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In my travels around the Eastern League with the Reading Phillies during the baseball season, there is a lot of down time in hotels and on the bus. I've found that one of the best ways to pass the time is to read. My books of choice almost always involve sports and they're usually about baseball. If I come across a particular book that I enjoy, I like to let you know.

Such is the case with Minor Players, Major Dreams by Brett H. Mandel (University of Nebraska Press). Mandel's first book has a regional tie. Mandel is a lifelong Phillies fan who works as an assistant city controller in Philadelphia. The concept of this 243-page book is a unique one.

Many youngsters across the country dream about becoming a professional baseball player. A very low percentage gets the chance to live that dream. A plethora of books have been written about life in baseball. Many of those books came from media members or players. Mandel's perspective would be the same, but in a much different perspective. Confused? It's simple really.

Back in 1994, Mandel approached the newly formed Ogden (Utah) Raptors of the rookie level Pioneer League. He wanted to take a leave of absence from his job and his weekend baseball league to write a book about the experiences of a minor league baseball player. The Raptors agreed to set aside one of their roster spots to accommodate Mandel and his laptop computer.

Most teams in the Pioneer League were affiliated with major league organizations. The Raptors were not, they were an independent franchise. Mandel quickly and vividly pointed out that the Raptors were the bottom of the barrel -- players at the lowest level of the minors who were holding on to one last chance or trying to make the most of their one and only chance.

The author does a great job describing the summer when he lived out his dream. While he saw hardly any playing time, Mandel was one of the guys. He took batting practice and infield practice. He coached first base. He was basically a fan one day and then a guy in uniform in a dugout the next.

Mandel will take you on the bus, in the hotels, to the clubhouses and virtually everywhere else his travels took him. As a guy who has spent six years living life in the minors, I can tell you Mandel gives the reader an accurate account. He was willing to relay some of the not so nice things that happen during the course of the season. He didn't always name names, but that was okay with me. The person wasn't important, the event was the point.

The most interesting aspect for me was the openness which Mandel provided when describing the very strained relationship between the players and the manager, coach and ownership of the Raptors. It was not a good situation.

I had just one minor complaint and it's almost nitpicking. A most redundant theme was that the Raptors players were trying to keep their major league dreams alive or that their final professional baseball game could be their next one. When you're playing on an independent team, this is definitely true and very important, but it was mentioned too much for me. That by no means takes away from what I thought was an outstanding book. Mandel was able to become one of the guys while still being able to do the job at hand.

If you are a baseball fan, this is a must read. If you had dreams of putting on a professional baseball uniform and never got the chance, Minor Players, Major Dreams will take you there. It's one man's fantasy come true. It has been available in local bookstores.

They call the "the boys of summer," those eternally-young athletes with a baseball mitt, those determined batters with the dream of belting one out of the park. For those baseball players who didn't make the Big Leagues yet or whose careers have stalled and need the seasoning, there are the minor leagues. It is precisely about one minor league team, the Ogden (Utah) Raptors of the Pioneer League which one young man decides to immortalize in prose. Brett Mandel, an assistant city controller in Philadelphia, took a chance on a dream...or actually, two dreams in one: to play professional baseball and to wrire a book about the minor league professional baseball experience. While chasing his dream, he befriends a team full of dreamers. Some are fresh out of college, others had careers that haven't really gotten started, some were resurrecting careers that ran afoul along the way. The fire to play pro ball burns fiercely in their gut, especially those who played with guys who are now in the pros. And those minor league players were very special to their franchise city. The games were part circus, the personal appearances were many, the autograph cheerfully given (never sold) and the players were expected to be gentlemen. I found myself charmed by the enthusiam of the Raptors and their fans, and wondering why baseball (big league ball) has strayed so far from its hometown roots. Baseball lovers will love "Minor Players, Major Dreams."

Mandel, a one-time civil servant and always-avid baseball fan, had a dream -- to play a season of minor league baseball -- and to write about it. He realized his dream with this book, a far better read than one might imagine coming from a non-player and a non-writer.

In joining the Ogden Raptors, a rookie league new to an offshoot Pioneer league, Mandel understood the dreams and ambitions of novice players who came from colleges, high schools and farms, and he watched them improve as professionals, suffering the agonies and exalting their triumphs. It isn't pretty, but it is real. And -- surprise -- Mandel is a first-rate journalist who brings the players to life and effectively captures moods and motifs.

Everything was there in Ogden for their new franchise professional team, but the players knew that if they didn't do well, the cheering would stop, and their baseball careers could end.

One of the strong suits of this book is the perspective Mandel gives to the game of baseball, to both the major and minor leagues. Mandel was a fan -- is a fan -- and he knows that watching baseball isn't what it used to be. "Could it be that my generation of fans was the last to place our cards in the spokes of our bikes without worrying that they would no longer be in mint condition?" he asks. And as a man who used to sit in the cheaper bleacher seats far away from the game, he found himself loving small baseball parks and found a close relationship between fans and players.

There are some sad stories here. One player was once drafted by a major league team, the Montreal Expos, but in 1993 he was playing for the lowly Raptors, bruised but not beaten, hoping to make the grade once again.

And there were challenging games against better- equipped, talented teams who were favorites in the matchups. The Los Angeles Dodgers was one of them, but in a dramatic recounting, Mandel gives readers the play-by-play that saw the Ogden newcomers win the game.

The book is filled with a succession of interwoven stories. All of it pays off for the readers who are also ardent baseball fans; it is for them that this is especially written. R.T.

For one summer, Brett Mandel was the self-described "worst player in professional baseball.'' Mandel lasted an entire season in the Pioneer League, and he managed one hit.

A single. Against a woman. In an exhibition game.

His official lifetime batting average as a minor-leaguer is the same as Susan Lucci's at the Emmys and Bob Dole's in the presidential race: .000. At the end of the season, the Ogden (Utah) Raptors gave Mandel his unconditional release.

"My season of dreams,'' Mandel calls it.

He had joy, he had fun, he had the 1994 season in the sun. Mandel, an assistant city controller in Philadelphia, escaped his desk and his 9-to-5 job for a summer fling in a summer league stocked by rookies and rejects. A lifelong Philadelphia Phillies fan, Mandel hatched during the '93 pennant race the idea of playing minor-league baseball -- and writing a book about the experience.

Mandel took his brainstorm to the Phillies, who informed him that they had no interest in letting a prospective author take a single batting-practice swing away from somebody who could develop into a major-leaguer. The Raptors, then a first-year independent team in a rookie league, had a more open-minded view of holding a roster spot for a then-25-year-old infielder who had no discernible physical tools that apply to baseball.

Of course, Mandel was willing to cover his $650 salary and expenses. That, and an opportunity to be forever immortalized, was an offer that a team operating on a shoestring budget couldn't refuse. "Minor Players, Major Dreams,'' is Mandel's 243-page account of life at the bottom of professonal baseball's food chain and the top of the world.

"It's the ultimate fantasy camp,'' said Mandel, who appeared at Borders Books and Music on Thursday for a book signing. "You have these guys who pay thousands and thousands of dollars to have a week like a major-leaguer.''

Mandel prolonged his fantasy for 72 games spread over 77 days. He lived the numbing 15-hour bus rides filled with mindless poker games and the same old videos. The hurried fast-food meals after night games to beat curfew. The team autograph sessions where two dozen players had to share three pens. Day after day after day. Game after game after game.

