Tri-State Baseball League still offering “good ole country baseball” almost 100 years later

Copyright Peter Wallace Register-Citizen 6/28/23

NORTHWEST CORNER – The Bethlehem Plowboys baseball team marks its 100th anniversary this summer in a celebration on its field behind the Bethlehem firehouse on August 26. Some 12 years after the team’s formation, the Plowboys became one of the original members of what became the Tri-State Baseball League.

Thomaston legend Gene “Sleepy” McMahon, once Thomaston’s mayor and always its foremost sports fan up to the day he died, reveled in the Plowboy team for which his son, Bob, played for many years. “Good old country baseball,” he cried in his high-pitched crackling voice every time a sports writer approached Gallup Field. To some, history is just a set of ancient numbers and dates. When it’s local and personal, it becomes something else entirely.

Consider, for instance, that those literal plowboys from Bethlehem’s farms 100 years ago, might have been engaging in an act of unity, defiance and American spirit on a very local, personal level in the wake of a World War and the 1918 pandemic in forming their team. A decade later, put the same real face on an entire league that shook its collective fists at the Great Depression of the ‘30s, then World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and, yes, now the Covid-19 pandemic.

For those who love the game, baseball is an embodiment of that American spirit that voluntarily unites, picks up the pieces and celebrates its ability to do so with an enthusiasm that inspired a man like Gene McMahon to roar his appreciation every time he saw it.

In a quieter, perhaps even more intense way, 20-year Tri-State Commissioner Eddie Gadomski is such a man. “We had 19 teams at the beginning of Covid,” he says in a phone conversation last weekend. “Now we have 10, but we expect to add more teams in the future. “We lost five teams after the 2020 Covid year when we didn’t have a season. Then we lost a couple more who couldn’t get enough commitment from their players.” The league is open to players of all ages, relying heavily on current and former college players and a smattering of former pros for its high-quality play in a sprinkling of towns across the area – Litchfield; Bethlehem; Amenia, New York; Burlington; Wolcott; Waterbury; Canton; and Winsted.

Most of the players have full-time jobs and families. Playing baseball on most Thursday evenings and weekends requires a high level of commitment indeed. “The best ability is availability; the key is to show up,” Gadomski likes to say as he insists that the 10 remaining teams make the league stronger than ever. “Everybody pulls his weight,” he says.

Nobody does that more than Gadomski himself, a consummate organizer who deflects credit to “great managers and communications through social media.” Rebuilding and displaying an American spirit at the local level has always been a league byproduct. Now, not only in the Covid-based shrinkage of Tri-State but some of its allies, like important feeder programs Babe Ruth Baseball, the Mickey Mantle League and American Legion Baseball as well as the AABC World Series, Gadomski and his committees are hard at work off the field as well as on.

“Believe it or not, we got hacked, so we’re having to rebuild our website,” Gadomski marvels. The rebuild, soon to come, will lay out the traditional schedule for the Tri-State championship playoffs, beginning July 25 and culminating in a Tri-State World Series at Fuessenich Park and Municipal Stadium August 11-13.

Beyond that, with the demise of the AABC World Series, Gadomski has been a key organizer in a new state-wide championship called the Connecticut Cup. Scheduled for August 18-20, it features competition between four league champions: Tri-State, the West Haven Twilight League, Greater Hartford Twilight League and the Connecticut Twilight League. Then, down to the roots of Americana, comes Bethlehem’s 100th anniversary celebration on August 26.

If and when you attend any Tri-State game this summer, you’re welcome to drift back through history to the same enthusiasm, skills and defiant unity on display as that which began it all with good old country baseball.