How a team of MLB rejects achieved baseball immortality — as Bill Murray served the beers
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Christopher Kamrani and Stephen Nesbitt
Aug 30, 2022
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SALT LAKE CITY — Still sticky and soggy from the champagne shower in the clubhouse, they made the half-mile walk down Main Street from Derks Field to the watering hole that was as much a sanctuary as a place to get properly smashed. They filed in through the red metal door that opens into Duffy’s Tavern and into another world, one where this band of minor-league misfits, the 1987 Salt Lake Trappers, was bound for Cooperstown and baseball immortality.
Behind the bar, hocking whatever he damn pleased, was the funniest man on the planet: Bill Murray, the bartender. The “Caddyshack” star was 36, a comedian, Cubs fan, and co-owner of a Trappers franchise celebrating a Pioneer League championship like it was a World Series. Rightfully so. Thirty-five years on, that Trappers season is still etched into baseball’s record books. They started the regular season 3-3. They ended it with a 17-18 stretch. In between, for four weeks and five days, the Trappers did nothing but win. Their 29-game winning streak remains the longest in American pro baseball history.
There they all were at Duffy’s, howling at the moon on a late summer night in the shadow of the Wasatch Mountains. They vowed not to sleep a single wink. Players threw back bottles of beer and shots of the good stuff. Fans crooned with them as the jukebox blared. Team staffers smiled so wide their cheeks spasmed. And if you asked for a couple cold Budweisers, Murray was behind the bar handing you Miller Lites.
“You just took what he gave you,” pitcher John Groennert says.
“No one said a thing,” adds catcher Frank Colston.
It didn’t matter. Why would it?
It was Sept. 4, 1987, the last night of the summer that changed their lives: The undrafted cast-offs on the league’s only independent team making baseball history and then, to prove they were more than just those 29 wins in 33 days, taking down the Helena Brewers and their nine future big leaguers to win the Pioneer League title. It is a baseball story to its core, because only baseball can provide such obscure theater. It was, outfielder Anthony Blackmon says now, the highest of highs at the lowest level of pro ball.
“The Trappers turned the world upside down,” says Dave Baggott, who was the team’s 24-year-old assistant general manager at the time.
Odds are you’ve never heard of the Salt Lake Trappers, who existed from 1985 to 1992 in a place known to worship the hardwood rather than the diamond. You can still find them at Duffy’s, the unassuming tavern in downtown Salt Lake City that once sponsored the Trappers. In one corner of the bar, an encased shrine dedicated to the Trappers features signed balls and a timeworn collage of newspaper clippings, baseball cards and photos of old Derks Field. There’s an image of Murray in his No. 29 Trappers jersey behind the bar. Close your eyes and you can feel the celebration in full swing, sunrise approaching and the bar still filled to the brim as the 1987 Trappers refused to let that summer end.
They were baseball rejects, outcasts, former college players schlepping their bags, bats and baseball dreams to Salt Lake City hoping for one last look from scouts. Those scouts had already had their say. Ken Griffey Jr. and then 1,261 others had been selected in the MLB Draft earlier in the summer of 1987. None of the Trappers were taken. So they came here, from California and Connecticut and Indiana and Illinois, to show scouts just how wrong they were.
“We referred to them as the Dirty Two Dozen. The castaways. The ne’er-do-wells,” Baggott says. “They all shared a common bond: Somebody told you that you weren’t good enough.”
A few games into the season — five weeks before he’d throw the final strike of the Trappers’ record-setting 28th win in a row — Groennert was at a pizza joint back home in New Baden, Ill., when Van Schley, the Trappers’ part-owner and player personnel director, phoned asking if he could still pitch. The Trappers needed another arm. Colston said he knew a guy; he had played with and against Groennert in high school. The next day, Groennert caught a flight to Utah. He walked into the home clubhouse at Derks Field and found a room full of guys like him. “We were forgotten,” he says now. “We got looked over.”
