From Gary to Pearl, the Story Keeps Moving
A former RailCat, an old manager, and one of those baseball threads that keeps finding its way back.
PEARL, Miss. - Baseball has a funny way of circling back on itself.
People leave. Teams change. Leagues shift. Stadium signs come down and new ones go up.
And then, every once in a while, somebody from another chapter of your life is standing in the other dugout.
For Mississippi Mud Monsters manager Jay Pecci, that somebody is Greg Tagert.
And for me, this series against the Tri-City ValleyCats has another layer.
I worked with Tags in Gary from 2014 through 2019, long after Jay’s playing days with the RailCats had ended. I never saw Jay play there. I never watched him turn a double play or take an at-bat in that uniform.
But I knew his name.
I knew it because of the way people talked about him.
I knew it because Hillary Smith Bird, then the sports editor of The Times of Northwest Indiana, and Michael Osipoff of the Post-Tribune covered every RailCats game and carried so much of that team’s history with them. I sat in that press box night after night, still learning the place, still learning the people, still learning what Gary baseball had been before I got there.
In a lot of ways, Hillary and Michael were my RailCats history teachers.
A Name That Meant Something
The stories were there before the press releases.
By 2019, the RailCats had even written about Tags’ coaching tree stretching across baseball. Big leagues. Minor leagues. Independent clubs. Anthony Iapoce. Andy Haines. Jose Yepez. Jamie Bennett. Dennis Pelfrey. People who had passed through Gary and carried pieces of that place with them.
But I did not first learn that history from a press release.
I learned it in the press box.
From Hillary. From Michael. From the way people talked when a name actually meant something.
And Jay Pecci’s name meant something.
Not forced. Not dramatic.
Just understood.
The player. The leader. The guy who helped build the standard.
So now, seeing Jay managing the Mud Monsters from one dugout and Tags managing the ValleyCats from the other, it feels like more than a nice old-baseball connection. It feels like one of those threads in this game showing itself again.
The First Original
For Tagert, Pecci was more than another player on the roster.
Tagert managed Pecci with the Gary SouthShore RailCats from 2005 through 2010. That sentence is true, but it does not quite cover it.
Because Pecci was not just a player on one of Tagert’s teams.
He was part of the foundation.
“Ironically, (Boomers Manager) Jamie Bennett was the very first player I signed with the RailCats,” Tagert said. “But my first ‘original’ player signing was Jay.”
Tagert knew Pecci’s background. Stanford. The A’s organization. A player with real baseball weight behind his name. He also knew Pecci was coming off a difficult injury, and that Gary might be the right place for him at the right time.
“I wanted the first signing to be of significance,” Tagert said, “and Jay’s background fit that profile perfectly.”
What he got was more than a shortstop.
As Tagert did his background work, the same words kept coming up.
Character. Work ethic. Prepared.
Then one phrase stood out.
“Jay makes everyone on the team, including the best players, better.”
Greg Tagert
That is the kind of thing people say sometimes. It can become one of those nice baseball compliments that sounds good and floats away.
But with Jay, Tags says it showed up quickly.
“The one thing I wasn’t told that I learned during our time together, he also made the coaches and the manager better,” Tagert said. “Jay instilled a culture in our clubhouse and on the field that became the RailCats Way, that existed for the 17 years I was in Gary. Even long after Jay left, his imprint stayed.”
I worked in that culture years later.
I walked into it after Jay was gone, but the standard was still there. The stories were still there. The expectations were still there. The names still mattered.
And No. 12 mattered.
“That’s why the number 12 is not worn by any current RailCat,” Tagert said. “I just hope the group there knows why.”
That is not a small thing.
Baseball has all kinds of ways of remembering people. Some are official. Some are not. Some get printed on signs. Some just live in the way people talk when they think you are listening closely enough to understand.
That is how I first knew Jay Pecci.
As a name people said like it meant something.
Building Something New
Gary is not being recreated in Mississippi, but lessons travel.
Years later, I know him as the manager building something here in Mississippi.
And maybe that is why this series has felt different to me.
Jay is not trying to recreate Gary. He is not trying to copy anyone else’s clubhouse. The Mud Monsters are new. This team has its own players, its own personality, its own weird little rhythms, its own story being written night by night at Trustmark Park.
But clubhouses do not come from nowhere.
They are shaped by the people who have been in good ones.
They are shaped by what you notice when you are young, what you remember when you are older, and what you decide to carry with you.
“When I retired as a player and began interviewing for affiliated coaching jobs, the first thing I did was make a list of all the managers and coaches who were most helpful to me,” Pecci said. “Greg Tagert was my number one.”
Pecci played professional baseball for 21 years. That is a lot of clubhouses. A lot of coaches. A lot of managers. A lot of ways to do things.
When he thought about what he wanted to become, Tags was at the top of the page.
“Tags was consistent, patient, supportive, and calm as a manager,” Pecci said, “but he was always maximizing from every angle and constantly coming up with new ideas.”
Sometimes that meant roster moves. Sometimes it meant preparation. Sometimes it meant food in the clubhouse.
And sometimes it meant a hamstring machine.
“I once mentioned to him that I had a hamstring machine at home that I missed during the season and needed to be at full strength. The next day he arranged to have it shipped across the country so I could keep my routine.”
Jay Pecci
I love that detail.
A player says something in passing. A manager hears it. Then he actually does something with it.
Nobody in the stands knows. Nobody circles it in the box score. Nobody writes “hamstring machine arrives, RailCats win 5-3” in the next day’s paper.
But the player knows.
And that stuff adds up.