"I came out with a real appreciation for the talent level,'' said Mandel, a 1991 Hamilton College graduate who played two years of high school baseball. "The other thing is, it's not just about being really good. You have to have the dedication to stick with a game day in and day out. Stay on an even keel. Resist the temptation every night in Helena, Mont., to go out and get blitzed, throw up in your bed, wake up the next morning and play baseball.''

The Raptors were the classic collection of rejects and retreads that populate independent teams. The manager wasn't above throwing at his players' heads during batting practice when he deemed them guilty of failing to give the game the proper respect. Two players got released late in the season because they got in a fight on the team bus. The fight started when one reliever relieved himself on another reliever.

For the most part, though, Mandel saw "a real neat world, an incredible intimacy.'' Ogden players stayed with Raptor foster families, mingled with kids before the games, signed autographs, bumped into appreciative fans at bars and took whatever freebies that came their way. To Mandel's astonishment, some Raptors fans actually began taking an interest in his "career.''

One of Mandel's rare plate appearances yielded a foul ball. The fan brought that same ball to the park days later for Mandel to autograph. On another night, Mandel couldn't believe his ears on the Raptors bench.

"Behind us, there was this souvenir stand,'' Mandel said. "If anybody broke a bat, they would sign it and put it in there and sell it for $5 or whatever. And I hear some kid say, 'Do you have a Brett Mandel bat?' I wanted to stop the game and go give the guy a hug.''

The summer of dreams couldn't have come at a better time for Mandel. He had just finished an anguishing stint as "a laughingstock'' on the Philadelphia Charter Commission. Assigned the task of re-writing the city constitution, the charter commission had its work rejected soundly in the voting booths.

"I had the opportunity to grow, mature and come back totally re-invented,'' Mandel said. "Now I'm not just a failed policy wonk. I'm a failed policy wonk who managed to get this book done.''

As the season progressed, so did Mandel's skills. He even hit two home runs -- in batting pratice. His ever-increasing confidence stoked what Mandel calls, "my silent ordeal, although my roommates would say it was not my silent ordeal.'' He wanted to get at least one hit in a game that counted.

His only hit in a game came against Colorado Silver Bullets pitcher Lee Anne Ketchum. His last at-bat, his last chance for an official hit, still haunts him.

"For some reason, I decide I'm going to make this 'a quality at-bat,' '' Mandel said. "I go up there and take a pitch. Slow ball right down the middle. 'Wait a second. Could I have that back?' Then there's a big curveball that I wave at. Now I'm just at this guy's mercy. High fastball. I swing right through it.''

The end of a Hall-of-Fame career. That's right. Brett Mandel made it to Cooperstown. The Hall of Fame asked him to donate copies of his manuscript, his release letter and assorted other artifacts from the project. Mandel spent Saturday in Cooperstown autographing copies of his book. He received a special guided tour of the Hall, along with a lifetime pass.

"Once every couple of months, I have a dream that I'm back in Ogden chasing that elusive hit,'' Mandel said. "I never had dreams while I was out there -- sitting at the computer saying, 'Should we do more of what New York City is doing to stop the crime in Philadelphia?' ''

Former high school ballplayer Brett Mandel yearned to experience a year in the minor leagues, so he convinced the Ogden (Utah) Raptors, about to embark on their maiden season, to let him chronicle that season from the perspective of a uniformed player. They agreed. The resulting saga describes the long bus rides, the bad food, the frustrations, and hopes that are all a part of baseball dreaming with affectionate good humor. The book's true life, though, steps up in the poignancy with which Mandel draws his teammates, young men destined for the most part to fall short of their great desire. As a player, Mandel went 0 for 5 on the year, proving that the pen, long deemed mightier than the sword, can be mightier than the bat, as well.

For Brett Mandel, making friends with the ballplayers and the fans who sought him out was part of the fun.

The best part, however, of getting to play baseball with the Ogden (Utah) Raptors was the fulfillment of a childhood dream.

"Growing up, I always dreamed of being a baseball player," the 28-year-old Northeast Philadelphia native said. "In fact, I still play ball now on the weekends. But getting to play with the Raptors was a chance to actually live my dream."

It was also a chance for the first-time author to document his experience in his new book, Minor Players, Major Dreams (University of Nebraska Press). And it all began when fate stepped in while Mandel was working as assistant to the policy director of the Philadelphia Charter Commission.

"Fortunately or unfortunately for me, the voters of Philadelphia chose to overwhelmingly reject the new charter and therefore decided I should have a new career," said Mandel with a chuckle.

"So, since I always wanted to be an author and play baseball, I figured it was probably time to do both."

In 1994, Mandel convinced the newly formed Raptors of the Pioneer League to allow him to join the team and write a book about the minor league experience and the Raptors' first year in baseball. Mandel's book, which he said was turned down "no less than 30 times," eventually was published.

An insider's view of the minor leagues and young men chasing their dreams, the book also illustrates how playing 72 games in 77 days brings a different kind of fatigue than the office job Mandel left behind.

Dogged determination

I'm a very determined person and I very much wanted all this to happen," the 5-foot, 10-inch, 170 pound Mandel said. "I guess it's that dogged determination of mine that finally made it all happen.

"Nobody asked me to go to Ogden. I had to make that happen. And nobody asked me to publish a book. I had to try to make that happen too."

Although Mandel signed on as a professional player, he funded his own contract and didn't displace any minor league players, thus providing a player's view with an author's perspective. His teammates learned his true identity because his baseball "skills" stood out as much as his laptop computer.

But his position as a baseball player was not without distinction.

"It was official. Because I was playing with a team at the lowest level of professional baseball, because this was a team of players who for some reason had been passed over by the scouts of the major league teams, and because I was the worst link on the lowest chain, I was probably the worst professional baseball player in America," he said.

So what? He still had more fun than most realizing a lifelong dream. Yet he never romanticizes the experience. He gives his readers a straightforward account of baseball life, as well as some of the additional rewards that came his way, like seeing his image on his very own baseball card, courtesy of Topps, the baseball card company.

I never imagined that one day I'd be putting my name on a baseball card contract, and that one day, during a book signing, a gentleman would come up to me and actually ask me to sign my card," said Mandel who now works as assistant city controller.

"He was my one groupie. But one's enough. It was a lot of fun."

Brett H. Mandel went 0 for 5 in his career in minor-league baseball. Not much to brag about, but enough to pick up a fan.

``He was just a little guy, maybe 6 years old. Real shy. I had played only one game at home, an exhibition game. I was the consummate benchwarmer, so you wouldn't expect me to be any kid's favorite player. I think I was his favorite because the first time I met him, I had taken the time to talk with him. I asked him what he had for breakfast. Later, he'd come to the games and say, `Mom, Mom, let's go see Brett.' ''

Mandel, who has written about his experiences as a minor-league ballplayer in Minor Players, Major Dreams, said that as the Ogden (Utah) Raptors of the Pioneer (rookie) League were taking curtain calls outside the clubhouse at the end of their inaugural season in 1994, he was pleasantly surprised to be called outside by his fan, Danny.

It was the capstone to a season in which Mandel, who was hitless in regular games, managed one RBI in an exhibition contest.

His lone professional hit came against the Colorado Silver Bullets, a women's pro team, in a game the Raptors won, 11-3. Mandel, now 28, who had played for his team at Northeast High School, had come up with the idea for the book while watching a Phillies game in 1993.

He was assistant to the policy director of the Philadelphia Charter Commission at the time, and the idea took on special urgency with the realization that the charter was not going to be approved at the polls and that he'd soon have to find something new to do anyway.

