Turquoise again.
After months of breadcrumbs hinting about the style of the team’s new identity, the Santa Fe Fuego broke out their 2021 game uniforms in an impromptu jersey draft for the players and a handful of fans Tuesday afternoon at Fort Marcy Ballpark.
New team, new roster, new season … same familiar look.
Promised black jerseys and caps, the kits the players will wear are no different than those worn the last time the Fuego took the field in the pre-pandemic 2019 campaign.
“I mean, yeah, at least it’s not red, because every team I’ve played on has worn red,” said Fuego pitcher Aaron McIntyre, the staff ace and the starter for Wednesday’s opener at Roswell.
The Fuego will embark on a 61-game regular season that ends the first week of August, playing 34 of those games in downtown Santa Fe. They’ll do so wearing the same turquoise jerseys and caps they’ve made their own over the past few years.
Fuego manager Bill Rogan said the plan all along was to wear black jerseys with the same rounded script across the chest. Those jerseys actually arrived, he said, but several had matching numbers while others had one number on the front and a different one on the back.
The fallback was turquoise, which the team will wear in Rogan’s first year as skipper. In fact, it’s the first year for everyone in the dugout — all except for the youngest guy on the team.
Mike Hernandez is a 19-year-old from Santa Fe who will serve as the team’s bullpen catcher. The Santa Fe High graduate, who played two seasons on the Demons’ varsity team for coach Ian Farris, said he started coming to Fuego games when he was a kid and wanted more than anything to wear the team’s colors now that he’s an adult.
For a game or two, he was down in the dugout serving as a batboy, doing whatever he could to be around the team he grew up watching.
“I was never much of a player, but I’ve always loved the game,” Hernandez said, stroking both open hands down the length of his No. 48 jersey. “It means so much to wear this thing, to be a part of this team.”
Given the chance to pick which number they wanted based on seniority, the players were called one at a time to take a look at the jerseys laid out on the Fort Marcy seats and claim the one they wanted.
Third in line was Manny Cachora, a Las Cruces native who spent time at Luna Community College in Las Vegas, N.M. Like a handful of others, the third baseman picked his number based on his love of hoops. After teammates Jared Gay took No. 25 and Ben Tingen claimed No. 22, Cachora made a beeline for No. 23.
“Ahhh, Don Mattingly’s number,” Rogan said. “Good choice.”
“Who?” Cachora said. “No, it’s LeBron’s number.”
Outfielder Harrison Moore was up next, taking No. 24 in honor of Kobe Bryant.
And so it went, one at a time each player grabbed a jersey and cap, then chatted with a handful of fans who were there to watch.
For better or worse, the Fuego will set sail with an opening-day allotment of 19 players, three shy of the league maximum of 22. They’ll play two games in Roswell, then be at Fort Marcy for a pair of games against those same Invaders on Friday and Saturday.
While help is on the way in terms of at least three additional players, Rogan is confident he has the top eight position players at his disposal for Wednesday’s game. Tingen, the team’s calm and pragmatic Pecos League veteran, will play center and bat leadoff while Moore will be in left and bat second.
Phil Buckingham will start at short and bat third while Gay, the tight end-sized first baseman whose family lives in Albuquerque, will bat cleanup. Catcher Ryan Bernardi bats fifth while Cachora is sixth.
Second baseman Declan Peterson and rightfielder Parker Depasquale, who played one season under former New Mexico Highlands coach Steve Jones at Texas A&M-Texarkana, round out the position players.
McIntyre will start on the mound with Ryan Norris and Troy Mowen on the hill the next two games.
“Every team in America is worried about their middle relief, and we’re no different,” Rogan said. “We’re always going to be looking to add the best arms we can, but right now we’re going with what we’ve got.”
What Rogan expects out of this club is what every single Fuego manager has dealt with since the club’s inception in 2012: Don’t fall in love with the long ball. With a postage stamp for a field, he wants his lineup to find gaps and manufacture runs with contact hitting rather than the long ball.
What he hopes for from his pitching staff is avoiding the beer league softball scores that are the norm at Fort Marcy, a field that seems to look smaller every single year.
“The idea isn’t to think about stuff like that,” McIntyre said. “The key for me — for every pitcher, really — is disrupting the timing of a hitter. If I can change speeds and keep the ball down, I know I can do this. Every guy can hit, but not every pitcher can do that.”
Rogan took Santa Fe Mayor Alan Webber on a tour of the Fort Marcy infield during Tuesday’s meet-and-greet. He said Webber promised to replace a portion of the chain-link fence that serves as a backstop immediately behind home plate. The bottom lip of the fence has curled up and away from the ground, leaving a small gap where balls can squeeze through or, worse, injure a player. … Augie Voight will be the team’s closer. … Rogan’s dream for Fort Marcy? The Screen Monster. He would like to see the city or the Pecos League develop a giant screen that stretches from the rightfield foul pole all the way to center, standing about 25 to 30 feet high. It would serve as an extended wall, much in the way the Green Monster does at Boston’s Fenway Park. The idea, he said, would be to sell advertising to generate revenue and keep the bloated Fort Marcy home run numbers down.
