Ebook: The Legends of Last Place: A Season With America’s Worst Professional Baseball Team

Lifelong baseball fanatic and former college ballplayer Abe Streep had long since grown disillusioned with the slick spectacle of modern major league baseball when he discovered the Santa Fe Fuego, a scrappy upstart team struggling through its first season in an independent professional league few baseball fans had ever heard of. The Fuego players were paid barely $50 a week. They slept on the couches of sympathetic fans and cleaned up the trash in the ballpark after games. As the last-place team in the least prestigious professional league in America, they had acquired a unique distinction: They were officially the worst professional baseball team in America.

The Fuego might not have been winners, but they were fighters and dreamers, willing to suffer the indignities and disappointments of life in the minor minor leagues for a shot—however remote—at the big time. In The Legends of Last Place, Streep spends a season with the team—the grizzled Vietnam vet coach with his number tattooed on his back, the pitcher attempting his third comeback as the oldest pro in the game, the one-time Mets recruit fallen on hard times—and finds something he thought had gone missing from professional baseball: its heart.


The Atavist No. 24, April 2013