Costner even showed up one night to flip on the lights and play along (the mayor: “Is this heaven?” Costner: “No, this is Zion.”), but the players were on the road at the time. Fielders Stadium wasn’t much—dugouts, a scoreboard, one trailer for players to change in and another for showers, porta-potties, concession tents and portable bleachers. The outfield was watched over by huge hydro towers rather than undulating cornstalks. But Zion was so thrilled to have a team of its own that no one cared.
How it all fell apart over the following year is laid out in court documents that read like a gossip column—Ehrenreich and the city sued each other over the dispute. Ehrenreich says he agreed to bankroll the team only because Zion promised to build the sort of gleaming minor-league ballpark that would make it a financial success. He claims officials concocted a “fake stadium scheme” that included a decoy fence erected around a phantom construction site. According to Ehrenreich’s lawsuit, Rogers was in a "close, personal relationship" with a developer involved in the deal (both parties denied there was anything romantic between them) and the shoddy temporary field drove away advertisers and ticket buyers. Zion claims the contract gave the city three years to build a proper stadium and everyone involved agreed on the temporary set-up in the meantime. The city alleges Ehrenreich skipped out on the rent, writing bad cheques from the bank account of his defunct Schaumburg team, which folded before the 2011 season. Each side blames the other for lies and broken promises. Meanwhile, a team of players looking for a second chance ended up as collateral damage.
The Fielders started the 2011 season on a six-week, 23,000-km road trip that took them from Yuma, Az. to Maui, back to Yuma, up to Edmonton and Calgary, again to Maui and then to Chico, Calif., before returning to Zion, with assurances a better ballpark would be ready when they got home. They adored their manager, former Blue Jays skipper Tim Johnson, and they were annihilating their opponents, racking up a 20-12 record. Away from the field, though, paycheques bounced and money for meals didn’t show up, and the players were fed up. “We ran out of balls,” says catcher Matt Redding. “Like, actual balls.” The only thing that kept them from walking out was the hope that the hometown crowds would fill up the coffers and everything would get better.
And, though the team returned to pretty much the same mangy ballpark in Zion, their home opener was the kind of idyllic small-town baseball scene Chevrolet commercials are made of. The Fielders drew huge crowds for their first few home games, with little kids running around under the bleachers and the scent of hot dogs wafting in the air. But nothing improved financially and player morale plummeted. A week after the home opener, Johnson finally had enough and quit, and the hitting coach, former Cub Pete LaCock, followed him out the door the next day. Then, on July 11, the GM traded or released almost the entire roster, saying the team wanted to start fresh with players who were happy to be there.
A few hours later, Dziomba and his new teammates started getting calls. Pitcher Nick Kennedy was halfway to Chicago from Lexington, Ky., where he went to college, when he thought to Google his new team. The first link revealed the Fielders were owned by Bull Durham himself, but the next was a news story about how the entire team had been turfed earlier that week, wiping the smile right off Kennedy’s face. The new players were thrilled to have a place to play, but things were clearly off. A few days in, the Fielders’ play-by-play radio announcer, exasperated about the money he was owed, quit live on the air at the end of a game. The shower trailer—located right next to the porta-potties—stopped working, and the players had to drive back to their host families’ houses to clean up. They wore their alternate uniforms on the road because there weren’t enough sizes in the away uniforms. And when Dziomba broke a couple bats, he discovered the team didn’t have any more. He called his dad, friends on other teams and equipment companies in an effort to scrounge some up. He even took to sidling up to opposing players. “Hey, man, you got an extra bat I can use?” he’d ask. “Can you help me out with some bats?”
The new players weren’t paid any more reliably than the team that started the season with Lake County. The first couple of guys to arrive at the bank could sometimes get their cheques cleared, but the rest would bounce. Then they discovered that if they cashed their cheques at Walmart, the store would go after the team owner rather than yanking the funds back from the players. When one Walmart location figured things out, the players skulked off to another one. “We felt kinda scummy doing it, but we were just trying to stay afloat,” Kennedy recalls. A lot of the players were fresh out of college and their bank accounts didn’t have much padding—rookies were supposed to make $600 a month, standard for independent ball—and they were going broke or living on handouts from their parents.
Beyond the financial problems, there were moments when Lake County just seemed hexed, like the day in July when two of the team’s vans smashed into each other in a toll booth and the third was side-swiped. “We can look back on it now and laugh because some of the stuff was completely ridiculous,” says Kelly Wells, the former promotions and media relations director. “You couldn’t make this stuff up. Somebody was against us.”
