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Braintree Rays – A short history, by Mr J Davis #00
Way back in the dark ages, when some of us were very young, in oh, the 1980’s… there was a flourishing baseball league in the UK with a junior league to boot. Those were the days….
Anyway, I digress. Braintree Rays, where are we from? Well from the mid 1980’s Braintree, a medium sized town in north Essex had a baseball team formed of a group of British and American locals. It is worth remembering that at this time the US still had substantial air force bases in the UK and one of these, RAF Wethersfield (now the national HQ of the Ministry of Defence Police), was only seven miles away. For this, and a host of other reasons, there was a considerable American ex-pat community in Braintree district.
Braintree Rays fielded a mix of British and American players who enjoyed going for a few too many beers on a Saturday night and then tearing off across half the country to play a game of baseball on a Sunday afternoon whilst nursing hangovers. OK, it wasn’t quite across half the country as it is these days because there were teams in Witham, Chelmsford (2), Southend, Cambridge and Norwich – all of which might be considered to be local. In those early years, we frequently travelled to games with eight players, in a mix of particularly bad vehicles, hoping that if we were lucky, we’d get a good game, win if we were really lucky and then repeat the same the next week.
Now in those dark days of old, the BBF even had half an interest in developing youth baseball at a local level and Braintree supported a good sized junior team, Braintree Stingrays. Run by the ever helpful and supportive Bob & Jackie Seymour, the team fielded a host of strong players and enjoyed a successful run at junior level. Sadly, the number of junior teams against which to play dwindled and as players left, or if we were very lucky, stayed with it and progressed to the Senior Team, the youth team eventually folded.
In the late 1980’s / early 1990’s Braintree Rays, now almost totally British in make-up, with original members of the Rays and Stingrays such as Scott Coe, Glen Barton, Justin Davis, Gareth Francis, the ever present token American Paul Lawless and a crop of the product of the Seymour’s hard work at the Stingrays (including their three sons) lurched their way through several seasons before finally wondering what was going on with the world and moving their home field to the nearby town of Tiptree.
As the Tiptree Rays, run by yet another of those Seymour Stingrays products, Darren Connew, the team enjoyed several seasons of limited success, even managed to get some local sponsorship and in 1993 actually won Division 3 South with a 12-0 game record. Ok, so we came were promoted for a single season and frankly by the end of all those wins we’d got sick of the sight of each other, but hey, not everyone has won a division, even if it was BBF Div.3 South
In the very late 1990’s and into the new century, as players moved away or took on new careers, the team staggered to an eventual uncomfortable and abrupt halt. Playing the odd friendly game here and there seemed to be all that we could generally manage and a commitment of 12 or more weekends in a short season was a lot to ask of any player. Those who wanted to continue playing drifted off to the likes of Essex or Brentwood to play a season or two, or hung up their gloves for a while. However, in 2005 something strange happened, some of the old players started to think playing again would be really quite a good idea (and when we say old, we don’t mean very old, except for Glen & Paul obviously).
In fact, it was such a good idea that we actually did something about it and under the inspired leadership of Gareth Francis and that ever charming lanky American Paul Lawless we reformed, flying like a bedraggled and somewhat unsightly phoenix out of the ashes to establish once again the Braintree Rays; dragging our slightly unfit and overweight carcasses screaming out onto the field for the 2006 season. A season, which actually, wasn’t too bad at all!
So, there we are; a very short history of the team. A team made up of players who enjoy the game, for the game’s sake. For whom winning is not everything, though we sure as hell like it, but a team who thankfully are not so far up their own behinds that they think others should be grateful for the opportunity to play against them or that every pitcher should wear a cap!
Braintree Rays, some of the original, still the best… well, the best that we can be anyway.
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