They called themselves “Trapper Family.” They took the field for batting practice wearing Duffy’s Tavern T-shirts and a chip on their shoulders. They were the Bad News Bears all grown up, demolishing Dodgers draftees by day and then hitting Duffy’s for a few beers before curfew.
“We had a chemistry that just said, ‘We don’t give a damn. Whatever we do, we’re going to do it together,’” says Blackmon, who had gone undrafted out of Oklahoma State after responding to racist taunts from fans in Starkville, Miss., by mooning them. He remembers the call from Schley, offering him a baseball lifeline: “Bill Murray wants you to play here.” (You don’t forget a line like that.) So, Blackmon went. Like the rest of the Trappers, he had nowhere else to go.
The colorful cast of characters on that Trappers team has surprising name recognition today. Perhaps you’ve never heard of first baseman Matt Huff, who hit .417 to win the league batting title, or closer Tim Peters, who owned the ninth inning. But there was a sizable ownership group that included Arte Moreno (the Angels’ owner, for now) and the Murray brothers, Bill and older brother Brian. There was assistant coach Barry Moss, who went on to manage in the minors, scout for the Dodgers and act in “The Natural” and “Moneyball.” And there was pitcher John Savage, now UCLA baseball’s head coach.
The man at the top step of the dugout was first-year manager Jim Gilligan. He wore No. 29, a number that matched the record win streak so perfectly he’d keep it throughout his almost four decades managing at Lamar University.
Gilligan swears the streak started the morning Moss talked him into playing a round of golf. See, the Trappers won that night, so the two of them golfed again the next day, and the Trappers triumphed again. A time-sucking superstition set in. Gilligan and Moss vowed to play a round each day until the team lost, just to be safe. They played, rain or shine, on courses in Pocatello, Idaho; in Great Falls, Mont., in Medicine Hat, Alberta. One wet morning in Pocatello, they pulled into a golf course parking lot, unloaded their clubs and sloshed through puddles and into the clubhouse.
“We need golf for two,” Gilligan said.
“Boy, this rain …” the attendant replied.
“Doesn’t matter,” Gilligan snapped. “We’re playing. If we have to cut a hole in the fence, we’ll do it. You’ve got to understand. We’ve got something going.”
Gilligan and Moss played 18 holes in a downpour, one holding the umbrella while the other shot. Later, Schley mentioned to Gilligan that he’d driven by the golf course that morning and seen two nuts playing a round in the rain.
“It was us,” Gilligan says, laughing. “I’m having a four-hour staff meeting every day playing golf. Then we go to the ballpark and win a ballgame, get up and do it all over again — for a month. That was life.”
The ownership group of the Trappers consisted of 16 men and one Bill Murray. Murray had a 5 percent stake in the franchise, but when he showed up unannounced at Derks Field, as he often did, he invested 100 percent of himself. During the summer of 1987, Trappers staffers would often have an hour’s notice to plan for Murray’s arrival. Sometimes, no time at all. “Bill’s here,” became a saying around the team.
Though Murray has been accused of inappropriate behavior in the years since, the team saw his light-hearted side. Murray ran the stadium staircases, sat in any empty seat he saw and heckled umpires standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Trappers fans. He’d beg Gilligan to take batting practice before games until the players finally stood back and gave him a few swings.
“He’d be joking and being his typical self that you see on TV and in the movies,” Groennert says. “It’d just make you laugh (to) sit back and watch him and look at how he communicated with people.”
Those in the press box would often see the door fling open and Murray jokingly strut around the room before moving on to his personal tour of the ballpark. Once, Murray sprinted in, grabbed the microphone from public-address announcer Mike Runge and said, in very Bill Murray fashion, “HELLO, DERKS FIELD! HOW YOU DOIN’?”
“When Bill showed up, you’d hear the buzz in the stadium,” said Glenn Seninger, then a public-relations intern for the Trappers.