Mandel approached the Phillies, but they refused him, saying that every swing he took `` `would be taking away time from a player who had real potential to become a Phillie.' ''

Ultimately, though, he was able to persuade the brand-new Raptors to sign him on, more as a writer allowed some playing time than as a full-fledged player. He even funded his own contract, and, since the Raptors did not have as many players as they were allowed, he was not displacing a player with real potential.

What struck him most about the summer was the poignant drama of young men pursuing their dream of playing professional baseball and perhaps even making it to the major leagues.

Some of the players were hoping for a second chance after having been cut by teams higher in the pecking order. Others were fresh out of high school or college and pursuing their dream for the first time.

He says the Raptors' rationale in allowing him to play was that they would get some free publicity.

Of the 30 players who went through Ogden during the summer of '94, only two are still playing, one in double-A and one in single-A. The Raptors are still in the rookie league, but now they are affiliated with the Milwaukee Brewers.

Mandel, now an assistant city controller in Philadelphia, is a native of Philadelphia and a graduate of Northeast High School. He holds a bachelor's degree in public policy from Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., and a master's in governmental policy from the University of Pennsylvania.

His scholastic baseball career ended in college when he was cut from the team. He played in the National Adult Baseball League before switching to the Men's Adult League, where he now plays.

Before finding a publisher -- the University of Nebraska Press -- for his first book, Mandel says the only thing he had ever published ``was a joke in Reader's Digest.''

He's working on a proposal to do a book about the current status of the field in Dyersville, Iowa, that was featured in the 1989 movie Field of Dreams.

Mandel says that the great advantage in being a writer while traveling on the team bus was that he could convince the other players that he needed some elbow room in order to write on his laptop.

``So you'd have the starting player curling up in the luggage rack in order to give me some extra space,'' he chuckles.

The people at the University of Nebraska Press know baseball books. For the past few years they have published annually trade paper reprints of several baseball classics and now add four more reprints, plus a Bison original, Minor Players, Major Dreams, about life in the Pioneer League.

Author Brett H. Mandel is a latter day George Plimpton who, at age 25, tired of his job with the Philadelphia Charter Commission and decided to play professional ball for a year and write of his experiences. He found his opportunity with a new team in the Pioneer (rookie) League, the Ogden Raptors. He was not under contract, paid his own way, but filled a roster spot without displacing any true minor league player, since the Raptors never intended to carry the full league-allowed roster.

Mandel differs from Plimpton in that he wrote of baseball at its lowest level, a league designed for first-year professionals, fresh from college or even younger. Few of the players will ever achieve a major league career, but they are professionals, if only for a moment, a moment filled with promise and wonder.

Although Brett Mandel now works as assistant city controller for Philadelphia, he's well-suited to writing about minor league baseball.

That's because, in 1994, he quit his job as assistant to the policy director of the Philadelphia Charter Commission and, icing a childhood dream, went to play baseball with the newly formed Ogden (Utah) Raptors.

But it wasn't all fun and games. Nor was it meant to be, said Mandel, who documented his experience in his new book, "Minor Players, Major Dreams," and will be on hand Thursday, May 15, at the Barnes & Noble Jenkintown Store to discuss turning his fantasy into reality.

"Fortunately or unfortunately for me, the voters of Philadelphia overwhelmingly reject the new Charter and therefore decided I should have a new career," said Mandel with a chuckle in his voice. "So, since I always wanted to be an author and play baseball, I figured it was probably time to do both."

Turned down no fewer than 30 times, what he calls his "dogged determination" finally paid off. After spending the summer of 1994 playing with the rookie league, his book about his experiences playing baseball was published by the University of Nebraska Press. "Minor Players, Major Dreams" is an insider's view of the low minors and young men chasing dreams as big as the skies in Utah, Idaho, Montana and Alberta. The book also illustrates how playing 72 games in 77 days brings a different kind of fatigue than the office job Mandel left behind.

I'm a very determined person and I wanted this very much," Mandel said. "I always joke that I wouldn't want to be the person who owes me a phone call. I will call you every single day if I have to until I finally reach you and get what I need."

"And that's what got me through the games, and the book," he continued. "Nobody asked me to go to Ogden; I had to make that happen. And nobody asked me to publish a book. I had to try to make that happen too. And I did."

Although Mandel signed on as a professional player, he funded his own contract and didn't displace any minor league players. His teammates learned his true identity because his baseball "skills" stood out as much as his laptop computer.

"But I signed on to play and play I did," he said. "It was official, although I was probably the worst professional baseball player in America."

Now that the experience is behind him and his book is receiving good reviews, Mandel is back in Philadelphia working at a desk job and, for the most part, enjoying it. But that doesn't meant there aren't more ideas for more books running around in his head.

"Before, as a first-time author, people turned me down because I'd never written anything." Mandel explained. Now that I have published, people come to me and ask to go over ideas for another book. And there are some ideas I'm interested in, still along the lines of baseball. I had a great time with the last book and I'm sure the next ones will be just as much fun."

Sick of his job as a minor bureaucrat in the dismal (and ultimately doomed) commission to change the Philadelphia City Charter, weekend ballplayer Brett Mandel dreamed of escaping political bickering for a life on the green fields of minor league baseball. Presto. His wish came true - at least for a year. By hectoring both book companies and ball clubs, Mandel found a team that would take him on for a season and a publisher that would pay for his story, ultimately titled Minor Players, Major Dreams. Mandel is neither a writer nor an athlete, but he attacks both tasks with equal determination and respect; he comes upon a tale that is true to the great undercover tradition of sports journalists, like George Plimpton in Paper Lion. During his year with the Ogden (Utah) Raptors of the rookie league, Mandel witnessed some great escapades and discovered more than a few secrets of the game. He met an NFL-drafted punter who. like Michael Jordan gave up a sure-thing in one pro sport to pursue a dream in another; a pitcher who channeled the spirit of his dead grandfather; and a cast of other talented hopefuls who found something in baseball they couldn't abandon. This Wednesday, Mandel reads from his book and tells what it was like to shuck one set of pinstripes for another and spend a year barnstorming the back roads of baseball.

It isn't often that the Walter Mittys of this world have the opportunity to act out their fantasies and see their daydreams come true. Brett Mandel '91, a baseball buff since boyhood, was dealing with frustration in his hometown of Philadelphia when a wild idea popped into his head. He had been engaged with the Philadelphia Charter Commission in an effort to change the rules for the city's governance, and the pace of progress was slow and the results disheartening (the voters ultimately rejected the charter). One August day, while taking in a Phillies game at Veterans Stadium, he suddenly decided to do something quite different - at least for a time. He would play minor league baseball and write a book about it.

The decision was a bold one for a weekend ball player whose competitive career had ended with high school. But thanks to Brett's determination and persistence, the wild idea became a reality when the owners of the Ogden Raptors, an independent team of the rookie Pioneer League starting up in Utah, agreed to make room for him as a second baseman on its roster.

The team's players were largely recruited from the ranks of those passed over in high school or college drafts or rejected after tryouts elsewhere in the minors. Most of them saw the Ogden Raptors as their last chance to fulfill their cherished dream of making it into the majors, "the bigs." The odds were overwhelmingly against them, for the rookie leagues, the lowest level of professional baseball, are where "big dreams meet slim chances," and where players' careers generally end. Nonetheless, if a player proved himself, there was some hope of recruitment by a scout for the majors. That put a premium on performance, resulting in enormous pressure added to the stress of 12-hour bus rides along bumpy roads and living from hand to mouth far away from family and friends.

