Independent leagues sit at the bottom of professional baseball's sprawling caste system. They are essentially the minor leagues' minor leagues, consisting of players trying to reach the Single A, Double A, and Triple A farm teams affiliated with major league clubs. The publication Baseball America, which is the authority on these matters, has ranked North America's independent leagues by payroll. The Pecos didn't even pay its players enough to make those rankings. According to a Baseball America official, the Pecos is "the lowest level of professional baseball" currently in existence.

To occupy last place in the Pecos League, then, is to lay claim to a singular title. Absolute superlatives are tossed off too often and easily in the sports world, but this one is not negotiable: As of July 25, 2012, the Santa Fe Fuego are, empirically speaking, the worst professional baseball team in America.

And yet here I am. I've spent too many hours this summer at Fort Marcy. Maybe it's everything the Pecos League lacks: scouts, agents, corporate funding, and the kind of dancing-bear kitsch that fills most minor league productions. Or maybe it's just nostalgia, the baseball junkie's favorite opiate. Out here on the concrete bleachers, I sometimes feel as though I've been dropped into a pre-steroidal epoch when the second basemen were short, the relievers were fat, and you could almost see yourself out there on the field. You'd never go to an NFL game, watch the centaurs lobotomizing one another, and think, Man, that could have been me. But the fantasy of self-projection, an old and fading tradition in baseball, is still alive down here in the Pecos League. These are not the automatons who have taken over the New York Yankees I grew up rooting for. On blue nights like this, I envision myself out in center getting a jump on a ball to the gap. The marvelous opening line of one of the great baseball books, Jim Bouton's Ball Four, once again arrives in my head: "I'm 30 years old, and I have these dreams."

If this all sounds a little ridiculous, well, I am 30 years old, I still own my cleats from college, and I've spent the better part of the summer eating $3 burgers. Besides, underdogs are easy to love. Over the past three months, inside what has at times seemed like a throwaway season in a throwaway league, I have found an extremely tough group of athletes who are willing to take real risks and make deep sacrifices in pursuit of a quixotic goal. Their dedication has reminded me of something essential about sports: Outside the confines of a major league stadium (or your TV screen), they are an occasionally comedic, often brutal endeavor with truly high stakes. There are unexpected bursts of inspiration—a 90-mile-an-hour fastball, a tape-measure home run—to remind you that these guys do, in fact, have a chance to scrap their way out of the cellar and into the higher reaches of pro ball. The Fuego play hard, and they play hurt, and they play to win. It just usually doesn't pan out that way.