Over time, Murray developed a close friendship with head groundskeeper Tommy Hassett, who was a ringer for Carl Spackler from “Caddyshack,” the film that launched Murray’s career into another stratosphere and, coincidentally, was released exactly seven years before the Trappers broke the win-streak record July 25, 1987. Hassett was obsessed with pristine grass and often curmudgeonly. (“He slept in the same room as the lawnmower,” Seninger says.)
One day that season, Trappers staffer Cathy Condas was sent to the airport to pick up Murray. When she arrived, she found Murray and singer Huey Lewis waiting for her at the curb. They had been on the same flight from San Francisco to Salt Lake City, where Huey Lewis and the News were set to play the Salt Palace, and Murray talked Lewis into singing the national anthem at Derks Field.
So, Murray and Lewis climbed into Condas’ small Toyota Celica.
“Huey Lewis coached first. Bill was the ball boy. It was kind of surreal,” Colston said. “It lit up the stadium. When (fans) saw Bill walk the balls out to the umpire, they went crazy.”
The next night, the Trappers ran up a big lead and got out of the ballpark in time to hit the concert. Murray drove the Trappers batboys. Backstage, remembers batboy Ryan Bagshaw, who was 12, “There was more alcohol than I’d seen in my life.” (He didn’t drink any.) The crowd went berserk when Murray went on stage, dancing along to the music, and then he waved the Trappers to join him for the last song of the night, the final encore: “Back in Time.”
Afterward, Murray drove the batboys to Duffy’s Tavern. He sat them at the end of the bar and told the bartender, “These kids need a Coke and something to eat.” They had come to the right place. Duffy’s is home to The Waldo Special — a pastrami, ham and cheese sandwich that Trappers GM Steve Pearson calls “the best bar sandwich ever” — and The Streaker: a hot dog with nothing on it.
The Trappers had just run their winning streak to 20 and broken the Pioneer League record for consecutive wins when Pearson answered the phone ringing in the Derks Field press box, listened for a few seconds and then let out a loud, “What?!” It was Ross Newhan from the Los Angeles Times. Newhan said he wanted to write about the Trappers inching closer to the record for longest winning streak in pro ball: 27 games, set by the Corsicana Oil Citys of the Texas League in 1902 and matched by the Baltimore Orioles of the International League in 1921.
“That’s when it hit us,” Seninger says.
To that point, little about the Trapper life had been glamorous. It was a grind. Every road game was in another state or province — “They had to go to Medicine Hat, dude. In Alberta, Canada,” Seninger says — and they bused everywhere. It was the stuff of baseball movie montages. Shoddy air conditioning. A blown clutch. Half-awake bus drivers. The only Trappers resting comfortably on 16-hour bus rides along Interstate 15 through Idaho, Montana and into Alberta were those small enough to climb into the overhead luggage rack and sleep among the bags: the batboys and 5-foot-7 shortstop Jim Ferguson.
“A lot different than any family vacation I’d gone on,” says batboy Ryan Bagshaw, who once did a local TV interview from the luggage rack.
“They were kings to us,” adds Andy Iacona, who was 11 at the time and the only batboy whose last name wasn’t Bagshaw (Ryan, Scott and Lance).
At home in Salt Lake City, the Trappers players stayed four to a room at the Shilo Inn and spent their $500 monthly salaries on nightcaps at Duffy’s. Before games at Derks Field, which was vacated when the Triple-A Salt Lake Gulls crashed financially and moved to Calgary in 1984, the batboys would walk across the street to 7-Eleven to pick up Big Gulps, cigarettes and chewing tobacco for the players, and they’d put a case of beer on ice for the umpires and coaches. No one questioned the legality of this.
The greatest threat to the Trappers win streak, it turns out, was the players’ nightly curfew. Colston, the bad-boy catcher nicknamed Shady, was known for two things: barreling baseballs and breaking curfew. “He broke curfew practically every night,” Gilligan says, “it was just a matter of how many times I caught him.” The fines increased with each infraction.
