Hamptons Collegiate Baseball

SAG HARBOR, N.Y. — It was a quintessentially American scene: talented baseball teams playing on a sweltering Sunday afternoon in a small town, parents cheering on their college-age sons, children on the sidelines trying to snag balls and autographs.

But it was in a location that is anything but typical.

This is Hamptons Collegiate Baseball, a summer league that is bringing the foul balls and dirt-stained uniforms that come with the game to a place better known for its celebrities, glamorous fund-raisers and crisp polo shirts.

“We’re the Hamptons, and we have plenty of cachet to go with that reputation, but at the root of it, we’re small towns with year-round populations,” said Rusty Leaver, the league’s founder and owner of Deep Hollow Ranch in Montauk. “This is bringing Iowa to the Hamptons.”

The five-team Hamptons league, which sits under the umbrella of the larger Atlantic Collegiate Baseball League, started in June with teams in Mattituck, Riverhead, Sag Harbor, Southampton and Westhampton. The regular season ends in July and the playoffs conclude in August.

It is modeled after the Cape Cod Baseball League, which recruits top college players each summer. (The players are not paid, but stay free with volunteer host families.)

The Hamptons League is also trying to replicate the sense of community that permeates through the Cape League, where games are often played on high school fields and are always free.

The crowd for the early Sunday game here was thin, mostly parents and friends of players, a few of whom are from Long Island.

Some spectators sat on bleachers near the public field, others under an overhang, and a few on beach chairs plopped on the grass. More people, some fresh off the beach or bike trails, came to watch the 5 p.m. game, which Sag Harbor lost to Southampton, 7-3.

“Go, Kevin!” one fan yelled to a player on the field. “Nice pitch!” yelled another.

“This is so exciting for us — we live two blocks from the park,” said Mary Labrozzi, whose son, Michael, a student at Farmingdale State, plays for the Sag Harbor Whalers. Ms. Labrozzi is thrilled to have her son playing in their hometown, and bakes a huge batch of cookies or brownies for each home game.

Robert Cleary of Sag Harbor comes almost every Sunday with his 7-year-old son, Dillon, who sings “God Bless America” with a group of children during the game. Dillon also goes to a Sunday morning clinic that many of the players — who are regarded like rock stars by the town’s youths — put on to teach baseball fundamentals.

“We’re lucky we don’t have to go anywhere. They come to us,” Mr. Cleary said. “The price is right. It’s like going to a free concert in Central Park. You get a great caliber of music for free, and we get a great caliber of baseball for free.”

While donations are requested during games, Mr. Cleary said he wished more Sag Harbor residents would come support the team.

“There’s probably more people inside the ice cream shop than here, which surprises me,” he said.

But the team does have its huge fans. John Longmire and his son William, 10, have traveled around the Hamptons to watch the Whalers.

“It’s really fun to go to the games on the weekends,” said William, who used Mr. Leaver’s radar gun to clock a few pitches.

Mr. Leaver said he and Skip Norsic, a sponsor, brainstormed the idea for the league “on a bar stool” two years ago.

They formed one team last year — the Hampton Whalers, now the Sag Harbor Whalers, — to “test the waters,” Mr. Norsic said. They traveled to play other teams in the Atlantic Collegiate League.

But the idea was always for a league that could ultimately sustain itself. The two spent all of 2008 rallying local businesses and residents, and to some extent the Hamptons celebrity scene, for volunteer hours and seed money.

Mr. Leaver raised $200,000 to build a new field in Southampton and got the comedian Jerry Seinfeld to throw out the first pitch at a game. This year, Mr. Leaver believes the league, registered as a nonprofit, has raised about $150,000 in cash donations.

“I feel like what we have going for us is a very diverse pool of people to draw from out here who share the common denominator of loving baseball,” Mr. Leaver said.

The league also works with colleges to recruit players and coaches, the only people in the organization who are paid. Many of the players work in local restaurants and stores when not playing or practicing.

Word of the league has spread among baseball fans, especially in Mattituck, where home games regularly draw hundreds of people, Mr. Leaver said, as does the large field in Southampton. But crowds have been much thinner in Westhampton and here in Sag Harbor, where the team plays a doubleheader each Sunday afternoon. Many residents, he acknowledged, still don’t know about the teams.

“We knew it was an ‘If you build it, you have to build a fan base that will come’ thing,” Mr. Leaver said.

The toughest part, he said, is coordinating volunteers in five communities and ensuring that there are enough host families to house all the players. This year’s goal is to build a fan base and credibility as a solid league. Mr. Leaver hopes the league becomes an economic boon for each of the towns, and leads to some sort of partnership with Major League Baseball.

But he never wants it to get too out of control.

“It should look like people with beach blankets and chairs, and should be a bucolic small-town atmosphere,” Mr. Leaver said. “It should be really relaxed, but when you’re sitting on a beach blanket you’ll see someone hit a 400-foot home run or throw a 90-mile-per-hour fastball.”