“He did not waver from his belief that good people and good teammates would inevitably lead to winning teams,” Pecci said. “Once you were part of his team, he showed total trust in you. And when you struggled, he seemed to know you would come out of it and he didn’t add any unnecessary pressure.”
That feels simple until you have been around baseball long enough to know it is not.
The season is long. The bus rides are long. Slumps feel longer. Everybody wants to win. Everybody wants answers. Everybody thinks they know what should happen next.
Trust sounds easy until somebody is 0-for-14.
Patience sounds easy until your starter goes three innings or less two nights in a row.
Belief sounds easy until the standings start staring back at you.
That is the hard part of managing that most people never see.
Now Jay is the one trying to do that for the Mud Monsters.
“I try to do everything I mentioned earlier as best as I can,” Pecci said.
Tags saw those qualities in him long before Jay had a lineup card of his own.
“I learned things from Jay that I still use today,” Tagert said. “But more than that, his personality and his just being a wonderful human being showed all the qualities any team would want in a manager.”
Across the Field
Not strange. Not dramatic. Just good.
So what is it like for Jay to look across the field and see Tags in the other dugout?
Not strange, exactly.
Not some big movie moment.
Just good.
“Seeing Tags over there in the other dugout was just fun for me,” Pecci said. “Nothing adversarial, nothing strategic, nothing nostalgic, just happy that we are both ‘together’ doing what we love and doing the best we can for the players.”
That feels right.
And this week, the map is pretty literal.
Troy, New York and Pearl, Mississippi are more than 1,300 miles apart. The ValleyCats are the farthest any team has traveled to play the Mud Monsters at Trustmark Park. They flew from New York to New Orleans, then took a bus the rest of the way to Pearl.
That is a long way to go for a baseball series.
And somehow, when they got here, one of the strongest connections on the field still ran back through Gary, Indiana.
Because if you stay in this game long enough, the map gets weird.
Former players become managers. Former managers become opponents. Old teammates show up in new uniforms. Someone you once heard about in a press box in Indiana is now the manager you work with every day in Mississippi.
“It is amazing how former coaches and teammates are constantly circling in and out of my life. It really doesn’t make sense, which makes baseball even more magical in my opinion.”
Jay Pecci
Tags, for his part, did not seem too bothered by seeing Jay in the other dugout, even after Mississippi took the first two games of the series.
“Well, if we’re going to lose a couple games,” Tagert said, “it might as well be to someone I hold dearly to my heart.”
Of course, no good baseball relationship survives without a few stories that probably should only be half-told.
When Tags was asked for one memory from Gary that still makes him smile, he gave me two phrases.
“Finish” and “Shower Slide.”
“That’s all I can say,” he said.
Jay was willing to give up a little more.
One year in Gary, the RailCats had a pregame ritual that involved “dunking” on each other in the dugout. Right before the game, during the final round of high fives, someone might jump up, grab the edge of the dugout, and wrap up an unsuspecting teammate with his legs.
Naturally, Tags eventually tried to join in.
“One game Tags was trying to be one of the boys and went to dunk on first baseman Mike Rohde,” Pecci said, “but the top of the dugout was slick from the rain, his fingers slipped, and he landed straight on his back.”
It was not great at the time.
“I believe he broke his tailbone,” Pecci said. “But now we can laugh about it, and the lesson learned that you can’t just dunk on anybody.”
That is independent baseball, too.
The long hours. The strange rituals. The stuff that makes no sense to anybody outside the room. The little moments that somehow become part of the glue.
The Bigger Thread
Independent baseball is bigger than one promotion, one signing, or one box score.
And that is why Tags talks about independent baseball the way he does.
“Independent baseball is the most unique level in the industry,” Tagert said. “There is not a clubhouse in any level, including the big leagues, where there is not a connection to the independent leagues.”
Too often, he said, people only measure this level by who gets picked up by a Major League organization. That matters. Of course it matters. Opportunities matter.
But it is not the whole story.
“These leagues are for the community, for opportunities,” Tagert said. “Anybody who has been involved with this entity for any number of years knows how truly valuable it is and the rewards it brings. There’s nothing else that even comes close in baseball.”
That is what this series at Trustmark Park has felt like to me.
A reminder of how this game works when you zoom out a little.
I knew Jay Pecci first as a name people said with respect in Gary.
Now I know him as the manager trying to build something here in Mississippi.
And across the field this week is the manager who once helped give him a place to keep playing, keep leading, and maybe, without anybody fully knowing it then, start becoming the kind of manager he is now.
The stories do not stay in one city.
They travel. They change uniforms. They show up years later in another dugout, wearing another logo, still carrying pieces of where they came from.
A manager in Tri-City helped build something in Gary. A player from that team is now building something in Mississippi. The lessons keep moving. The stories keep following. The people keep circling back.
And for three more nights at Trustmark Park, that baseball family tree is right there on the field.
Baseball has a funny way of doing that.
More on Pecci and Tagert
For a little more baseball context, here are the Baseball Reference pages for both managers in this story.
This Week at Trustmark Park
The Mud Monsters and ValleyCats continue the series Thursday, May 28 with Thirsty Thursday, featuring $2 16 oz domestic drafts and Post-Game Adults Run the Bases.
Friday, May 29 brings Fins Up Night celebrating Jimmy Buffett, Fireworks Friday presented by FMOL Health St. Dominic, and Stroke Awareness Night presented by FMOL Health St. Dominic.
The series wraps Saturday, May 30 with a special 5 PM doubleheader, two 7-inning games, a Hawaiian Shirt Giveaway for the first 1,000 tickets presented by the U.S. Coast Guard, and Post-Game Kids Run the Bases.