One night, Gilligan headed out late to meet Trappers part-owner Steve Butterfield at The Zephyr Club downtown. Gilligan walked through the front door and immediately saw Colston. Busted. “Well, Shady, it’s costing you 500 bucks,” Gilligan said, “you might as well get your money’s worth.” So, Colston joined them for a round of drinks, which turned into two and then three. Gilligan recalls it was after hours at the Zephyr, door locked, club emptied except for two tables: the three men talking baseball at one, and Mick Fleetwood chatting with a woman at the other.
“Hey, Mick,” Gilligan hollered across the room, “what did the Trappers do tonight?”
Fleetwood shot back a confused smile.
“They won,” Gilligan said. “Five to three.”
The next day, Colston wasn’t in the Trappers starting lineup. Wasn’t even listed on the lineup card. He asked Gilligan what was going on. “Shit,” Gilligan said, “you were out until 3 a.m.” Colston sputtered, “But I was with you!” Curfew was curfew. Gilligan told Colston he’d couldn’t force him to be back to the hotel on time, so instead he’d bench him every fourth game. This bothered Colston, a .397 hitter, and it bothered the pitchers too: backup Ed Citronelli was a hell of a hitter (“He’s as strong as a garlic milkshake,” Gilligan once said. “He’s got muscles in his hair”), but he couldn’t catch like Colston, and runners took advantage of his arm. Colston sat that game. At the end of the night, he walked into Gilligan’s office.
“Tell you what,” Colston said, “this is my major leagues. This streak is more important to me than anything. After we break the record, you can cut me. I promise I’ll be in by curfew.”
And, after that, he was.
A month-long winning streak won’t happen without a few minor miracles along the way, and the Trappers had their share. There was Jon Beuder stealing home for the tying run in the ninth inning (win No. 11). There was designated hitter Adam Casillas pitching — poorly, but winningly — for the shorthanded Trappers in a 14-12 barnburner over Idaho Falls (No. 4). There were extra-inning escapes against Idaho Falls (No. 3) and Pocatello (No. 21), and the time Medicine Hat’s Willy Fillard was called out for missing first base on a 10th-inning double (No. 17).
But that was nothing compared July 20, 1987, in Pocatello, as the Trappers chased win No. 23. The Giants had taken an early lead and, as rain clouds darkened over the diamond, added on with a five-run sixth inning to take a 9-3 lead. The Trappers trotted off the field, wind whipping and weather worsening, and readied the lumber. So long as the umpires didn’t call off the game, they had a chance. “I remember the silence in the dugout was deafening,” Colston said. “Nobody was panicking. No one was angry. No one was sweating.”
Then came one of the most epic self-inflicted jinxes in baseball history.
“The streak is over!” the Pocatello public-address announcer told the crowd, and then, with Giants manager Rafael Landestoy waving furiously from the home dugout for him to shut up, the announcer said it again: “The streak is over!”
As soon as he said it, the raindrops slowed.
“A beam of light came out,” says Trappers play-by-play broadcaster Randy Kerdoon, “and the clouds went away.”
“A rainbow came out,” Groennert says.
“Over our dugout,” Colston swears, “was a double rainbow.”
To win as the Trappers did that summer, you must embrace some mysticism. Ferguson and Colston crushed two-run homers, Citronelli hit a three-run shot, and by the end of their eight-run seventh inning the Trappers were in front for good.
“That’s when you knew the gods were with you,” Kerdoon says. “It was as if the sky parted, the rains came in and the Almighty himself was saying, ‘Pardon me, I believe I have a different opinion.’”
After the game, a Trappers pitcher snuck into the press box and stole the cassette tape of the Pocatello broadcast before boarding the Trappers team bus.
