They own baseball's longest winning streak. The story doesn't end there

When he heard the story about the 1987 Salt Lake City Trappers, Kelyn Ikegami knew it was one that would resonate with baseball fans. And anyone with a dream.

“How in the world,” he thought to himself, “do people not know about this?”

Ikegami was a media arts student at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. When he had moved there for school, he figured he was putting his baseball fandom on the backburner. He had fallen in love with the sport in his native Tokyo, where Nippon Professional Baseball is a popular pastime. And that love had grown deeper when Ikegami’s family relocated to Seattle in 2001 -- the same year another Japan native named Ichiro Suzuki won American League Rookie of the Year and MVP while propelling the Mariners to a record-tying regular-season win total.

But Utah? Ikegami knew nothing about baseball in Utah.

Until a friend told him about this independent team that, in one magical summer, had become the toast of the sport and captured national attention by winning the most consecutive games in professional history.

As an aspiring filmmaker, Ikegami knew this was a story he had to tell.

“Baseball,” he says, “is the dreamers’ sport. And the Trappers were the perfect embodiment of baseball.”

If you were around and alert to sports stories in 1987, perhaps you did hear the story of the Trappers -- a band of unwanted, undrafted players who suited up for a club that was the only one in the eight-team, rookie-level Pioneer League to have no affiliation with a Major League franchise. Playing a schedule that pitted them against teams featuring legit big league prospects, the Trappers went on a 29-game winning streak that remains the longest in American professional baseball history, then stormed away with the league title.

That’s the story The Plains -- a film and commercial production company featuring the director Ikegami, producer Hunter Phillips, cinematographer Jared Jakins and executive producer Tyler Measom -- set out to tell in their debut full-length feature “The Streak,” which premiered last fall at the Nashville Film Festival and captured the Audience Award for feature documentary.

But the film world is a lot like the baseball world, in that only a fraction of participants reach the highest level. And in telling the story of the Trappers, Ikegami has seen a bit of his own story reflected back at him.

“This is the first feature-length documentary I’ve ever directed,” he says. “I have a chance, and this may be my last chance. Once I make the film, it’s up to the world to tell me what I get to do next.”

That’s something the members of the Salt Lake City Trappers experienced back in 1987.

* * * * * * * *

Frank Colston calls it “the gift of desperation.”

That’s an odd phrase, isn’t it? Look up “desperation” in a thesaurus, and it spits words like “hopelessness,” “heartache” and “misery” back at you.

Some gift.

But Colston, the catcher and captain of the ’87 Trappers, speaks from experience when he says desperation can be channeled into something positive and life-changing.

“It’s very hard to think of desperation as a gift,” he says. “That’s just kind of not normal. But we weren’t very normal, either.”

Colston’s story is typical of a member of that Trappers team. He was born in East St. Louis, Ill., where he fell in love with the Cardinals and played the game day and night. He suited up in college -- first for Southwestern Illinois College and then for Louisiana Tech. A Yankees scout showed some interest in him, but the 1986 amateur Draft came and went, and Colston’s name was never called.

Desperation had set in for the young man whose only dream, only goal and only hope had been to play ball professionally.

And that’s when Van Schley called.

Schley was an artist who embarked upon -- well, actually, stumbled into -- the professional baseball world by purchasing the Texas City Stars, a founding franchise in the independent Lone Star League in 1977.

“I got into baseball by mistake,” Schley says. “I read a story in Sports Illustrated about this rag-tag league being formed, and it looked interesting. I got fascinated by it and went to a league meeting in San Antonio. I ended up raising my hand and getting the Texas City team.”

Schley went on to serve as an executive for a variety of clubs in the ensuing years. Despite no real baseball scouting background, he developed a reputation as a shrewd talent evaluator, beginning by putting together the 1978 Northwest League champion Grays Harbor Loggers squad. Schley also became involved with a television documentary production company named TVTV, which featured an actor and comedian named Bill Murray, who briefly suited up for the ’78 Loggers.

By the mid-1980s, Schley and Murray were both part of a group of managing partners of the Salt Lake City Trappers, an independent entry in the short-season rookie Pioneer League. Schley scoured the country for former college players who had gone undrafted and even found a couple pitchers who had been cast aside in the professional ranks in their native Japan.

Schley signed these guys up using his personal American Express card.

“Every year, you’d meet more people and find coaches around the country that you could trust,” Schley says. “You’d meet the right people to help you get the right players.”

That’s how players like Colston got their call and their lifeline. Their chance to make the most of that “gift of desperation.”

“It would have been so much easier to believe what the scouts believed,” Colston says. “But we didn’t believe them.”