In exchanging wingtips for spikes and a suit for a uniform with a number on it, Brett Mandel became a part of that world for a season in 1994. In the aptly titled Minor Players, Major Dreams (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Pr., 1997), he vividly recounts the stress and tedium, as well as the joys and excitement, of baseball at its most basic level, where the game is in many ways its purest, and where the fans are the most intimately involved. His own role was essentially that of a bench warmer-observer, and it has resulted in a fascinating firsthand depiction of life in the minor leagues, with all its aspirations, and its dreams all too often dashed.

As for Brett today, he is back in Philadelphia, serving as assistant city controller. With his Walter Mitty season in the dugout behind him, he is left with an enormous respect for the dedication of minor league player and coaches, as well as a renewed appreciation for what the game truly means to its grassroots fans.

Books about baseball are like vacation pictures. There are too many, and they're usually a far cry from being there. One might even say they are with few exceptions, lifeless.

But Brett Mandel based his baseball book on a fresh idea which gives "Minor Players, Major Dreams most of its oomph.

Now an assistant city controller in Philadelphia, Mandel talked his way onto a rookie-league team with weapons no more formidable than a laptop computer.

He came away from the 1994 season with a couple at-bats and a likeable, if artless, first book.

I say artless because Mandel is not a writer so much as a chronicler. The story of how members of the Ogden (Utah) Raptors face their futures moves along like the team bus. This is not a bad pace; it beats the play-by-play pace of most nonfiction baseball books.

The Raptors were a new rookie-league team in the Pioneer League in 1994. The rookie leagues are a step below the official "farm system" of A, AA and AAA teams that feed the Major Leagues.

Ogden was so appreciative of its team that one fan recognized Mandel, who to that point had batted just once in public. The fan alluded to Mandel's at-bat - an infield out - and asked him when he expected to play again.

Baseball fans frequently allude to the minor leagues as the ideal environment, for the intimacy they have with the game and the hunger the players have to play.

This is the fan's fantasy, of course. The players get meal money that precludes anything but fast food, they have to carry their own bags and, in the off-season, work a graceless job and keep in shape for the next season.

In a way, Mandel's story is as interesting as his teammates'. On the staff of the Philadelphia Charter Commission he was spending his days in a suit and tie in an office thanklessly toiling on a charter proposal the voters would overwhelmingly reject. As a run of the mill baseball fan, he attended Phillies games.

Then 25 and a weekend baseball player, he became smitten by the idea to write and inspired by the dreams of the young men in baseball's lowly rungs have to make it in the rarified air of major league baseball.

After work and on weekends, he began scouting around for a team, working out at the batting cages and writing book proposals. When the Raptors agreed to take him on, he suited up but agreed not to be paid.

Getting off the field is part of the secret of a good baseball book. The other part is wonderful storytelling. for a first-time author, and one so thoroughly likeable as Mandel, one out of two ain't bad.

Many of Baseball America's readers no doubt dream of playing professional baseball. Others probably dream of writing a book about professional baseball. Brett Mandel managed to do both

In the summer of 1993, Mandel was a 23-year-old civil servant in Philadelphia and a frustrated weekend baseball player. He had been a bench-warmer on his high school team and was cut from the Division III Hamilton (N.Y.) College team, so professional scouts weren't exactly beating down the doors of his house.

Mandel came up with an idea. Despite no experience or demonstrated expertise in either playing baseball or writing about it, Mandel wanted to play one season in the minor leagues and write a book about that season. His powers of persuasion must have been considerable, because he was able to pull off this implausible plan.

Mandel spent the 1994 season with the Ogden Raptors of the Pioneer League, about as far down the food chain of Organized Baseball as a player can go. The Raptors then were an independent team, which meant that every player on the club had either been released from an organization or ignored in the draft, or both. Ogden was the last chance these players could have to turn around their careers.

Since Ogden didn't play with a full roster, Mandel was in.

Mandel seems to give us a fairly unvarnished look at a season in the low minors. He certainly had plenty of time for observations. Though he participated fully in workouts, team promotions and so forth, he batted only five times during the season, which lasted from mid-June through August.

Readers who are convinced that today's players come up short in the intangibles department will find much in this book to support their opinion. The hard-working, fundamentally sound Raptors all too often simply aren't good enough to sustain a professional career. The players with talent all too often waste their potential by drinking, carousing, missing signs and making bonehead plays.

The clang of the last chances being tossed onto the scrap heap is omnipresent. Ogden's intense 28-year-old manager Willy Ambos alternates between rage and despair at his players' lackadaisical attitude, and gradually loses control of his team.

Even with all this chaos, a drunken late-season bus fight and constant roster turnover, the Raptors almost win a pennant. Several of the better players sign contracts with organizations, but within a few years almost all are out of professional baseball.

"Minor Players, Major Dreams" isn't totally bleak, of course. Mandel has kind words for Ogden, especially the host families who house the players. Most of the players clearly relish the close fan contact that is an inevitable part of baseball in the low minors.

But what many readers will come away with is a fresh appreciation for the reality that in the fiercely Darwinian world of professional baseball, raw talent isn't nearly enough to make it.

Here's the sleeper of spring. A gem from the rough diamonds of the hard-scrabble Pioneer League.

In 1994, Brett Mandel was languishing as a Philadelphia city employee with a part-time hobby of playing weekend baseball. He parlayed his passion for baseball into a book by convincing the Ogden Raptors, a newly minted unaffiliated team in Utah, to let him ride the pine of their bench while writing a book on the Raptors' first season.

Mandel has a gifted eye for detail, be it the rookie pitcher who sticks a feather inside his cap before each game or the frustrated manager who takes out his anger during batting practice by plunking his own players.

This is a cross between George Plimpton's Paper Lion and Jim Brosnan's The Long Season. Snap this book up.

You're tired of your job (as assistant city controller of Philadelphia, no less - more romantic, it's difficult to imagine), so you get a leave of absence, summon up your (not especially impressive) high school and college baseball skills, and find a team which will let you play (and pay your own way), so that you can write a book about the low, low minors, and the book, by the way, will be your, um first...

Well, it certainly won't be Brett Mandel's last, for his season-long chronicle of the Ogden (Utah) Raptors is an insightful commentary on the dreams of young men, and certainly not the narcissistic journey it would have become in the hands of a lesser writer.

Since the Raptors are an independent team, not affiliated with a major league behemoth, their roster is composed of young athletic heroes who had failed - either to be noticed in high school or college, or, worse, to have signed but have failed and been consigned to the scrapheap of the scorned. "One more chance" would be a good motto for this motley crew.

The team and his teammates knew about Mandel's plan, and since no deserving lad lost a chance for the last seat on the bench. While on suspects that he discounts his own skills, it's apparent that he's not up to the competition. Mandel refreshingly acknowledges this fact, musing that his team, the Raptors, is composed of unaffiliated rejects and failures, that he is their worst player, so ... he is probably the very worst player in professional baseball (and you thought it was ... Mario Mendoza!). Such honest humility has its appeal.

On occasion, Mandel has his tongue firmly in his (tobacco-less) cheek, observing that everyone uses kindergarten contractions ("unies" for uniforms, and so on). However, it is his sympathetic portraits of the last-chance lineup which elevate this book from the zillions of every spring.