“We listened to it for about 14 hours on the way home,” Colston says, roaring with laughter. “We just kept taking it out and putting it back in. Oh, goodness gracious. I don’t want to get all God squad, but it seemed like there were some times where we had some special help.”
As the Trappers set their sights on the win-streak record, the attention of the baseball world turned to Salt Lake City. The two phone lines in the press box rang constantly. Scalpers started charging as much as $400 for individual tickets. Jerseys went for $90 a pop. Reporters from across the country — and a few from Japan, in town to write about Trappers pitchers Yasuhiro Hiyama and Koichi Ikeue — flocked to Derks Field.
“We were out in the batting cage, and I told a bunch of (the reporters), ‘You know, guys. I appreciate you being here. This is a situation you will never see again,’” Gilligan recalls. “They asked why that was. I said, ‘You guys are from all over the country, but you’re pulling for one team. Not one of you is pulling against the Trappers. You want us to win. That’s why you’re here. There’s a bunch of undrafted wannabees. That’s your story.’”
These wannabes were no slouches — they batted .320 as a team that season and averaged more than nine runs per game during the streak — and they thundered past Idaho Falls, 14-4, for win No. 26, setting up their shot at baseball’s consecutive-wins record. The next day, for all of the hoopla, the Trappers left no doubt: Beuder slugged a first-inning grand slam, and the Trappers coasted to a record-tying 7-2 win against Pocatello.
They all returned to Derks Field the following night for a date with destiny. Ten thousand fans crammed into the ballpark, and thousands more tried. They watched from rooftops and from trees beyond the outfield wall. “It was like being a rock band,” Kerdoon says. “It reminded me of Wrigley Field. The crazy part is, I had my Vin Scully moment where I would say, ‘Out there in left-center field is a group of people watching,’ and they would start waving at me.”
Before the game, the jittery Trappers huddled in the clubhouse with Max Patkin, the clown prince of baseball, who had been booked to perform at Derks Field on July 25, 1987, long before that Saturday night was historically important. Patkin regaled the players with stories of drinking beers with Babe Ruth, and that jogged loose a thought that helped calm the players’ nerves: Win or lose, they’d wind up at Duffy’s afterward anyway.
It was not all smooth sailing that night. The starter, Ikeue, lasted only four outs before departing with the bases loaded in the second inning. In came Groennert, the pitcher plucked from a pizza joint, to hold the Giants at bay until the Trappers lineup found its footing. Groennert never gave the baseball back to Gilligan. Just like their high-school days in Illinois, Colston carried the offense with six RBIs, and Groennert was in control over the final 7 2/3 innings. The 28th consecutive win was punctuated by a two-strike Groennert pitch that froze the final Pocatello hitter, a got-’em-looking strike three that has stood the test of time in baseball’s record books.
That was the Trappers’ first of two champagne celebrations that season, and at the center of this one was Max Patkin, thanking the Trappers for the greatest night of his career.
“I said to him, ‘Max, better than drinking beers with the Babe?’” Colston recalls. “He said, ‘Frank, you could do that almost every night. What happened tonight is a once-in-a-lifetime deal.’”
On the last Saturday in July 2022, the Trapper Family filled Frank’s Corner Kitchen — Colston’s bar in Beckemeyer, Ill. — to celebrate the 35th anniversary of their win streak that still stands above all the rest. There were a dozen of them there, circling tables and telling the stories they all have told hundreds of times, cutting each other off to help fill gaps in their memories.
For most of the Trappers, the summer of 1987 was the highlight of their baseball careers. Thirteen of them went on to sign pro contracts with MLB affiliates, but only the late Casillas, who reached Triple A, played past the lower levels of the minors. The players’ names were in the New York Times, in Sporting News, in a two-page spread in Sports Illustrated under the headline: STREAK CITY. The Trappers set the record and then pushed the win streak to 29 games before losing, 7-5, on the road in Billings, Mont., and beginning to fade into obscurity, a fascinating footnote in baseball history.
