In the summer of 1990, my best friend, Ashley Pace, and I worked for the rookie-league Burlington Indians in Burlington, North Carolina. I’d just graduated high school, and Ashley was a rising senior. They were some of the greatest jobs we’ve ever had.
That’s me on the left. Ashley’s on the right.
But for the last thirty years, we’ve been haunted by this question: Did Ashley, the team's batboy, accidentally cost one player his professional baseball career? Not long after Ashley got busted running food for the player, against the manager’s rules, the player was sent down to the Gulf Coast League, and we never saw or heard from him again. He never even played another season of professional baseball.
In our podcast, we take a trip down memory lane with players and staff from that great Burlington team. And great is an understatement. Estimates show that only one minor-leaguer out of ten will make it to the majors. For the ballplayers arriving in Burlington in any given summer, that means three of them might make it. From the 1990 Burlington Indians, though, seven did. You'll definitely recognize some of them. The name Jim Thome ring a bell?
The Mysterious and Unbelievable Case of the Batboy and the Hot Dogs is full of all the things that you've always loved about the minor leagues. In the investigative style of all the great true-crime podcasts, but with all the hijinks of a movie like Bull Durham, it's also a way for Ashley and me to finally answer that decades-old question. Was it really the batboy, in the dugout corridor, with the hot dogs?
The Mysterious and Unbelievable Case of the Batboy and the Hot Dogs is available wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, and Google.
Here’s what one reviewer had to say about it:
Here we are, decades later, back at the scene of the crime.
Be sure to also check out the podcast over on Instagram.
And here they are, the 1990 Burlington Indians. That’s Thome on the front row, far right.
