Know Your Foe: The Yuba-Sutter High Wheelers

Welcome to Know Your Foe, your friendly fast facts to get to know the Ballers’ opponents at Raimondi Park this season.

Next up: The Yuba-Sutter High Wheelers!

Their Season So Far:

The High Wheelers, like the Ballers, have been one of the best teams in the league their entire young existence. The Wheelers won it all last year and barely finished out of playoff contention in the first half of this season. The teams met last week in Marysville, where the Ballers took five of six games. Yuba-Sutter comes into Raimondi with an overall record of 37-29 and a second-half record of 8-10.

The Wheelers have two top-ten duos in the league: Cuba Bess (#34) and Gio Brusa (#19) in home runs, and Bobby Lada (#11) and Parker Coddou (#5) for steals. On the mound, Christian Womble has six wins, including a no-decision six innings against the Ballers on Friday, and Brett Wozniak has an ERA of 3.38, including six innings and only two earned runs against the Ballers on Wednesday.

In the second half, the two northern California rivals play each other 18 times, requiring some big brainy baseball talking heads to call it The Series To Watch across all of independent baseball. And, meeting that moment, the teams’ cleared the benches on Saturday night in Marysville. The rivalry, as the theys of the world love to say, is alive and well.

Hometown: Marysville, California  

-              Marysville’s population is about 13,000, and it neighbors Yuba City, population around 70,000.

-              Marysville is named after Mary Murphy Covillaud, a survivor of the doomed Donner Party, who perhaps avoided some of the worst culinary…unpleasantness…due to her age, barely 15 at the time.

-              The eponymous Sutter Buttes, as diligent superfan Mike Chouinard has recently noted, are volcano remnants often referred to as the “world’s smallest mountain range.”

-              As plugged on the wonderful “Wide World of Baseball” segment on our own B’s broadcast with Nevada Cullen, Marysville features both in the “official” Tom Waits lyrics for “Burma Shave”—Hell Marysville ain't nothing but a wide spot in the road—as well as one of his monologues waxing Waitsily in a performance at Austin City Limits in 1978: This small little town, a place called Marysville. It's up around Yuba City, Gridley, Chico, they're all the same. The names are different. It takes about... oh 23 miles and you're in the next one and they got a Foster Freeze just like they had in the one you were trying to get out of... 

-              Another around the globe: Marysville is home to the historic Bok Kai Temple, a centerpiece of its longstanding Chinese heritage, and Yuba City has a prominent Sikh community that  hosts the Nagar Kirtan parade ever November, one of the largest outside India.

-              Stephen Johnson Field was elected alcalde of Marysville after only three days in town, instituted a whipping post as punishment, and later went on to become the second-longest serving US Supreme Court Justice at over 34 years (in a profession that is known for some looong tenures).

-              The actor Larry Bagby was born in Marysville, and in true Hocus Pocus irony, played the iconic role of Ernie/“Ice,” the teen who bullies a recent California transplant to the East Coast with such Golden State burns as “tubular” and “Hollywood.” (The actors also re-created the scene decades later.)

Mascot:  Axel!

-              A cuddly-yet-dignified bear with a top hat? Yes please.

-              Axel and Scrappy are developing their own, food-based rivalry, with Scrappy giving in to his scroungier instincts and stealing a hot dog or two last week in Marysville.

Team History:

-              The High Wheelers and Ballers began play last year as twin expansions teams with a shared ownership group in California for the Pioneer League. The rivalry was immediate.

-              In their first season, in incredible fashion, the High Wheelers beat the Ballers in a tiebreaking playoff semifinal game and then and won the championship, defeating the Glacier Range Riders.  At the time, the High Wheelers players may have had something to say about it to Oakland fans.

-              After playing last season at UC Davis’s Dobbins Stadium, they moved to Marysville and now play at Bryant Field, which previously hosted the Drakes and Gold Sox. The park has its own “splash hits,” where fair and foul balls land in Ellis Lake, which runs behind the first-base line and beyond right field.

-              This season, the team scored 121 runs in a single week, *believed* to be the most weekly runs in professional baseball ever, beating a record from 1930 held by a little nothing nobody team called the New York Yankees.

-              The team also helped pitcher Brandon McPherson sign with the Houston Astros organization this season after only two starts (Ballers fans are pretty glad we don’t have to face him).

Best Promos:

-              A visit and first pitch from future Hall of Famer and Bay Area (and Carmichael, CA) legend Dusty Baker!

-              A collaboration with a pumpkin farm!

-              Aloha Night! (Give me a ukelele any day.)

-              $2 Tuesdays with $2 beers and dogs!

What to Watch For:

-              Invaders! High Wheelers head of marketing Nick Harksen sauntered into Raimondi Park before the Marysville series to scout out the competition, and no one’s saying he won’t have the gall to do it again…he might even bring Axel and some vocal Wheelers fans with him.

-              Though their manager, Billy Horton, also loves baseball, has lived in Michigan, and writes a blog, there is no relation with yours truly. (Hortons of the world…unite?)