That’s not to say there weren’t some bright spots. During a road game against the Yuma Scorpions, Kennedy was on the mound fiddling with the rosin bag before his first pitch when he heard Jose Canseco’s name announced over the loud speaker. “I looked back and saw four of me standing at home plate. I’m probably as big as one of his thighs,” says Kennedy, now 24, his voice squeaking with the memory. “I’m like, ‘Oh my god, what am I gonna do?’” Four pitches later, the kid who’d been a pro ball player for all of 10 days got Major League Baseball’s original 40-40 man to chase strike three. Those were the moments, amid all the chaos, that “kept you sane,” says Kennedy.
The Fielders hit a cold streak at the end of July and lost all four of their games in Edmonton, but they had a great time doing it. They stayed in a cool little hotel downtown and revelled in a clubhouse that served up full meals after games. They played the Capitals in a beautiful ballpark before fired-up crowds and finished the series pretty much in love with the city.
And then: “The week from hell started,” Dziomba says.
The team was supposed to leave Edmonton early in the morning after their last game, but they got a call from their manager telling them that plans had changed and they should chill in their rooms for a bit. Dziomba, half-awake, packed up his bags and went back to sleep. Right before the noon check-out time, the players were called down to the lobby, where their manager told them the team couldn’t afford to fly them home. “They’re joking with us,” Dziomba remembers thinking. “Come on, stop playing with me.” At some point, it became clear they were going to take a bus home—it didn’t leave until midnight and there was no money to keep the hotel rooms for another day. To kill the next 12 hours in the cheapest way possible, the teammates wandered through a street fair, played basketball at the YMCA and endless card games back at the hotel lobby. Dziomba napped on a couch and ate the apples they were giving out for free at reception. The players found a mall nearby with an Irish pub that offered a free movie ticket with dinner—they went to see Horrible Bosses.
Finally, at midnight, they boarded a packed Greyhound bound for Winnipeg. Dziomba took one look at the tough-looking characters around him and curled up next to his buddy, a pitcher. “We’re literally holding hands snuggled up next to each other, like, ‘I don’t know what to do. If I fall asleep on you, you can fall asleep on me,’” he says. Around the time the baby a few rows back stopped wailing, the sky became light enough for a little kid to narrate, at top volume, every object that passed his window. There were a lot of horses.
It was Dziomba’s first visit to the Prairies, so he tried to make the best of it, mesmerized by the carpets of grain falling away in every direction. The Guess Who song “Running Back to Saskatoon” played on a loop in his head as they passed places he’d heard about in lyrics but never seen: “Red Deer, Terrace and a Medicine Hat…” He called his dad to make him guess where he was. At the bus station in Saskatoon, Dziomba swore he saw Burton Cummings sitting on a bench—he realized then that he might be losing his mind a little.
It took the Fielders more than 20 hours to reach Winnipeg; then a private charter bus drove them the 15-hour home stretch. They reached Zion in the early afternoon, by which point they’d missed the first game in a six-game series against the Calgary Vipers and had just a few hours to rest before the next one. The exhausted Fielders lost 8–5.
A few weeks earlier, the team had run low on baseballs—again—and sent an intern to Dick’s Sporting Goods for more. He picked up a few buckets of the best they had and the balls sat forgotten on a shelf until the fourth game against Calgary, when the Fielders ran out for real. That’s when they hauled out what Kennedy calls “four dozen of the worst baseballs in the history of the world.” One of Calgary’s players later wrote online that the Vipers killed themselves laughing when the Fielders handed over one of the balls for their starting pitcher—until, that is, they realized their opponents were serious. The balls emitted a weird, flat thunk when the bat connected and even laying down a bunt flattened them. Missiles that looked destined to soar over the centre-field fence dropped out of the sky like dead seagulls. “These things would not clear the infield if Albert Pujols hit one as hard as he could,” says Kennedy. “I wouldn’t give these baseballs to a little league team.” By the second inning, the pitchers’ hands were bleeding from the cheap seams and Calgary refused to continue; Lake County was forced to forfeit the game.
Five days later, on Aug. 10, the Fielders were supposed to start a series in Maui. Given the Edmonton debacle, they knew the Hawaii trip was almost certainly a mirage, but they held out hope—it was a perk they’d been looking forward to since they signed. They gathered at the field the day they were supposed to leave, but their manager was once again sent to tell them travel plans had fallen through. They forfeited all four of their games in Hawaii and the North American League finally booted the errant Fielders out with a statement saying they’d “eliminated themselves… by failing to appear for their scheduled series.” No longer associated with a league, some players immediately left for other teams or simply went home. The organization released most of the others.
