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‘The Streak’: A new documentary brings back fond old memories

With the recent release of “The Streak,” a documentary film about the year a rookie league team in Salt Lake City won 29 games in a row, a winning streak longer than any other team at any level in the history of professional baseball, Glenn Seninger suddenly found himself transported back to a time when his hair was black, his future was unlimited and a salary of $550 a month qualified as a good deal.

It was 1987. Reagan was president. “The Simpsons” made its TV debut. “Les Miserables” opened on Broadway. Nike introduced Air Max I. And in Salt Lake City, Seninger, halfway through his junior year at the University of Utah, was hired, for the aforementioned $550 a month, to be the media relations director for the Salt Lake Trappers.

The Trappers were an anomaly in the baseball world, a professional team made up entirely of free agents, aka ballplayers no one else had drafted or wanted and were clinging for dear life onto their fading big league dreams.

The club had come to Salt Lake two seasons earlier, bankrolled by the $500 the owner, a Californian named Van Schley, maxed out on his Amex card. This was the last chance saloon, baseball style.

Players got paid $500 a month (less than Seninger, who, for obvious reasons, kept his salary secret). They played 70 games in 73 days. A grind of a schedule. But there was no lack of ballplayers who wanted to be Trappers. The team held a tryout prior to the 1987 season and 200 hopefuls turned up, including, Seninger remembers, a kid who rode the bus from Pittsburgh for three days and showed up wearing overhauls and work boots. He threw faster than anyone there, above 90 mph, but still didn’t make the cut, nor did anyone else. Baseball can be a harsh mistress.

The Trappers played at Derks Field (later the site of Smith’s Ballpark), a cement relic of a stadium angled beneath the Wasatch mountains — offering arguably the prettiest view in all of baseball. Seninger shared a windowless office under the bleachers with Dave Baggott, the club’s new assistant general manager who played on the team the year before. (The same Dave Baggott who would go on to buy the Ogden Raptors and become a local minor league legend). They had metal World War II metal desks. It was an upgrade when Seninger showed up one day with a couch he’d bought on the way to work at Deseret Industries.

The ballclub was no frills. They gave free game tickets to a man who would retrieve balls hit out of the park during batting practice — because they couldn’t afford to lose the balls. The groundskeeper, Tom Hassett, slept at the ballpark during homestands. A regular called Foul Ball Bob held a pool each game, at a dollar per entry, on how many foul balls would go into the stands that night.

But as June bled into July, the “Bull Durham” vibe turned to another curiosity: the team that couldn’t lose. After starting out 3-3, the scrapheap Trappers beat and kept beating Butte, Great Falls, Pocatello, Medicine Hat, Billings and Idaho Falls — Pioneer League opponents that were run by big league franchises and filled with players who made the cuts the Trappers players didn’t.

It was when the Trappers closed in on the rookie league record of 19, set by Lethbridge, that people started taking notice. The radio stations that routinely rebuffed Seninger when he called in with Trappers updates, started putting him on the air.

The team was charmed. It seemed like everybody contributed, on and off the field. Seninger gets an assist for the day he took the team’s two Japanese players, Kouichi Ikeue and Yasuhiro Hiyama, to the Kyoto restaurant on 11th East and fed them sashimi. Ikeue pitched and won that night’s game.

Most memorable was the night the PA announcer in Pocatello lent a helping hand. The Trappers were losing 3-1 in the sixth inning, with dark storm clouds hovering, when the announcer said, “The Streak is over.” Seninger remembers Rafael Landestoy, the former big leaguer who was managing Pocatello, looking up at the announcer’s booth shaking his head with absolute incredulity. The black clouds parted, the Trappers won 9-4, their 23rd in a row.

By the time they set the new record of 28, eclipsing the record of 27 held jointly by 1902 Corsicana Oilers and, more significantly, the 1921 Baltimore Orioles, Derks Field was overrun by more than 10,000 spectators. ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” was there, along with the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, dozens of other out-of-town scribes and New York’s fabled sports talk show, WFAN, which was piping play-by-play announcer Randy Kerdoon’s broadcast back to the Big Apple.

The next night, The Trappers ran the streak to 29 with a win at home before finally coming back to earth with a loss the next night in Billings.

Somehow, 38 seasons have come and gone since then.

Soon after its release in August, Seninger — who has enjoyed a successful four-decade career in sales for Oracle Corporation since leaving the employ of the Trappers — made sure to see the new documentary on the big screen before it went to streaming.

“I thought they did a great job,” he says, giving high marks to the filmmakers. “And it was well overdue, right? If you remember, after the streak, there were rumors that Ron Howard was going to do a movie.”

His only complaint: the doc wasn’t longer.

“The hard part with that short amount of time is you just can’t include all the funny stories, introduce all the characters, talk about everything that went into the magic that was the streak.”

Nonetheless, the film got Glenn Seninger thinking about the old days. Sometimes that’s the best part.

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