Mandel rightly recognizes that each of his teammates was the best, the very best, player from his high school or hometown. Despite its essentially humbling nature (succeed 30 percent of the time and you won't have to pay your way to Cooperstown), each player at this level believes in himself. He has to, because very few others will. It isn't the blind chance of our esteemed state lottery, because every at bat, every fielding chance, every pitch is recorded, even if Grantland Rice's Great Scorer may sometimes misinterpret the data, and deny you the opportunity which is rightfully yours.

What will become of manager Willy Ambos, Brett Smith, Doug Smiley, Josh Kirtlan, and the rest who benefit from Mandel's sharply-drawn, but sympathetic portraits? How does impending reality meld with their already-damaged self-confidence? An epilogue helps, but soon you can learn for yourself about the real drama of real baseball by passing up Fenway for the boys of summer (not yet) in their ruin (why do most people forget that last part?) in Lowell, Norwich, Pittsfield, or Pawtucket.

Weary of his job as a policy pundit with the City Charter Commission, 25-year-old Brett Mandel decided to live his field of dreams by taking off to play baseball. The Northeast High grad was able to score a gig playing second base for the Ogden Raptors - a fledgling minor league team based in Utah. Somehow he talked them into letting him play in exchange for a book about his experience with the ballclub. Two years later, Mandel 27, has traded in his cleats for a job under City Controller Jonathan Saidel but is also dutifully working the promotional junket for his finished book about the Raptors' 1994 season titled, Minor Players, Major Dreams. You can catch him next at Border's in Chestnut Hill April 10 when, among other things, Mandel will rhapsodize on the joys of playing in the minor leagues and "being chased by 10-year-old boys and 16-year-old girls." How does the job of baseball compare to working in city government? "Well, I guess you could say Philadelphia has a minor-league economy." Mandel jokes.

K. Abbott

By W. Speers

Philly assistant controller Brett H. Mandel, just in time for spring, has had a baseball book published by the University of Nebraska Press. Called Minor Players, Major Dreams, it's his account of the 1994 season he spent playing in Utah for a rookie league team. Mandel's a grad of Penn's Fels School of Government.

Jeff Caraska

An unrelenting fast food diet, interminable bus rides and low pay. Sound attractive? Welcome to life in the low minor leagues of baseball. For many, the indignities of such a lifestyle would be welcome for the pursuit of a job in the major leagues.

For Brett Mandel, an assistant Philadelphia city controller, the pursuit of that dream was the basis for his book "Minor Players, Major Dreams."

Mandel, 27, convinced the Ogden Raptors of the Pioneer League to pose him as a ballplayer for the 1994 season. Only the front-office , his teammates and coaching staff were aware of his secret identity.

Mandel would experience the season just as any young hopeful would, enduring and enjoying everything it had to offer.

The only difference between Mandel and his Raptor teammates was he didn't have to worry about being let go because he wasn't getting the job done. He was going to be with the team for the duration.

While that allowed him to pursue his goal of writing a book about the experience, it also provided some personal frustration.

"It was hard not to have the dream myself," Mandel said from his Philadelphia office recently. "You get caught up in it during practice."

Mandel joined the other players in workouts, but knew chances of actually getting on the field were remote at best.

Still, Mandel managed to bat five times. He drove in a run with an infield out in his first appearance, nearly legging out a base hit.

As the season drew to a close, Mandel had hoped for another opportunity and was frustrated when he struck out in the next-to-last game of the season.

His only base-hit that season came in an exhibition game against the Colorado Silver Bullets, a barnstorming women's team. He did get ejected from one game, the umpire believing he had been insulted by Mandel when it was actually one of his teammates.

The real frustration, Mandel said, didn't surface until the following spring.

"It wasn't hard to leave the season behind while baseball wasn't being played," Mandel said. "There were other sports going on. But the next spring was the toughest part, because I knew the guys I'd played with would be chasing their dreams again. I was jealous of those guys who had a chance to go on with their careers."

Mandel still plays ball in a recreational league. He originally presented his idea to the Phillies as a way of learning how to approach minor league clubs with his project. He was essentially told it couldn't be done. Minor-leaguers represent investments by parent clubs.

But the Raptors, a first-year independent team, suited Mandel's needs. "There are only a handful of independents in affiliated leagues." Mandel said. "There was a lot of rejection at all ends of the process."

Luckily for Mandel, the Raptors president Dave Baggot, had a P.T. Barnum flair and decided to let Mandel pursue his book.

Being on the inside meant Mandel was subject to everything his teammates were: fines, public appearances and those never-ending bus rides. "On the east coast, you can drive for two hours, but you're going to see things," Mandel said.

The book is not just a diary of Mandel's experiences. Rather, it is a chronicle of the people and places of the Pioneer League. It's sprinkled with his own wry insights.

Such as the belief that because he was the least talented player on the team, playing in one of the lowest leagues in organized baseball, it qualified him as the worst player in professional baseball.

As spring takes hold, Mandel looks forward to playing more recreation league baseball. And when the Raptors open their new stadium in Ogden this summer, he's been asked to be on hand, signing his books.

"I'm looking forward to it," he said. "The family I stayed with that summer has already told me I have to stay with them."

By Jessica Genova

MINOR PLAYERS, MAJOR DREAMS

By Brett H. Mandel

(University of Nebraska Press, $16.95)

In 1994, Philadelphia policy wonk Brett Mandel (who now works for city Controller Jonathan Saidel) did what most baseball fanatics could only dream of. He walked off the job and onto the playing field. For the next season, 25-year-old Mandel was a second baseman (and benchwarmer) for the Ogden (Utah) Raptors. Now you too can get the dirt on live in the low minors, complete with cheap motels, lonely bus rides and late-night poker. Or as Mandel likes to remember it, "Minor league baseball is where big dreams meet slim chances."

By Jonathan Yardley

MINOR PLAYERS, MAJOR DREAMS

By Brett H. Mandel

Bison. 243 pp. Paperback, $16.95
Four years ago Brett Mandel was 25 years old, working for the Philadelphia government in what eventually proved a losing cause: revision and reform of the city's charter. His work was challenging but sedentary and frustrating. As the reform campaign wound down, Mandel longed for a dramatic change. He wanted to be outdoors, and he wanted to play baseball.

In the end he managed to combine both yearnings with yet a third: to write a book about baseball as it's played in the minor leagues. He had no experience either as a writer or as a professional baseball player, but after circulating inquiries he provoked a sympathetic response from the management of the Ogden Raptors, a rookie league team about to start its first season in a small city in Utah. He was invited to sign on.

"Minor Players, Major Dreams" is the result. It is a charming and engaging if somewhat artless book, an account of its author's love affair with minor league baseball that also, however contrarily, makes the case that you have to be a little bit crazy to play minor league baseball -- to want to live and play under the circumstances that baseball at the bottom dictates.

Not merely were the Ogden Raptors the bottom, they were "the absolute bottom of the baseball world." Not merely were they in a rookie league, the Pioneer League, but they were unaffiliated with any major league farm system and thus were reduced to signing the halt, the lame, the thrice-rejected and the desperate. Mandel felt right at home: "Because I was playing with a team at the lowest level of professional baseball, because this was a team of players who for some reason had been passed over by the scouts of the major-league teams, and because I was the weakest link on the lowest chain -- I was the worst professional baseball player in America."

That agreeably self-mocking passage sets the tone for Mandel's treatment of his attempts to play as a professional. His position was second base, but he played there only once, in an exhibition game against a barnstorming women's team; in that game he got his only hit, such as it was, in five professional at-bats. He wanted to play, but the manager of the Raptors wanted to win, so Mandel sat on the bench, taking his pleasures from the camaraderie of the team, the support of the fans and the sheer novelty of it all.