Dziomba spent his birthday moping around his host family’s house, waiting for the official axe to fall. Even while his team had been struggling against Calgary, he had bounced back from his own slump and started putting up the kind of numbers he hoped could get him a shot at minor-league ball. “It really started to hit me hard: This is B.S., I’ve worked so hard to get here and I’m having a pretty good season—don’t take this away from me now,” he says. He made another round of desperate phone calls, trying to find a place to finish his season. Nothing panned out, so he resolved to stick it out a little longer in Zion, still hoping for a miracle and figuring that staying was better than going back to work on the highways around Buffalo. “I was crushed,” he says. “All I cared about was playing baseball. That’s all I wanted to do.”
It was the Border Battle that finally broke Dziomba. The Fielders had no league, professional opponents or money for travel and only the scraps of a baseball team, but management had one more indignity in store for the few remaining players. In a last-ditch attempt to draw people to the ballpark, the organization invented an interstate rivalry with the semi-pro Kenosha Kings from just up the road in Wisconsin. Lake County held open tryouts and added spare parts through front-office connections to cobble together the third roster of the summer. When Dziomba and Kennedy arrived at the ballpark for the first game against Kenosha, they found a grounds crew member who had played Div. II college ball and the team’s VP of sales, a former minor-leaguer in the Dodgers system, suiting up. “I’m the only pitcher left, so our skipper comes up to me and says, ‘Hey, you wanna start today?’” says Kennedy. “Yeah, sure, who else is gonna pitch?” He threw a complete game with 14 strikeouts, but the Fielders lost 1–0. Kennedy stayed for one more game.
After that, Dziomba was the only player left from the “second team” and Kenosha was destroying the tattered remains of the Fielders. Lake County’s roster was so fluid and random, in fact, that the pressbox would radio the dugout regularly for help identifying who was in the on-deck circle. The PA announcer was reduced to saying, “Up to bat, #5, Mr. Brown!”
Dziomba was heartbroken and humiliated. “You know it’s bad when the umpires are coming up to me in between pitches, going, ‘What are you still doing here? Aren’t you a professional baseball player?’” he says. He asked himself the same question, then called his dad and girlfriend. Come home, they told him. Finally he agreed, packing up the Alero once again. Before he left, he stopped by the Fielders offices, located in an outlet mall north of Chicago, to have breakfast with his manager and collect his final cheque. By early afternoon, it was obvious the money wasn’t coming, so Dziomba headed back to Buffalo. He hit Chicago at rush hour and ended up trapped in two hours of gridlock, howling along to his Grateful Dead CD while the guy in the next car stared at him in alarm. “I felt awful,” Dziomba says. “Everyone is still playing baseball and I’m going home. Someone doesn’t like me.”
When the Fielders’ season finally ended (they played another three weeks and about 19 games against Kenosha), the ragtag group of remaining players was released and the front-office staff agreed to take a little time off. Then, in November 2011, Ehrenreich sued the city for $10.7 million in damages and this past March, Zion counter-sued for $500,000 in unpaid rent and other costs—it was obvious the team was done. The city has since filed a motion to dismiss both lawsuits and a hearing is scheduled for early October. Costner, for his part, has distanced himself from the whole mess, refusing through his publicist to even discuss the goings-on in Lake County. The bleachers, trailers and press box have been hauled away; all that remains of Fielders Stadium is the abandoned field, dugouts, lights and scoreboard on the outskirts of Zion.
Today, the Lake County Fielders exist only in a pile of court documents that reflect the grand ambitions of their start. There are a handful of site plans depicting the retail stores, tidy rows of parking, restaurant and movie theatre Zion envisioned framing a perfect little jewel of a ballpark—it’s labelled Lake County Field of Dreams. “We were the greatest thing that could have been, you know?” says Brandon Newton, a second baseman from the team that started the 2011 season. “We could almost guarantee a championship back then. We were that confident and that good a team.”
The Fielders have become infamous in independent baseball and people who meet someone associated with the team often beg for details. The former staff members who live around Zion see each other regularly and trade stories, and the players stay in touch on Facebook and cross paths when their current teams meet. “They say that soldiers, after they go into battle, become like brothers,” says Kennedy. “I feel like that’s kind of how we are.”
After Dziomba went home, he spent time with his girlfriend and went to Boston with his dad and brother to see the Red Sox, who were in the midst of their own implosion. Eventually, all the craziness of the Fielders just melted away. He spent the fall and winter finishing his master’s degree, coaching at a baseball academy and working out like crazy while making another round of calls in hopes of finding a team. One Sunday, he got another voice-mail message: A coach with the Fort Worth Cats said he’d heard nothing but good things and wanted to sign him. “I was freaking out, I was doing somersaults all over the place,” says Dziomba, who went all the way to the United League championship with the Cats in 2012 and had a career year in hits and RBI. “All I asked for is someone to give me a chance.” This time, it’s for real.
This article originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine.