Mapping the path

EASTERN MIDWEST BASEBALL

Schaumburg Boomers

We head to Wintrust Field in Schaumburg, Illinois, to see the Schaumburg Boomers, an independent professional team playing in the Frontier League. We cap off a great Father’s Day with Chicago deep-dish pizza at Lou Malnati’s Pizzeria.

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On a typical ballpark road trip day, Dad and I will have breakfast in our hotel, accepting the make-your-own waffles, greasy sausages, and mass-produced egg products as necessary steps toward getting on the road efficiently.

But this was Father’s Day. We had two fathers and three generations together on our biggest baseball road trip yet, and the hotel’s mystery buffet simply wouldn’t do on such an occasion. Instead, Dad, my son Danny, and I enjoyed an excellent, leisurely breakfast at the very busy Lake Street Café near our hotel in Addison, Illinois, before heading out to the village of Schaumburg for our next ballgame.

German-born immigrants arrived in this part of Illinois in the mid-1800s, many from the Principality of Schaumburg-Lippe, west of Hanover. By the 1870s and until the Great Depression, this group of immigrants owned nearly all of the land in the Schaumburg Township. Today, Schaumburg is a sprawling incorporated village of about 80,000 that blends in seamlessly with its many suburban neighbors west of Chicago.

Wintrust Field opened in 1999 to host the Schaumburg Flyers of the independent Northern League, which folded in 2010 due to financial woes. The Boomers moved in for the 2012 season and promised — with a tongue-in-cheek nod toward the Chicago Cubs — to win a title “in the first 100 years or your money back." They did much better than that, securing a championship in their second season of existence and adding three more since then. The team’s success has extended to the turnstiles: The Boomers regularly lead the league in attendance, averaging a record 4,721 fans per game in 2024.

In the 1980s, investors purchased the land where Wintrust Field sits today as a hopeful location for a new Wrigley Field project. That deal never came through, but the field dimensions in Schaumburg nevertheless mimic the Friendly Confines of the Cubs ballpark.

The Boomers are named after the "booming dance” of the male Greater Prairie Chicken, a member of the grouse family that once numbered in the millions in Illinois and now is an endangered species, with just a few hundred birds remaining in the state. Right around the beginning of baseball season, male prairie chickens establish “booming grounds” where they perform for prospective partners, inflating air sacs on the side of their necks and snapping their tails. I hoped we would see nothing like that from the namesake home team.

Dad and I got a good look at the Boomers merchandise on offer, and he picked up his logo baseball. But the team gave out free hats on Father’s Day, and I liked it enough to make it the one hat I would claim for the day.

Walking around the windy concourse, I found Kelly Robinson, host of the Minor League Nerd podcast, which covers the history of minor league teams. A Chicago White Sox fan whose team was on its way to posting one of the worst records in baseball history, Robinson and his wife Christina spend much of the season enjoying the Chicago Dogs and other baseball riches in the Midwest — Minor League, independent, and collegiate summer league teams who put on a great show. (Watch our chat in the episode!)

The Boomers opponent for the afternoon was the Washington Wild Things from Washington, Pennsylvania, just southwest of Pittsburgh. The Wild Things came into the game leading the West Division of the Frontier League’s Midwest Conference by a half-game over the Lake Erie Crushers, and by three games over the third-place Boomers.

Pitching in his first season as a professional, Boomers starter Jacob Smith faced a Wild Things lineup that had donned its hitting shoes in the clubhouse. Washington collected four singles to take a 2-0 lead out of the gate. Schaumburg got on the board in the second with a run on a couple of hits to make it 2-1.

Sitting directly behind home plate, in special seats awarded to lucky fans of the game, I spotted Joel Van Diggelen, whom I had met on Twitter. He made finding him easy by wearing an orange Boomers jersey bright enough to be seen from space. Like Kelly and Christina, Joel goes to games all over the region, though he is primarily a Boomers fan. He would see us again during our grand finale with the Kenosha Kingfish.

Before each baseball road trip, I put together a “Concessions Strategy” document to help Dad and I track the ballpark food we want to try at each stop. For Wintrust Field, we had one clear priority: Ben’s Soft Pretzels. The chain has locations across the U.S. but particularly in the eastern Midwest, and they are exceedingly popular with Boomers fans — always generating a long line or even selling out. (In 2025, a second Ben’s Soft Pretzels stand will be added to Wintrust Field to meet the demand.)

The pretzels are indeed fantastic — light, fluffy, and buttery — not the dense bread you typically get from other, purportedly “soft” pretzels. I also tried a pulled pork sandwich with crispy onions, which was good and saucy.

Both offenses heated up in the middle innings, with Washington plating two runs in the fourth and two more in the sixth, and Schaumburg scoring one in the fourth and two in the fifth. The visitors led it 6-4 through six.

There wasn’t much happening on the field between innings on this scorching Sunday, but we did get to see an eventful race between giant bottles of shaving cream, sunscreen, and insect repellent. Appropriately, sunscreen blocked the others on its way to victory. (Watch the episode!)

I walked to the outfield, where the Boomers have a large turfed play area full of inflatable fun. On the way, I passed another inflatable spraying a cool mist on adults needing a break from the 94-degree heat.

Washington appeared to put the game out of reach in the top of the seventh, scoring three runs on three hits, including a homer to left by cleanup hitter Walter Lagrange. The Dominican outfielder was a former Mets farmhand who hit .291 in the Minor Leagues and briefly reached the Triple-A level before joining the Wild Things in 2022.

The Boomers answered with three runs of their own in the bottom half. Schaumburg’s left fielder, Aaron Simmons, matched his counterpart with a long ball over the right field wall to make it 9-7 Wild Things. Washington’s ace starter, Kobe Foster, was finally lifted from the game, having given up seven earned runs in seven innings. Despite those big numbers, Foster finished 2024 with a 10-1 record and a tidy 2.91 ERA.

In the bottom of the eighth, Boomers right fielder Christian Fedko hit a two-out bomb to left, and suddenly we had a tie ballgame going into the ninth.

Washington reclaimed the lead in the top of the ninth on two walks and a single. In the bottom half, Schaumburg recorded two quick outs and looked to be coming up just short.

But the next Boomers batter, first baseman Kyle Fitzgerald, got hold of a breaking pitch and smacked it over the left-field wall. The crowd erupted. The game was tied once again.

Aaron Simmons then came to the plate and hit a towering drive to left field that seemed to hang in the air forever until it landed just over the fence — a moment punctuated with an explosion of noise from the home fans. The Boomers had hit back-to-back bombs with two outs in the bottom of the ninth to rescue the victory. Players poured onto the field, and a good Father’s Day crowd went home happy.

On a business trip to Chicago 20 years earlier, I had tried another deep-dish mainstay, Geno’s East, and left unimpressed by their pizza’s fairly ordinary tomato sauce. Lou Malnati’s was a different story altogether. Dad and I shared a pie with pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms, and black olives. It was perfection by the slice, a deeply satisfying end to a very special Father’s Day.