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From August 13 to September 6, 2002, the Oakland A's captured the attention of fans and the media by reeling off 20 consecutive victories, the longest winning streak in American League annals and the fourth longest in Major League history.1 Jim Gilligan, the baseball coach at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, assessed the A's achievement: "Few people realize how tough it is to put any amount of games together. It's tough just to win five or six in a row."2 Gilligan spoke from experience. In 1987 his Salt Lake City Trappers won 29 straight games, the longest winning streak in the history of professional baseball.
The Trappers' unlikely achievement was the more remarkable given the improbable cast of characters. The Trappers, an independent entry in the shortseason rookie Pioneer League, came to town in 1985 following the financial demise of the Salt Lake Gulls of the AAA Pacific Coast League. The franchise had virtually no local presence since all but one of the club's twelve managing partners, including comedic actor Bill Murray, were absentee owners.3 Part-owner and player personnel director Van Schley, also president of Texas Star Baseball Inc., scoured the country signing former college players who had been passed over in the annual June Major League draft for unaffiliated Minor League teams. (The book Good Enough to Dream, which chronicled the on- and offfield doings of one such Schley-stocked team, the 1983 Utica Blue Sox of the class A New York-Pennsylvania League, appeared just before the Trappers' first season in Utah.)4 "It's sort of a kick," Schley said, "to compete against a multimillion-dollar scouting system with just an American Express card and a telephone."5
Hurriedly assembled after the June Major League draft, the 1987 Trappers were baseball orphans, players rejected by Major League scouts as being not talented enough to warrant a professional contract. Signing with the Trappers for $500 a month gave them an entry to professional baseball and a chance for redemption. Playing at the bottom rung of professional baseball, the Trappers displayed a fierce determination to prove the scouts wrong. First baseman Matt Huff, who had played for the Trappers in 1986, spoke for his teammates: "We're still the nobodies. The outcasts of the outcasts. We're not supposed to be...