“You say to yourself, ‘I was partying with Huey Lewis and the News in the dugout? And Bill Murray? Did that all really happen?’” Seninger says. “It comes so fast, and then it’s gone.”
The night the Trappers broke the record in 1987, three words flashed on the scoreboard at Derks Field: TRAPPED IN HISTORY. That’s still how it feels, Colston says. His bat from that 28th consecutive win was one of the artifacts shipped to the Baseball Hall of Fame 35 years ago, along with Groennert’s cap, a few game programs, a baseball signed by all the Trappers and Gilligan’s jersey — No. 29, to match the new record. (Baggott claims to have absconded with Gilligan’s game-worn jersey, swapping it late that night with a jersey in storage. “Don’t tell Gilligan,” Baggott says, “He will call me up and curse me out.”)
The Trappers exhibit is not currently on display in Cooperstown, but, over the years, the Trappers have stopped in to see it, taking their kids along to lend proof to their tall tales. When Kerdoon walked up to the ticket window, he asked, “Do you have to pay if you’re in the Hall of Fame?” The woman behind the window squinted back at him: “Are you in the Hall of Fame?” Kerdoon got in for free. When the broadcaster saw his signature on the Trappers ball, suspended midair by fishing line, he thought, My ego is now filled for the rest of my life.
“This was a chance for these kids to be remembered for eternity,” Baggott says, “and here we are, 35 years later, talking about it. It’s remarkable.”
A decade ago, the Triple-A Salt Lake Bees invited the 1987 Trappers back to town for a 25th-anniversary blowout, a weekend that included batting practice on the field with Murray. The players hope to hold reunions more frequently in the future. They’re in their 50s and 60s now. At Colston’s bar last month, they raised a glass to the three from the Trapper Family who have died: Ferguson, Casillas and Mark Phibbs, who didn’t play baseball but ran Duffy’s Tavern.
Colston can hardly mention Ferguson without choking up. They were close, from the day they met in Salt Lake City to the day Ferguson died. “Four years ago today,” Colston says, because the news brought him to his knees Aug. 2, 2018, and also because Ferguson’s passing seemed to, in some way Colston can’t quite explain, rekindle interest in the Trappers story. In the months after Ferguson’s funeral, Larry Dierker — the former MLB manager — started research on a still-in-progress book on the Trappers. Then came a documentary, due to be released in 2023.
Then came a screenplay. Colston had always wanted to write one about the 1987 Trappers, even took a screenwriting class in the 1990s before setting the idea aside. Over the years, Ferguson constantly reminded him, “Write the story, write the story, write the story.” After losing Ferguson, Colston started driving down to a local baseball field to write. In four months, he had a finished script. Whether or not it ever turns into anything more than a stack of papers, Colston knows he lived a Hollywood season in Salt Lake City, and he knows he did right by his friend and by the rest of the Trappers Family gathered in his bar 35 years later.
“When everyone was here, you could just feel how grateful everyone was,” Colston says. “Almost like that movie ‘A League of Their Own’ when the elderly women get together at the end. You can just see their hearts open up. It’s kind of like that with us. I know my heart opened up. I shed some very happy tears, and there was also some mourning. It had it all.
“I don’t know what to say, other than it’s one big wonderful family.”
There’s a framed photo at Frank’s Corner Kitchen, some 1,400 miles from Salt Lake City, of Colston, Ferguson, Todd Noonan and Bill Murray in the champagne-soaked afterglow of the Trappers championship — after the players had dunked Murray in the clubhouse showers, before they all headed to Duffy’s. Every so often, a stranger will stroll in and ask about the photo: “Is that … Bill Murray?” Colston will smile, and then the stories start tumbling out. His dream, he’ll tell the stranger, is to have Bill Murray tending bar for a shift at his place in Beckemeyer: holding court, handing out Millers, bringing back the magic of Duffy’s and the summer of 1987.
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