His interest as author of this book, in any event, was not in himself but in his fellow players. As a longstanding fan of the Philadelphia Phillies, he had been accustomed to sitting in seats that seemed miles from the field, looking down at players who seemed even farther away. He admired the skill of the big-leaguers but, like a lot of baseball fans these days, had grown weary of fat salaries, fatter egos, labor disputes and a deep indifference on the part of players and owners alike to the people in the stands.

Ogden and the Raptors proved useful correctives to this. Like the club's management, the players were in on the real reason for Mandel's presence, but his writing plans seem to have made no difference in their treatment of him. Though he was slightly older than they -- and not much younger than the manager, Willy Ambos, or his coach, Rich Morales -- he was accepted as an equal, and his dogged efforts to improve his play got friendly, enthusiastic support. When he turned his tape recorder on, people talked openly and unembarrassedly to him.

With one or two possible exceptions, the people in Mandel's cast of characters had nowhere to go except down, at least if they wanted to stay in baseball, and since Ogden was "the absolute bottom," down meant out. Yet almost all of them were true to cliche: They stayed in the game not so much out of a conviction that they could reach the majors as out of the sheer love of it. "I love the game": The phrase recurs in one variation or another over and over, until it becomes a leitmotif.

The young players, all eagerness about to be crushed by baseball's cynicism and insularity, are interesting and appealing, but Ambos and Morales steal the show. They are, or want to be, career baseball men, veterans of the minors but still young, determined to find places for themselves in the game yet still precariously employed. Mandel treats them candidly but sympathetically; his portraits are sufficiently engaging that readers of this book who also follow the voluminous publications devoted to minor league ball are likely to be looking up their names for years to come.

Brett Mandel has written a minor book about the minor leagues, but a good and honest one. No Plimptonesque exhibitionism is to be found here, and no new-journalistic narcissism: just a plain, straightforward account that is amusing, revealing and affecting.

By Keith Landgren

Every once in a while a writer has an idea the rest of us can only envy. How about, just for the summer, being a baseball player?

Brett Mandel was able to overcome all the obvious problems. He found a minor league, a very minor league with a brand new team and an extra roster spot, and some understanding management. His baseball abilities were solid enough to avoid embarrassing anyone, and he had the summer free. The result is "Minor Players, Major Dreams."

People who are mad at baseball over the 1994 players' strike aren't usually angry at its lower levels. The arrogance, the limos, the Rolexes, the $10 autographs are in the major leagues. Here in Ogden, Utah, in the independent Pioneer League it's not that way at all. When you get to the Show, to the Yankees or the Cubs, then you can be a creep.

You will not be a creep here in Ogden. In Ogden you sign autographs for free. You stay at the Motel 6 when you're on the road in Helena, Mont., and at Frank and Ruby Sanders' house when you're plying at home. You carry your own bags. There will be burgers and draft beer at dinner, not lobster and fine wine. And somehow during the course of the summer you will learn to play this game.

The attrition rate in baseball is as high as any other sport, but baseball is deceptive. The players look pretty much like the rest of us; they don't weigh 300 pounds and they're not 6-feet, 8-inches tall. Wen you see a kid at Sherman Field with a 90 mph fastball, he looks like Roger Clemens. He could make it in the majors.

He's not Roger Clemens. he will hurt his arm, or flunk out of college before he learns to throw a curve. He will hate working every day, all summer, and just quit. He will throw a tantrum in front of the wrong general manager or strike out four times the one time all summer the scout from the Cardinals shows up.

That kid at Sherman Field is the very best baseball player in his school. Every single player on the Ogden Raptors was the very best player in his school. And as he moves up the baseball ladder, to an affiliated team, to AA ball and to Triple A, where the Omaha Royals play, it gets tougher and tougher.

The 1994 season at Ogden was not an unmitigated tragedy. There are plenty of warm summer days with the grass that shade of green only baseball fields have. But there is a sad theme running throughout. All these athletic, likable kids want to do is get to the net level, play one more season. And they're probably not going to make it.

Mandel was given a cast of characters a novelist could love and he's smart enough to let them create their own plot. Manager Willy Ambos and his assistant Rich Morales are able to keep the personalities under them in control long enough to achieve success. And Mandel includes a "Where Have You Gone?" section to help the reader sort it out.

Pitchers reported for spring training Friday, but that's in Florida and Arizona. In Lincoln, "Minor Players, Major Dreams" will have to do. Things could be worse.

By C.M. Morfit

A man who posed for one season as a professional baseball player has written about his 0 for 5 career in the Pioneer League.

Brett Mandel, a controller for the City of Philadelphia and sometime second baseman, is the author of ``Minor Players, Major Dreams,'' (University of Nebraska Press, $16.95), an insider's view of no-frills minor league ball and discarded pro prospects down to their last out.

Mandel, 27, convinced Ogden Raptors management to let him join the then-independent team for its inaugural season in 1994. Although he practiced and played with the team all summer, Mandel's sole and stated purpose was to add his entry to an already lengthy list of baseball books.

