Editorial: Home run

The pitch that three officials of Hamptons Collegiate Baseball threw the Shelter Island School Board Monday night was juicy and tempting — a meatball right up the middle. If the board had been in a swinging mood, it could have knocked it right out of the library. Instead the board, biding its time, took the strike — but the feeling is there: Something good is going to happen here.

Of course the board must do its due diligence before saying “yes” to the summer college league’s proposal to launch a sixth team and base it on Shelter Island, using the school’s ball field as its home base and local families as its hosts. The board should ask parents and officials in Sag Harbor, Westhampton, Riverhead, Southampton and on the North Fork how having a Hamptons Collegiate Baseball team has worked out for them.

Drawn from top college players from across the country, the league offers a way for them to stay in the game over the summer — and perhaps draw the attention of minor league scouts — by competing in a division of the Atlantic Collegiate Baseball League.

Founded in 2008 by Rusty Leaver of Montauk’s Deep Hollow Ranch, whose son at the time was a pitcher for the University of Rhode Island, the league is a non-profit organization with only one paid employee, its director, Brett Mauser. All the others, from managers and coaches to members of its board of directors and community advisory board, are volunteers. The league operates with financial support from sponsors that include Bridgehampton National Bank, Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate, Vitamin Water, Norsic Sanitation, Tanger Mall and Hampton Jitney, which provides player transportation.

In its first year of operation, the league included one team, the Sag Harbor Whalers based at Mashashimuet Park — the infield of which league volunteers and local businesses chipped in to overhaul. The Whalers played in the Kaiser Division of the Atlantic League and won it that year.

Four more franchises joined the league in 2009. They play 20 games a season from June 1 to early August at 5 or 7 p.m. Spectators are welcome at no charge. Every field they use “gets a scoreboard and we make it a top-notch facility,” Whaler General Manager Tom Gleeson told the School Board Monday. He said the Hamptons League appeals to players from all over the country because its teams are close together compared to those in the hinterlands so travel times are short and yet each host community on the East End has a unique, appealing identity.

Shelter Island, as a sixth franchise, would provide a bridge linking those communities even closer together. “Shelter Island’s where we want to be, no doubt about it,” Mr. Gleeson said.

So where’s the catch? There doesn’t seem to be any. But board members seemed impressed and pleased by the pitch and will, no doubt, investigate carefully before taking that swing. There’s bound to be a lot of smiles ahead as Islanders hear that satisfying plonk of bat on ball.