Batter Up: New Flathead Men’s Adult Baseball League Gets Ready to Play Ball

The story of the Flathead Men’s Adult Baseball League begins in the fall of 2024, with its commissioner, Nathan Dugan, driving on the weekends about four-and-a-half hours to Spokane, Wash., and about four-and-a-half hours back to his Whitefish home in what amounted to a nine-hour commute for the love of baseball.

There’s a case to be made though that the story should really begin not in Whitefish, or in eastern Washington in 2024, but instead in the 1990s, when the Cleveland Indians drafted a 6-foot-4, 250-pound first baseman and future Baseball Hall of Fame inductee by the name of Jim Thome.

By 1996, Thome had become the kind of MLB slugger who could reliably hit 30-plus home runs in a season, and thus, he became the hero of Ohio kids like Dugan, who went so far as to make his online screen name some variation of “Thome Kid.” It started a love of baseball for Dugan that carried his playing career into high school. But, as it does for so many teenage athletes, Dugan’s time as a baseball player also ended with high school. Or at least it did until he started showing up to play in Spokane last fall.

Prior to his Spokane road trips, Dugan, now 35 and a physical therapist, had taken another road trip last spring all the way back to Ohio, and managed to make it to a Cleveland Guardians game. Being in the ballpark helped him rediscover his love for playing baseball back where it all started for him almost 30 years ago.

Unfortunately for Dugan, once he made it back to the Flathead after his trip to Cleveland, he quickly found his desire to play baseball again facing the hurdles of reality. Spokane, he discovered, was the closest adult men’s baseball league for Flathead Valley residents. Still, he started making the drive, just to play for a couple of hours at a time, and soon found out that the game he grew up loving still brought him joy.

But that nine-hour drive to play in the Inland Northwest Men’s Baseball League wasn’t sustainable, and Dugan figured there had to be a way to revive the sport locally. He even had a strong conviction that the enthusiasm would be there if someone took the step of organizing. He started cooking up ideas, and eventually launched a website for what he’s calling the Flathead Adult Men’s Baseball League. Around February, Dugan began promoting the new league on social media, and signups started to pick up momentum.

As of mid-April, the league was hovering at right around 51 signups, just a few over the golden number of 48 that allows the league to field four teams of 12. Ideally, those numbers could keep ticking up, and the league could get to six teams. Prospective players who have signed up so far range from college age to one man in his early 60s who is waiting to see how workouts go before fully committing. The average player age is in the mid 30s, according to Dugan.

The wood bat league will be a part of the Men’s Adult Baseball League (MABL), a national organization that boasts 325 local affiliates that have given rise to 3,200 teams and 45,000 members. MABL has an established rules system, which is a modified version of baseball’s traditional rules that offers some opportunities to lighten the physical demands of the game. For example, games will stretch anywhere from seven to nine innings, but with a 2 hour and 45 minute limit. Everyone in the lineup can bat, regardless of if they are playing in the field, and teams can substitute courtesy runners. Pitchers are limited to 100 pitches per day. So far, Dugan said most of the players who have signed up have selected “pitcher” when surveyed about which positions they can play.

As for how the teams will be constructed, Dugan said that a lot of people have signed up together as groups, including one fully formed team. Dugan and the other managers have access to a spreadsheet with available players, and they’re continuing to go back and forth picking people. The teams so far are The Rockies, The Brewers, The Monarchs and GTOD (Glacier Twins or Die).

League dues give players access to Blades Athletic Performance Academy in Whitefish, complete with batting cages, a pitching machine, throwing areas, strength training equipment and the swing analysis video system HitTrax. Those dues were sitting at $345 per player as of late March, with the potential for them to drop further based on additional league signups. Dues go toward use of Memorial Field in Whitefish, umpires, insurance, game baseballs, and a national player fee for the MABL. So far, Montana Tap House and Northstone Solar have agreed to help sponsor the league, but the search for more sponsors is ongoing.

The league will kick off on June 1, and the plan is to play most of the games on Sundays, with the local teams facing each other, and the season culminating in a championship. The hope is that the league helps to grow the local baseball community, with some members of the Glacier Twins American Legion youth team already stating their intent to check out the games. Right now, the league is scheduled for each team to play once a week, with the championship taking place on Aug. 10.

Getting back into playing and throwing shape has had its highs and lows. Joined at Memorial Field on a recent afternoon by fellow manager and 34-year-old Whitefish resident J.D. King, Dugan lamented how he got badly jammed on a pitch at the batting cage the other day and could barely grip the bat afterwards. For his part, King said he was throwing batting practice to some other players the week before and felt it in his arm the next day. But King also indicated that to some extent soreness was to be expected.

King comes from a baseball family and he said he played some growing up, but hasn’t played “a whole lot.”

“We’ve got at least three or four of the guys on the team that are in the same situation. They played as a kid, and they just love the sport and jumped on the opportunity to join the men’s league,” King said. “But you know, like me, they haven’t thrown or hit or ran in 10 or 20 years for some of these guys. So, I’m a little worried about the hamstrings on our team, to be honest.”

Adult softball leagues are more commonplace and less physically demanding than baseball. But Dugan described how part of what sets baseball apart for him is the amount of work it can take to make even minor technical improvements. And there are other features of the game, such as the speed of the ball, and the distances to throw, that make it hard for him to view softball as an adequate substitute. They are, of course, different games, even if they share some conceptual similarities.

As King put it, “Baseball is baseball.”

Signups for the Flathead Adult Men’s Baseball League will remain open until a week before the season starts. For more information go to https://www.flatheadadultbaseball.com/.

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