``I'm counting on the fact that people want to buy a million more (baseball books),'' Mandel said. ``I just re-read `Ball Four' last summer. Some folks compare this to `Ball Four,' which I think is a flattering comparison to make.

```Ball Four' was really the first book to go inside the game,'' Mandel said. ``It had the dark side, the underbelly of the game, drugs, husbands running around. And one of the reactions I came across with `Minor Players, Major Dreams' was that it didn't have any of that stuff. But I think that had already been done.'' Mandel, who played for his high school team and remains an avid weekend ballplayer in Philadelphia, scoured publishers and professional teams for 10 months to bring his book idea to fruition.

The result is an enjoyable trip through the Pioneer League, with description s of all the familiar hubs, including Idaho Falls: ``Along the banks of the Snake River the stands of E.F. McDermott Field rose to frame an impressive baseball facility,'' Mandel writes on Page 73. He calls McDermott a ``cozy'' field with ``home run-denying dimensions,'' and expresses delight that ``the showers were even warm.'' Although Mandel was a part of the team, he rarely takes the easy way out by writing about himself. At center stage are the struggles of his teammates, most of whom have organized their lives around the high- stress, high-turnover world of pro ball.

Mandel's candid interviews include insights from assistant Raptors coach Rich Morales, whose father played professionally before he did.

``It was one of those things that as much as baseball has given me, baseball has taken away from me,'' Morales says. ``I mean, I didn't have a stable home life, my parents were always fighting because when you're on the road all the time it's rough on a family.'' Mandel also shows a light touch, relating the time manager Willy Ambos invited a priest to deliver a ``baseball chapel'' in the bullpen. Mandel noticed that the man was wearing Birkenstock sandals, and ``never once mentioned that the Bible actually begins with a baseball verse -- `In the big inning.''' Mandel's coaches knew there was a writer in their midst. His teammates did, too.

``Originally, we thought I could do it on the sly,'' Mandel said, ``but me being there and not being cut looked awful weird, so we just decided OK, we'll tell everybody.'' Mandel says his host family in Ogden had no idea he was not a real prospect. He says they cheered wildly for him on his rare game appearances, and accepted him as a pro player.

``As a matter of fact, they were very encouraging about it,'' he said. ``Every once in a while when I got in, they would say `Oh, great, you got in!' They just accepted it, as I think most folks accepted it.'' The author pointed out that his deal with the Raptors didn't deprive a legitimate prospect of a spot on the team -- a spot was created for him. As it turns out, Mandel said, only two of the 30 Raptors that year are still in baseball.

``For the most part I don't feel sorry for the ones who had the chance,'' Mandel said. ``I guess the ones to feel sorry for are the ones who never had the chance.'' Mandel can now say he got his chance. Although he went hitless, he did drive in one run with a squibber up the middle that he tried in vain to leg out for a single.

``Back home that's a hit,'' Mandel said. ``Leave it to a professional ballplayer to make that play.'' Feb. 5 was the publication date for ``Minor Players, Major Dreams.'' You may need to special-order it.

"At age 25, Mandel left his job to write this entertaining insider's account of playing minor league baseball."

"Back in the mid-1960s, George Plimpton set aside his typewriter to try his luck as a quarterback with the Detroit Lions. The result was Paper Lion (1966), one of the best-selling sports books of its era. Mandel was working as a Philadelphia municipal bureaucrat when he decided to chuck it all for a Paper Lion experience. He received permission from the newly formed Ogden Raptors of baseball's Pioneer League to travel with the team as a player while writing a book of his experiences. Like Plimpton, he was not a real player, but he practiced with the team and tried to experience what his teammates were experiencing as they began the arduous journey upward from the low minors. Mandel doesn't romanticize the experience: the money is poor, and the odds are stacked against the young players, most of whom, he notes incredulously, are unaware of the unique opportunity they've been given. A fine baseball book. - Wes Lukowsky
"Every aspiring big league should read this revealing account of day-to-day life in the low minors"

Hoping for a hit. Brett Mandel is an assistant city controller who loves baseball and likes to write. In 1994 he got a chance to do both when he convinced the Ogden Raptors to carry him on their roster. The book he wrote about life in the lowest rung of the minor leagues, ``Minor Players, Major Dreams,'' is out next week. Mandel managed to get 5 at bats for the season with no hits, making him, he said, ``the worst professional baseball player in America.''

BY MARK SAAL
STANDARD-EXAMINER STAFF

The message for is little Danny and Travis, wherever you are.

Remember that Ogden Raptors baseball player you kids idolized back in the summer of '94, the one you followed around for autographs, souvenirs and just general adoration purposes?

There's something you should know about him. It's nothing, really. A minor technicality. Hardly worth mentioning.

He wasn't really a ballplayer.

In fact, he was an impostor. A stowaway. A counterfeit.

For that entire summer, Brett Mandel wore the teal, blue and white of the Ogden Raptors uniform. He took infield and batting practice with the rest of the team. He sat in the dugout each game, cheering on his alleged teammates. He even got to the plate a time or two, always late in a lopsided game, when there was absolutely, positively no way he could affect the outcome of the game in any sort of remotely meaningful way.

But the truth is, Danny, Travis, your beloved no. 5, Brett Mandel, was no more a professional ballplayer than you or me.

Say it ain't so.

Yes, there is a reason your hero got only five at-bats all season and walked away with a .000 lifetime professional batting average. (That's very, very bad, for you non-sports-fans out there.)

You've heard it said that the pen is mightier than the sword? Well, in this case, the pen was definitely mightier than the baseball bat.

Mandel was not a professional ballplayer, but an aspiring writer, working on a book about the life of the minor league baseball player.

Plimpton wanna-be

Flashback to August 1993. A warm afternoon at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia. Mandel is sitting high in the stands of the huge stadium, watching his team, the Phillies, play the Montreal Expos.

At some point, he turns to his friend and says, "You know what I want to do this summer? I want to play minor league baseball and write a book about what it's really like to be a minor leaguer and tell the world about the young men who put their lives on hold to pursue the dream of playing in the majors."

A sort of, as Mandel described it in a recent telephone interview from his office in Philadelphia, "Paper Lion Meets Bull Durham."

All of which is easier said than done. Most minor league teams are farm clubs for major league teams, and they're not about to give up a valuable roster spot to some George Plimpton wanna-be.

Mandel would have to find an independent team, one not affiliated with any major league teams, and hope its owners would be willing to let him join the squad for a year.

Eventually, Mandel approached the Ogden Raptors, a first-year, unaffiliated team filled with players nobody else wanted.

"He told me his idea and that nobody would give him a chance," said Dave Baggott, one of the Raptors' owners. "One thing we were emphatic about as an independent was giving people a chance. If you can't catch a break with an independent team, you can't catch a break. We used that same reasoning and gave him a chance."

Besides, said Baggott, the team could use all the media exposure it could get. Pay your own way, the Raptors told Mandel, and you're in.

The result is "Minor Players, Major Dreams," a 243-page paperback book about the Ogden Raptors' 1994 inaugural season. Published by Bison Books of the University of Nebraska Press ($16.95), it's scheduled to hit bookstores this month.

Secret identity

The initial idea was that only management and the coaching staff would know of Mandel's true identity, sort of like a superhero. ("Look, up in the batter's box. It's an infielder. It's an outfielder. It's . . . an author?")

However, very early on, it became apparent that those in the know were going to have to let a few more people in on the secret.

"I was aware of the situation but was told he had baseball experience," then-manager Willy Ambos said. "But it was very, very obvious that his skills were not up to those of the rest of the players."

Ambos, who today is a sales coordinator for Utility Trailer Sales of Utah in Salt Lake City, said the situation might not have been so uncomfortable, but when the Raptors started camp, they had four spots left on the team and had invited eight more players to try out: "Now, all of a sudden, we were cutting viable candidates from the team, and they were looking at him (Mandel) and saying, "Wait a minute. This guy is under contract and I'm getting cut?' "

So the players were brought into the loop.

("A somewhat funny byproduct" was that "guys were trying to be quotable around me," Mandel said. "They'd sit in the dugout and say stuff like, "You know, baseball is a lot like life . . .' ")

However, if the ballplayers could see through his disguise, the fans couldn't. After all, Mandel had at least played high school ball and had been cut from his college team twice. He was also a regular in a Sunday adult baseball league in Philadelphia.

"It's probably the wrong word, but you can fake it, a little," he said.

Writing from the inside

Mandel's book has been compared to George Plimpton's "Paper Lion," in which the author wrote about spending time in a Detroit Lions pro football uniform. And while Mandel doesn't mind the comparisons, he believes the two books are actually quite different.

Only a small part of the book uses the premise of "Paper Lion," according to Mandel.

