Published: July 10, 2009 11:12 pm      

Mercer Cup series renews in Bluefield

BLUEFIELD — The 18th year of the Mercer Cup series between the Bluefield Orioles and Princeton Rays will energize the stands at Bowen Field for the next three evenings.

The neighboring Appalachian League teams are scheduled to play 11 games this season — seven in Bluefield — to decide the fate of the tall trophy that was on display last week in the courtyard of the Orioles, the 2008 series champions by a 6-3 margin.

“There’ll be tons of fans, screaming and yelling,” said Princeton pitcher Joey Callender, who has been in three of the series already. “We love to have our fans’ support. They’re the best, as far as I’m concerned. They support us, on and off the field.”

Orioles general manager Mike Showe said, “The fans in this series are well into it — it’s the whole Bluefield-Princeton thing.”

“It’s great to keep that trophy,” he said Friday. “We’re looking to keep it here for a long time.”

“We’re starting to get pumped up,” Callender reported Friday afternoon, just before the team bus left for Pulaski.

He said that on Thursday, after the Rays’ home game was rained out, he and some teammates were eating pizza at a restaurant in Athens. “We heard about it on the radio,” he said. “We knew it was a big deal. We started smiling at each other.”

Rays outfielder Brian Bryles said, “We feel like we should at least try to win this year because we know how important it is to Princeton. ...”

He said that as professional baseball players, the members of the Rays and Orioles arrived without any kind of “rivalry” mentality, but the message gets delivered nonetheless.

“You hear the fans talking about it, and how much they really want it, they can actually get you to feel like it’s a high-school rivalry game,” he said.

Orioles pitcher Vito Frabizio, in his first Appy League season, told Daily Telegraph sports editor Brian Woodson that the people in Bluefield are “always talking about baseball, and everybody is talking about beating Princeton.”

Princeton won the series in 2005-2007 and, by virtue of their three straight wins, got to take permanent possession of the third cup created to mark the annual competition.

Bluefield leads the overall series 10-6-1. In the tie year (1994), when each team won five games, the Orioles were allowed to retain the cup as “defending champions.”

Jim Holland, Princeton’s general manager, said, “It’s truly big for us and Bluefield, both, to have created something like this. These are the levels that we were aspiring to when the Cup was first created in ’92.

“That’s what you aspire to, but you don’t know whether it will ever get there or not. So when it does, it really makes you feel good.”

He said that the goal all along, for both franchises, “was to increase the interest in Appalachian League baseball.”

Holland noted, “Obviously, the players do the work. They swing the bats, they catch the ground balls. It’s their competition that they’re playing for. But the fans on both sides of the county, I think, really spur that effort along, and (elevates) it to the magnitude that it is ... whoever wins.”

“Fans on both sides are proud of it when they win it, whoever it is.”

Both teams’ field managers are in their first season with their teams.

Bluefield manager Einar Diaz said, “This is my first year in the league, and I hear rumors that the fans come here and the fans from Bluefield go over there (to Princeton). I want to see that,” he said with a laugh. “It’s like, 15 or 20 minutes over there.”

“We will see, we’ll see what happens,” he said.

Jared Sandberg, the Rays’ field chief, said, “It’s an exciting time. It creates more of a competitive atmosphere for the players, the fans and the people of Mercer County.”

On Thursday, he said that he planned to introduce the topic after the Rays’ series with Pulaski. “We will treat it as just another game, but I’ll tell them there is an importance to the fans and the community.

“Bringing (the trophy) back to Princeton would be exciting for the Princeton Rays and their fans. It’d be pretty big.”

The Rays’ Callender knew that the trophy currently belongs to Bluefield, but had a positive prediction. “Last year, we struggled at times, but this year is a different story.”

Jamie Nelson, the former Princeton manager who won four of five Mercer Cup series during his tenure, was helping out the Rays this week and called the phenomenon “a season within a season.”

“When we win, they (the Princeton fans) love it,” he said. “For me, it was a lot of fun when we won. ... To have something to play for, an incentive inside of the season, was really neat. It was a good experience.”

Nelson, a roving coach in the Rays’ farm system, said, “We knew, with the way we were drafting — getting high school players in here — with your Danvilles and your Elizabethtons, that playoffs were really not realistic, or probable.

“With that in mind, having a series against another team, an 11-game series, was a lot of fun. ... I think it’s a little extra incentive, and it’s pretty neat, and hopefully these kids will feel the same way, once they experience it.”

Game time is 7 p.m. this evening, which will also be Town of Bluefield, Va., Night at the ballpark, which Showe said will include promotion of local businesses.

Sunday’s outing will feature a post-game home run hitting contest for fans. Monday is Bluefield State College Night, with free T-shirts for the first 500 fans.

— Contact Tom Bone at

tbone@bdtonline.com