'Ain't No Place in the World Like This Here'
Sports Illustrated
The playing rules at the Long Time are not so much rules as they are an ethos. Both dugouts must abide by them. They go like this:
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These might seem like simple attempts at eccentricity, a quirky revision of the long list of recent suggestions to make baseball more fun. They are not. (For one thing, if you’re at the Long Time, you believe that baseball is already plenty fun.) Instead, these rules are like anything else at this ball field on the eastern outskirts of Austin, which is to say that they have been designed with care and purpose.
The Long Time is the home park of the Texas Playboys, a sandlot club of mostly musicians, photographers, filmmakers and other artists. Their captain is first baseman and pitcher Jack Sanders, who is also the team founder and the man who built the ball field from the ground up. The Playboys existed before they had a diamond of their own, playing in Austin parks and going on short road trips. But for five years now they’ve made their home at the Long Time. Hundreds of season-ticket holders come not only to watch the Playboys face teams from around the region but also to catch whatever other performances might be in store from a club full of creatives—say, an acoustic set from a player’s new record during the seventh-inning stretch.
For Sanders, 45, the Long Time is an extension of his architectural practice. The place is made largely from found materials, with scrap metal salvaged from a vodka distillery and a home dugout that used to be an old chicken coop. Every part of it is thoughtfully constructed—the hand-lettering on the outfield signs, the modest stage behind the bleachers, the bistro lights strung behind the backstop. On a sticky July night Sanders looked out at the field after a doubleheader, sipping a beer to a soundtrack of crickets while the last of the sun slipped away behind him. He reached for a term that an architecture professor of his would use: .
“The best of design, and of art, is something that’s way beyond what we’re capable of imagining,” Sanders explains. “It finds its own special story.” That’s how he sees the field that he has built in this stretch of floodplain. It’s how he sees the brand of baseball that has grown here, too—freer and kinder and more interesting than anything he ever imagined.
There are adult baseball leagues of varying structures and flavors all around the country, some tethered to tradition and some freewheeling, some competitive and some very much not. But sandlot ball is its own particular category. It doesn’t have to be played on an actual sandlot, but it does have to feel as if it could be, with the same energy and possibility invited by a vacant neighborhood patch. It’s meant to evoke the baseball you played when you were a kid, even before Little League, when all you knew was that you loved the game.
The Playboys don’t belong to any formal organization so much as to a loose confederation of teams joined by “a common thread,” says Dave Mead, a photographer who has been on the Playboys’ roster since their first game, in 2006. The logistics that might otherwise be handled by a league infrastructure all get worked out eventually. It’s more important that everyone is on board with the spirit of the thing. Joining the Playboys or another sandlot squad is less about playing ability than cultural fit. (There are no formal tryouts, but there are “vibe checks,” as one visiting South Austin Parakeets player puts it.) Throwback uniforms, whimsical team names and elaborate pregame rituals are critical. The score is not.
When Sanders was studying architecture at Auburn, he participated in an off-campus design program called the Rural Studio, in Newbern, Ala. He came across a baseball team there called the Tigers. The men were mostly in their 50s and 60s, playing with a sort of earnest joy that he hadn’t realized could be available to adults and using each game to raise money. The cash typically went toward flowers for funerals and dignified burials—simple, vital community needs filled by baseball, which “sort of blew my mind,” Sanders says. As his thesis project, he built a new backstop for their field. And a few years after returning to his native state to attend grad school at the University of Texas, Sanders decided to form a team of his own, with a spirit close to what he had seen in Newbern, and take it to Alabama to play the Tigers.
He started calling up friends and friends of friends, designers and architects and the like, to ask whether they wanted to join. The answer was a resounding .
“Jack is one of those people that everything he touches kind of turns to magic,” says his wife, Ann Tucker, also an architectural designer. The two were dating when he had the idea for the team, and watching him line up participants was like the Pied Piper, Tucker says.
In three days Sanders had 25 teammates. They named themselves the Texas Playboys after Bob Wills’s swing band of the 1940s. They went to face the Tigers and it was a delight, something they knew they wanted to do again. So the Playboys did—and then they started thinking about traveling elsewhere, scheduling a series with a sandlot-style team in New Orleans. What if they could play more regularly at home, in Austin, against people who felt the same way about baseball?
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