With the Tradewater Pirates now moving to Madisonville, let’s revisit my profile of current and former manager Steve Fowler, who also co-owns the baseball team. This is from the Nov. 2 edition of The Messenger:
Every season, the Mr. Baseball award is awarded to the best high school player in Kentucky. If there was such a thing as a Mr. Hopkins County Baseball award and it weren’t limited to high school athletes, Steve Fowler would likely be on the shortlist of candidates.
The Hopkins County native has been involved in local baseball in one form or another for almost all of his 50 years, playing YAA and youth baseball, then moving up to play for Madisonville-North Hopkins and putting the Tradewater Pirates baseball team on the map as its manager.
With his recent acquisition of the Pirates, Fowler may be about to usher in a new era of Madisonville baseball, as the city is on his list of relocation sites for the Pirates, who have played in Dawson Springs for 13 years in various leagues, most recently the KIT and Ohio Valley collegiate-level wooden-bat organizations.
If that were to happen, it would be a homecoming of a very specific sort, as the team would play in Elmer Kelley Stadium, located on the grounds of Madisonville City Park, where his family worked while he was growing up.
“I grew up at that park,” Fowler said. “My grandfather ran the city park clubhouse. Some of my fondest memories are climbing up on top of the clubhouse with a pair of binoculars and watching the Maroons play in the stadium.”
Fowler was born in 1961, the son of Jerri Ashby and Wayne Fowler, the latter of whom played for the Madisonville Miners in an older version of the KIT League back in the 1940s and also started the local American Legion Post 6 team. Steve wasted little time following in his father’s footsteps, starting out playing ball at Elmer Kelley in a “small-fry” league under Dee Hall and then becoming a member of the first baseball team to play out at the YAA ballpark in Madisonville.
“He didn’t let you play until you were six years old,” Steve said of Hall. “Dad took me out (when I was) five and asked him, ‘Mr. Hall, Steve can play pretty good — I wish you’d let him in a year early.’ And he said, ‘OK, Wayne, show me what he can do,’ and we played catch. Then he said, ‘Let’s see if he can hit,’ so he threw me some pitches and I hit him. And then he said, ‘Let him run the bases,’ … and I ran straight to third, cut across from third to first, headed towards second, and then cut my way to home.”
Armed with a proper knowledge of base running, Fowler made the North high school junior varsity team as an eighth-grader, moving up to varsity the following year and getting the starting nod at catcher as a junior. In his senior year, Fowler hit .374 and six home runs as a team captain and won team MVP honors, bonafides that earned him a roster spot on the Wabash Valley College (Ill.) baseball squad.
That didn’t last long, however: Fowler would soon move up in the college ranks, playing for Kentucky Wesleyan College and the University of Evansville. This kept him on the radar of the Cincinnati Reds, who had been scouting him since he was a senior, and pretty soon he was in Riverfront Stadium trying to put some Maroon into the Big Red Machine.
“I remember digging the dirt off my uniform after the tryout and putting it in a plastic bag,” Fowler said. “My dad was like, ‘What are you doing?’ And I was like, ‘Dad, this is the dirt that Johnny Bench has on him.’ I kept that dirt in a plastic bag for years.”
That was as close as Fowler would get to the majors as a player, however. After a spring training tryout in the early ’80s, the Reds offered him a spot on a Single-A farm team in Virginia, a signing bonus of no more than $1,000, plus $1,000 each month. Fowler opted to return to KWC and hope to be drafted, but instead of becoming a part of Reds history, a Pete Rose-Ray Fosse slice of Reds history became a part of him.
“We were playing in Florida and a guy ran over me at home plate,” Fowler said, “It separated my left shoulder and it tore my rotary in my right shoulder. I had been clocked at 94 mph and I could get rid of the ball in 1.85 seconds from home to second … I dropped down to 84 mph and never quite got it back.”
Not long after, Fowler returned to Hopkins County to help with the family business of running City Park. He remained on the local diamonds, however, coaching Little League ball and playing softball. In 1992, he opened the Pro Prospects Training Academy to help shepherd local talents up the baseball pecking order.
Then in the late ’90s, Fowler went from the local diamonds to looking for local diamonds in the rough, accepting an offer to become an associate scout for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. It was there that he put together the first major league scouting report on Owensboro native and future big-leaguer Brad Wilkerson.
“I went and watched Wilkerson play and I was unimpressed, but I was very impressed,” Fowler said. “It was kind of weird. The kid was not spectacular, but he did nothing wrong. There were no flaws in his swing, no flaws in his glove, his arm was fabulous … I just did a four-star report on him.”
Fowler juggled his baseball academy and scouting until he hooked up with Dwight Seymore, a Dawson Springs resident whose son was one of Fowler’s pupils. The process of rebuilding the city’s historic Riverside Park was in the early stages, and the two decided to fill the stadium up with a team, the Tradewater Pirates.
The reformation of the KIT League was a year off, so the two fielded a motley crew of semi-pro club of college players and older players, sometimes ones in their 30s, and played wherever, whenever possible. With Dawson Springs High School nearby, Fowler also coached their baseball team as well.
“It was like the Wild Wild West,” Fowler said of Tradewater’s early days. “We showed up at a ballpark one year and they were shooting clay pigeons and had a keg party going on before the ball game. Rowdy fans jumped the fence and people would throw at people and hit ‘em, just for looking at ‘em wrong … We went to Beckley, W.Va., we went to Macon, Ga., we played all over the place.”
With Seymore as CEO and general manager and Fowler coaching, the Pirates won 183 games in seven years and made the National Baseball Congress World Series three times. Fowler left after the 2005 season, but was never strayed too far from the Pirates, who joined the KIT League in 2007. Fowler ended up managing two of their new rivals, the Marion Bobcats and the Owensboro Oilers, the latter of which eliminated the Pirates last July in inaugural edition of the OVL playoffs.
Not long after the Pirates’ playoff exit, Seymore retired from running the Pirates, and the club’s board of directors voted to cease operations. Fowler stepped up the plate last month and gained ownership of the team, with a view to moving the club to Madisonville or another city in the Pennyrile area. Muhlenberg County has already made an offer for the team, but Seymore is holding out hope for his old stomping grounds.
“For the Tradewater Pirates to be successful, we’ve got to bring the business community together and the community as a whole,” Fowler said. “My personal choice above ‘em all of course would be Madisonville. Elmer Kelley has been my home since I was six years old and I would love to see nothing more than a team land in Madisonville.”