When the 1987 Trappers convened at their home park known as Derks Field to continue their dream of reaching the bigs while collecting a mere $500 per month, there was a winning tradition to uphold. Despite the lack of affiliation and the hurried assembly of this cast of baseball orphans, the Trappers had won the Pioneer League championship in their first two seasons of existence in 1985 and 1986.

Still, no one could imagine what that ’87 club would accomplish.

After splitting a season-opening six-game road trip, the Trappers played their home opener on June 25, storming back from a 6-0 deficit to defeat Pocatello, 12-6.

That was the beginning of a win streak that would last more than a month.

As the team began to close in on the then-professional record of 27 straight -- set in 1902 by the Corsicana Oilers of the Class D Texas League and matched in 1921 by the Baltimore Orioles of the Double-A International League -- it became a national sensation. Reporters from Sports Illustrated, the New York Times, USA Today, CNN and ESPN, to name just a few, descended upon Derks Field to tell the tale of the baseball rejects storming toward the baseball history books.

“There is an inherent motivation among the Trappers, who are always out to prove they belong, that mistakes were made in the draft, that they are worthy of a contract with a Major League organization,” Ross Newhan wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “Sharing a line with Corsicana and Baltimore in the record book is memorable stuff, but the bottom line is that the streak has attracted scouts, media and national notoriety. It has proved they can play.”

Murray was a regular in the stands, even bringing rock star Huey Lewis along with him to sing the National Anthem before one game. And in Salt Lake, the Trappers themselves were rock stars, the toast of local watering hole Duffy’s Tavern.

“The thing is, we were blowing people out,” says third baseman Jon Leake. “So there was never any pressure.”

So how did this team full of outcasts outplay the teams full of bonus babies?

“We all had a common enemy,” Leake says. “[The other teams] had something we wanted, and so there was nothing sweeter than beating them.”

To give you a sense of the Trappers' dominance, consider this: Aided by the altitude of Salt Lake City, they hit .320 as a team and had three of the league’s top hitters in terms of batting average, with first baseman/DH Matt Huff leading the way with a .417 mark, followed by Colston at .397 and outfielder Adam Casillas fourth in the circuit at .385.

This band of predominantly college-experienced players also benefited from their relative experience. The Trappers’ average batting age (21.8) and pitching age (21.4) were both the highest in the Pioneer League that season. In many games they were playing rosters littered with teenagers: who, even if they had higher ceilings, were still comparatively raw in terms of baseball skill.

The Trappers matched the record on July 24 and broke it the following night, with a 13-3 home victory over Pocatello in front of 9,968 fans.

There would be one more victory to reach 29 before a fluke play -- a possible shoestring catch in center field that was ruled by the umps to have hit the grass first, leading to the Trappers’ opponent scoring three game-changing runs -- ended it abruptly.

“I think we played .500 ball the rest of the year,” Leake says with a laugh. “It was a streak hangover. My only regret about the streak is I never really looked up into the stands to soak it all in because I was trying to focus on baseball.”

There would be plenty of time, after the Trappers went on to win the league championship, to reflect on what they had accomplished. There have been many “Remember when?” pieces written in the decades since. And in 2012, the Triple-A Salt Lake Bees, who had long since replaced the Trappers as the city’s Minor League entry, hosted members of the ’87 team -- as well as Murray -- for a 25^th anniversary reunion.

So the Trappers, unquestionably, made the most of that “gift of desperation.”

But as Ikegami’s film explores, that’s only half the story.

* * * * * * * *

If the story of the 1987 Trappers was a traditional sports movie, it would end with the championship celebration.

That’s not conjecture. That’s literally how “Trappers Streak From Behind the Plate” -- a script written by Colston – comes to a close. After his playing days, Colston went on to do some acting and took a screenwriting class. All these years later, he’s still finessing the script, but the ending is intact.

“Hey guys, way to go!” the Schley character says to the players in the champagne-soaked clubhouse. “What a great job, what a great season. Here’s a toast to you guys!”

The team erupts in celebration.

Cue the credits.

While Colston’s movie remains unmade, Ikegami’s documentary picks up where it would have left off. “The Streak” has an 87-minute run time, but the baseball streak itself is over by minute 45.

It’s the back half of the documentary that is more compelling. And sad. And redemptive. And real. And every other adjective that resides in our complicated lives.

The story of the Trappers ultimately contains a question most of us are confronted with at one time or another: What do you do when your dreams don’t come true?

Yes, the Trappers’ season ended in champagne and in the history books. But all of this took place in rookie ball, which might as well have been a million miles from the Majors. And though 13 of the 1987 Trappers did go on to play in affiliated baseball, none reached the game’s highest level.

