Beto O’Rourke, an occasional member of Los Diablitos de El Paso sandlot baseball team, looked pathetic in his first two at-bats last Sunday at the Long Time, a diamond in Austin, Texas. Both were strikeouts. The first one was on three pitches.
This did not dampen the spirits of the more than three hundred people in attendance, who each paid $100 to attend "Barnstorming with Beto," a campaign fundraiser featuring a baseball game between Los Diablitos and the home team Texas Playboys. It was a perfect spring day, there was free food and alcohol, and a splash of musical performers that included Britt Daniel, frontman for the Austin rock band Spoon. Still, people wanted to see their guy make a big play.
And then, somewhere around the fifth inning, one of the Playboys got greedy running the bases and O’Rourke, playing centerfield, made a spectacular throw to put him out at home plate. The play was unbelievable considering O’Rourke hasn’t played ball in a year—and, frankly, because it seemed like the rust had settled on his game even before that. O’Rourke, the Democratic U.S. representative of Texas' 16th district, will need another miracle if he is to unseat incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, a member of the Texas Republican stronghold and a supposed sure thing to win the November 6 election.
Earlier this month, O’Rourke announced that in the first quarter of 2018 he had raised almost $7 million—with no PAC money—compared with a little more than $3 million for the Cruz campaign in that same time. Money has proved irrelevant in multiple primary elections, but it is still a salivating stat for Democrats who have duped themselves in recent elections into thinking Texas is going to turn blue again.
“It gives us some faith,” O’Rourke said, “that, one, not only can we win, but, two, we can win the right way, and then, three, maybe set the example nationally for how you run a campaign with people instead of corporations, and kind of throw out the old playbook.”
The event was atypical for O’Rourke. Normally he is trying to bridge, not divide, the left and the right at the more than 200 town halls he has hosted during travels that have taken him to almost all of the 254 counties in the state. This was about pandering to those who have already cast their votes and just want a photo opp to prove it.
Los Diablitos and the Playboys have played before multiple times, on this field and in El Paso. Both teams are part of a loose confederation of sandlot squads assembled throughout the south. This includes the Third Man Threes, featuring Jack White, who the Playboys once played in Florence, Alabama, at an event hosted by the fashion designer Billy Reid.
Jack Sanders, the day’s host, is the captain of the Playboys and an architectural artist whose community-minded projects include the El Cosmico trailer and teepee hotel in Marfa, Texas. He built the Long Time, a literal field of dreams, in the backyard of his art studio, on acreage surrounded by pecan trees. The games are less about competition and more about fraternity, with the real action behind the backstop, not in front of it.
“I’ve always been attracted to the sandlot nature of Beto’s campaign,” Sanders said. “I think going to counties that nobody’s ever been to, with three people in your car and eating at Whataburger, I think that’s the way you do it.”
A throng of adults and children looked on from blankets laid on the grass. Free beer and rosé, and hot dogs and Cracker Jacks, were plentiful. Dogs roamed freely. Members of each team mingled in the other team’s dugout. Among the souvenirs available for purchase were Mexican religious candles bearing O’Rourke’s likeness and T-shirts with President Trump’s image underscored with the word PENDEJO. One person wore a jacket on the back of which it read MEXICO IS THE SHIT. The afternoon was a halcyon dream for liberal elites.
Among the event’s “hosts,” who paid $250, was Richard Linklater, the Austin filmmaker behind Boyhood, Dazed and Confused, and others. Linklater played baseball at Sam Houston State University in the early ’80s. He said he is one of the original Texas Playboys, but nagging injuries have relegated him to the sidelines, where he sported a Houston Astros jersey. Linklater regards O’Rourke as a rare opportunity to cast a vote for someone who is actually for the people—and not just his own people.
“He’s like a Texas version of Bernie Sanders,” Linklater said, “and Cruz is kind of one of the more loathsome individuals to ever be in elected office. It’s a blessing, like, on one hand we would prefer anybody, but the person that we’re trying to replace him with is actually one of the coolest candidates in modern times. So the contrast couldn’t be bigger.”
Linklater remembers when Texas politicians weren’t a bunch of “extreme yahoos.” He praised president Lyndon Johnson and speaker of the house Sam Rayburn for their great populist tradition.
“As far as a Texas-centric view that I think actually speaks to the whole country, Beto has great ideas for energy jobs,” Linklater said. “You know, we’re the ultimate gas and oil state, but we’re also the wind and sun—solar state. So he has a real plan there. He’s not messing around. Let’s harness that. Let’s be of the future. Let’s create jobs of the future, not the past.”
Linklater intends to host his own fundraiser for O’Rourke later in the year, with a competition of short pro-Beto and anti-Cruz films. Spoon also plans to do something for O’Rourke as the election draws closer. Though generally reserved about politics, President Trump’s rise has inspired Spoon’s Britt Daniel into action. Daniel reached out to his longtime friend Andy Brown, O’Rourke’s fundraising director, with a willingness to help.
“I want to do anything that I can to get Ted Cruz out of the Senate and to help turn the tide in Texas, which has been a long time coming,” said Daniel, who was born in Galveston and reared in Temple.
Daniel has been told he first met O’Rourke in 1999, when O’Rourke was touring with his punk band Foss, which included Cedric Bixler-Zavala of the Mars Volta and At the Drive-In. Daniel has come to realize a shared affinity with O’Rourke on term limits. O’Rourke is the co-chair of the Term Limits Caucus in Congress and pledges for himself a maximum of four terms in the House and two terms in the Senate.
“That’s my issue of the day,” Daniel said. “I just feel like we’re in this situation where politicians are there for their own careers more than for the public. That’s one thing we can try.”
Daniel might be surprised to learn that Ted Cruz also is for term limits, yet for Daniel, Linklater, and many of those in attendance, this race is, first and foremost, about restoring the state’s character. O’Rourke, perceived by many as a Kennedy-esque golden boy, is the antithesis of Cruz, who even his own party thinks is a turd (former Republican speaker of the house John Boehner once called him “Lucifer in the flesh”). The election of O’Rourke would, according to Linklater, be a step in “embarrassing Texas a little less.”
Despite widespread contempt for Cruz, Republicans are not likely to break party line. They also have strength in numbers, with roughly twice as many voters as Democrats in the last general election. If O’Rourke is going to pull the upset over Cruz he is going to have to inspire a lot of new Democrats to turn out and vote.
Somewhere around the middle of the third inning, Daniel and Spoon guitarist Gerardo Larios finished their three-song acoustic set with “The Underdog.” After, O’Rourke ascended the stage with his daughter, Molly, riding piggyback. She and her mom, Amy, also dressed in a Diablito uniform, stood by O’Rourke as he presented Daniel with a cake and led a chorus of “Happy Birthday.”
O’Rourke proceeded to call this a moment of prime importance and truth. He stressed a living wage, world-class public schools, immigration laws that respect diversity, and universal health care. The audience cheered. Of the six hundred tickets sold, though, it looked like only half were cashed in at any given time. Beto is going to need a better batting percentage than that.
