Professional baseball player Aaron Glaum, an Aptos High and Carbillo College alum. (Contibuted)
It's tough to make a living as a minor-league baseball player. The pay is low and the travel seems constant.
Aptos native Aaron Glaum learned this first-hand in his rookie season with the Frontier League's London Rippers, a first-year pro team in Canada.
But Glaum -- a lifelong player and a standout shortstop at Florida's Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in 2010-11 -- could do nothing to prepare himself for the continuous curve balls life delivered him this year.
Glaum, 23, made $600 a month the past season, and received $20 on game days for food and free housing. Still, his budget was tight.
"On the road, it was OK, but when we were in Canada, everything's more expensive there," said Glaum, a 5-foot-7, 170-pound middle infielder and outfielder for the Rippers. "They don't even have a dollar menu. It's like a dollar and 33 cents."
Then, what little he had was Ripper-ed away.
On July 24, Glaum and teammates were only left with the shirts on their backs. Or, in this case, jerseys. Really.
The Rippers, who played their inaugural game May 18, ceased operations.
At midnight on that ill-fated day, Glaum went from starter to free agent -- jobless.
Frontier League commissioner Bill Lee -- not the "Spaceman" -- immediately stepped in with an option for the players, though. After the top free agents were gobbled up, Lee said the decimated Rippers could pick up outcasts from other teams and finish the season. They
would do so without a home field.The team would reside in hotels near the Lake Erie Crushers in Ohio and go by the name Road Warriors. Really, they would live on a charter bus.
Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines.
The unfoldings meant the Road Warriors had little to no fan base. They barely had that as a losing team in Canada, anyway.
From the moment of the Rippers' inception, controversy began pouring in.
Some people publicly detested the team's name and logo, which bore a resemblance to Jack the Ripper, the infamous late-19th century serial killer from London, England.
And then a trio of players -- two Dominicans and one Taiwanese -- couldn't get into Canada. They joined the Rippers only for road games.
Slowly, the losses began to mount.
But the hardest thing to swallow?
The Rippers -- who displaced the Intercounty Baseball League's London Majors as the primary tenant at Labatt Park -- were unable to obtain a liquor license.
No beer? No fans.
No fans? No profit.
I can hear the unpaid public address announcer now: "This team is going, going ... gone!"
The Rippers, unable to pay bills, were locked out of their retail outlet downtown. Then they closed shop at Labatt Park.
"We had 60 to 80 people," Glaum said of the average home crowd, likening it to playing at Aptos High. "Except in high school, the stands aren't as big. Everyone was crammed together. [In Canada,] it was one or two people here or there."
If he felt like a big-leaguer, he must have felt like a Montreal Expo.
Err, make that the A's, Glaum said.
"Some of the guys on the team would make those jokes, that we were the Oakland A's of the Frontier League," Glaum said. "Moneyball.' It felt like that. We got the bare minimum of everything."
That trend continued after the Rippers became the Road Warriors.
"I think some fans felt bad for us," Glaum said. "It's tough to go into all those parks and have no one there for us. We had no home-field advantage -- ever. And we were never the home team, which means we never got the last at-bat. That's tough to continually try to win like that."
The Road Warriors finished their season Sunday, beating host Traverse City 6-1 for a rare win.
The Warriors finished with a 9-27 record -- worst in the Frontier League's East Division. [The Rippers' dismal record was expunged from the league standings when it folded.]
Monday, Glaum was back in Pittsburgh, where he lives with his girlfriend. Finally, he exhaled.
"It was fun, but it was a stressful year," Glaum said. "The worst possible things that can happen kind of happened. It was so hard to get fired up every day when one thing after another went wrong."
Glaum finished with a .205 batting average in 87 total games. He knows he's capable of better.
Glaum envisions brighter days, but with a new team. He loves the sport too much to quit now, not like this.
Still, he said: "I wouldn't trade any of that to keep playing."
Tuesday, Glaum was an ex-pro and again on the road. He had an interview at Dick's Sporting Goods.
"I need to get a job, too," he said.
He's not living the dream yet. But he's still chasing it.
Contact Assistant Sports Editor Jim Seimas at 706-3256 or jseimas@santacruzsentinel.com
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