"Part is the vicarious thrill, the "Hey, look, here's a guy just like me, playing pro ball,' " he said. "But the rest of the book focuses on the real players -- what it's like to be a minor league player chasing the dream of making it to the majors."

By joining the team, Mandel could write about the sport from the inside.

"It's a different experience being on the bus and getting yelled at, actually being under curfew, standing at the Taco Bell drive-through in Butte at 4 a.m. trying to get something to eat," he said.

That inside view is what attracted the book's publisher.

"There have been a couple of good minor league books, but they've all been written from the outside," said Dan Ross, director of the University of Nebraska Press.

Ross believes that Mandel, in his "heart of hearts," also hoped he'd be discovered as a ballplayer.

"He's certainly a better writer than a ballplayer, although I think he's chagrined by that."

As manager, Ambos got that same impression.

"I'm sure he wanted to play more than I played him," he said.

Striking out

Mandel admits there were those moments. In his very first at-bat, he hit a sharp grounder that, while Mandel was thrown out at first, scored a runner.

"All of a sudden, you go to sleep that night thinking, "That wasn't so bad. Maybe I could get the kinks out if I could play a few games, and then I could compete with these guys,' " he said.

But those moments would quickly pass. In his four other at-bats, Mandel struck out, leaving him to realize that there was a reason he was passed over by the scouts.

But that didn't stop Mandel from taking advantage of his situation. He was impersonating a pro ballplayer for more reasons than just doing the book. It provided a baseball fanatic like Mandel with the ultimate baseball fantasy camp: spending a year playing for a pro ball club. And when he went back to his Sunday league, the year with the Raptors helped.

"I'm one of the better players," he said.

"Minor Players, Major Dreams" is Mandel's first book. But he's not sure if it counts as his first published piece.

"I once had a joke published in Reader's Digest, does that count?" he said. "Hey, it paid $400, which is more than I've gotten from the book so far."

The book features some rough language and a couple of wild stories (like the bus fight that started when one player urinated on a sleeping teammate), but it primarily remains focused on the subject of baseball. Mandel said some people have asked why it doesn't feature more players hopping in and out of bed with women.

"There were people looking at buying the book who said it doesn't have the kiss-and-tell stuff they were looking for," Mandel said. He remains steadfast in his choices.

"This book is about baseball players chasing dreams," he said. "While, yeah, the fight on the bus was weird, focusing on that would detract from the guys who were chasing their dreams, guys like Doug O'Neill and Willy Ambos."

Still dreams of Ogden

Today, Mandel works as assistant city controller for Philadelphia; he's currently analyzing the homeless problem in his city. Which would he rather be doing, playing a game or eradicating homelessness?

"I still have dreams that I'm back in Ogden playing," he said. "I never have dreams I'm in the office deciding on fiscal policy."

The Raptors are considering bringing Mandel back, next season, not as a player, but for a book-signing.

A final note to Danny and Travis. Don't throw away all that Brett Mandel memorabilia just yet. Mandel is still grateful for your loyalty, and he's hoping to get you copies of his book.

And it's important you boys realize that Mandel isn't just any old mediocre ballplayer. As the author admits in his book:

"It was official -- because I was playing with a team at the lowest level of professional baseball, because this was a team of players who for some reason had been passed over by the scouts of the major-league teams, and because I was the weakest link on the lowest chain -- I was the worst professional baseball player in America."

That ought to make his autograph worth something.

(c) Standard Examiner

Baseball is just around the corner, and a paperback has arrived to halp get the juices to flowing.

Brett H. Mandel is a baseball nut, a dreamer who works for a city politician in Philadelphia. He grew tired of his 9-to-5 job and finally decided to put his life on hold for one summer to pursue his baseball dreams.

In Minor Players, Major Dreams (Bison Books $16.95), Mandel's sole objective was to play minor league baseball and write a book about his experiences. There was a catch. He had no team.

He found one in the Ogden (Utah) Raptors of the Pioneer League, and the door opened for him.

Coming face-to-face with his boyhood dream in such an unusual manner provided the experience that led to this exciting book.

BY KURT KRAGTHORPE
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

For the Ogden Raptors, this was no secret infiltration. Teammates knew that Brett Mandel was carrying a bat, glove and word processor in his season as a minor-league infielder.

Only Dave Baggott -- the baseball executive whose innovations included having the scoreboard command fans to ``BARK!'' at the old Derks Field -- would play along with something like this. In 1994, Baggott and the Raptors signed Mandel as a second baseman and allowed him to keep notes and even appear in a few games.

Mandel's Minor Players, Major Dreams was published 2 years after his summer in Ogden. The time lapse takes away some of the impact, although he provides updates about the players. And the way Murray's Jeremy Winget and West Jordan's Shane Jones are prominently featured makes the book fun for Utahns.

The Raptors operated independently during that first season -- and the next -- in Ogden, before becoming affiliated with the Milwaukee Brewers. The independence allowed them to keep Mandel as an extra player, making the standard $650 monthly salary. The Philadelphia assistant city controller managed to look the part, at least enough that Ogden fans figured he was a genuine Raptor.

Mandel's writing approach is more like George Plimpton's than Jim Bouton's, even if five official at-bats all season could only take his story so far. His personal highlights were driving in a meaningless run on a ground out at Butte, delivering a single in an exhibition game against the Silver Bullets women's team and placing second to Winget in the fans' vote for most popular player -- after a season-long effort to stuff the ballot box.

His descriptions of players' indiscretions off the field are fairly vague and names are rarely used -- except in the case of a drunken fight on a busride home from Helena, Mont.

Willie Ambos, a former Salt Lake Trappers' pitching star and the Raptors' first-year manager, is painted as both a sympathetic and pathetic character, trying desperately to get through to the players. The book's best part are the interviews with Ambos and selected players.

Ambos' tirades and the players' reactions to them are sprinkled throughout, but the manager becomes more human when he explains his dilemma. ``The players think that when we lose a game, they feel bad about it. I feel bad about it . . . and I'm usually the middle man, so I have to eat s--- and give s--- at the same time. A lot of times I don't even relay some of the crap that comes from hierarchy solely because I'm trying to protect them, but they don't understand that.''

Jones talks about his frustration about leading the country in home runs as a University of Utah senior, only to be overlooked in the major league draft.

``The scouts don't know what they're doing,'' he says. ``I've said that from day one. They'd rather take a guy that runs track -- 3.6 to first base and hits a buck ten [.110] -- than take a guy that can hit .360 and not run a lick. . . . They're after speed. They're not after the real talent of the game.''

Winget becomes the Pioneer League batting champion after a plea from ex-Atlanta Braves star Dale Murphy allowed him to play. Other teams could block his return to the league as a veteran player; the Idaho Falls Braves held out until Murphy intervened.

The goal of every Raptor -- even Mandel, secretly -- was to attract an offer from a major-league organization. More players were released from Ogden during the season than moved on afterward, although Winget signed with San Diego and Jones returned to the Raptors before getting a '96 spring-training shot with Milwaukee.

They're out of pro ball now -- and so is the author, who concludes that all he has left are ``minor dreams.''

"While it's no Ball Four - major-leaguer Jim Bouton's hilarious demystification of baseball - Mandel's book has a lot going for it....The book's best bits are glimpses of ordinary baseball life - real manager swearing, real bus-ride trivia games, real too-much-beer dismissal stories - and Mandel sprinkles them around but leaves you wanting more....but when he's describing the games, or the ballparks, or the surprise of seeing Red Sox great Luis Tiant take the field as an opposing team's pitching coach, the shortcomings are forgiven and Mandel makes an appropriate and likable spy. Bonus appearances include those by the Silver Bullets (suspiciously the only women who make it into the tale, and not far into it at that), and Rich Morales Sr., erstwhile White Sox shortstop and father of the Raptors' second-in-command, Rich Morales Jr."

A baseball fan chucks the 9-to-5 world to write about a season in minor league baseball

"In the spring of 1994, avid rec-league baseballer Mandel, 25 ditched his job as an assistant city comptroller in Philadelphia and took to the road with the players and coaches of the Ogden (Utah) Raptors, an independent class-A rookie-league outfit playing in the Pioneer League. Clad in a team uniform, and with pen in hand (all team personnel were aware that he was chronicling their season), Mandel took to the diamond, albeit seldom in game situations, in an effort to get inside the heads of players, coaches, and managers. For some, like Shane Jones, a protean slugger at the college level who was not drafted by a pro team, the Raptors offered the first step toward possible stardom. For others, like manager Willy Ambos, it was likely the last act of their baseball career. Mandel records his subjects' lives as they win some and lose some, spend endless hours on the bus, talk baseball, and engage in youthful hijinks."

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