So there is a dramatic dichotomy to the story -- a dream season taking place amid a bigger dream that didn’t materialize.

“How do you not let the weight of past failures not strip you of your youth?” Ikegami asks. “How do you recover from that?”

As he met with many of the men who made up the ’87 Trappers, Ikegami found himself drawn to that question and to the lives and stories of four people, in particular: Colston, who owns and runs Frank’s Sundown & Corner Kitchen in Beckemeyer, Ill.; Leake, who went on to become a physical education teacher and is now raising his four young children on Long Island; outfielder Ed Citronnelli, who now runs a ministry based in Arlington, Texas; and pitcher Koichi Ikeue, who is tracked down in his native Japan.

What we see in the film is how, for both Ikeue and Leake, tortured relationships with their tough-love fathers drove them to dissatisfaction with careers that, while unquestionably successful in one sense, didn’t pan out as planned.

Says Ikegami: “For [Ikeue] to be like, ‘My dad was disappointed with me and always giving me pointers,’ and then talking to Jon Leake in New York and him saying very similar things, there’s this universal element that is crossing the ocean and the boundaries of our cultures and uniting us together.”

Another bonding element, unfortunately, was alcohol. The Trappers were hard partiers, and some of their members let the party go too long.

One of the team’s most magnetic players was their handsome and talented shortstop Jim Ferguson, who battled alcoholism for many years before passing away in 2018, at the age of 53.

Colston overcame his own addiction to alcohol, which is no small feat when you spend your working life in a bar. He’s proudly been sober for 15 years.

“Alcoholism is so hideous,” he says. “I lost so many buddies to the streets. The streets are undefeated, man.”

When Colston got sober, he temporarily lost interest in telling the story of the Trappers. Perhaps because those nights at Duffy’s Tavern were so deeply intertwined with the wins, Colston didn’t feel as connected to those Salt Lake successes once he stopped drinking.

But then Ikegami and his crew called and called and kept calling until Colston, after avoiding the filmmakers for some time, finally picked up.

“He was the last person to give us the OK,” Ikegami says. “He was the team captain and really protective of the story. And rightfully so. I feel like he was dodging me for months. When I first got him on the phone, we talked for like four hours. He was just really thoughtful and philosophical about the whole experience of baseball from the very beginning of his childhood and all the way through retirement.”

No one is more philosophical about the whole thing than Citronnelli, who uses his baseball background as a backdrop to some of his impassioned sermons.

“Ladies and gentlemen, some of you may not know this,“ he tells one congregation in Yonkers, N.Y., in the film. “Your pastor never made it to the Major Leagues, but I am in the Baseball Hall of Fame.”

Not the plaque gallery, of course. But yes, the Hall does have items from the Trappers’ streak in its archives, including a ball signed by all the players, a bat used by Colston and a cap worn by winning pitcher John Groennert in the record-breaking 28^th straight victory and a jersey worn by manager Jim Gilligan.

In one of the documentary’s most touching scenes, Leake and his family make the drive from Long Island to Cooperstown to see these items.

“Immortality!” Leake says as he steps into the Hall.

Remarkably, the Trappers achieved that.

After “The Streak” first premiered, Leake’s wife, Gina, arranged a showing of it in a local theater. About 60 friends and family members turned out, and afterward they went to the house of Gina’s cousin, who owns a successful construction company.

There they were, in the beautiful home of this well-to-do businessperson, who couldn’t get over what he had just seen on the screen.

“Twenty-nine in a row?” the guy kept saying, amazed at what Leake and his friends had once accomplished. “I had no [expletive] idea!”

So despite not reaching the pinnacle of their chosen profession, the Trappers were successful in their own right and in their own way. And now they have this film documenting that success for -- they hope -- a wider audience.

Ikegami and his crew are now in the process of trying to get “The Streak” shown at more festivals and accumulate the word-of-mouth it will take for the film to be picked up by a major distributor. They knew that dedicating half the movie to the complicated aftermath of the streak, rather than focusing entirely on the fun sports story that is the streak itself, would make for a less commercial picture and that it might impact the way it is distributed.

But they also wanted to do right by the introspective athletes they had encountered and befriended. The Trappers were a team with heart, and the filmmakers made a film with heart.

“Ultimately, the reason I got into film is the way it makes me feel,” says Ikegami, “and the way it helps us explore the human condition.”

The 1987 Salt Lake City Trappers aren’t just a record-breaking baseball team but a window into that condition. Long ago, they made history together. All these years later, they keep in touch via a text chain almost daily. They celebrate and honor and respect each other. They didn’t achieve their dream come true. Yet they know they got something better.