Sometimes Orange Is Almost Gold
Jim Antonini & Suzanne Reynolds
Pump Fake Press (2025)
ISBN: 979-8218530501
Reviewed by Paul Knobloch for Reader Views (11/2025)
In one of my favorite maxims, Becket famously proclaimed, “Try, fail. Try again, fail better.” Without this advice, my life would have been much less tolerable, and it looks like the North Carolina softball lovers from Morgantown’s Chico’s, a team put together by the people running Chico’s Bail Bonds, have taken this axiom to heart. This memoir, Sometimes Orange Is Almost Gold: Morgantown’s Misfits of the Diamond, lovingly put together by Jim Antonini & Suzanne Reynolds, is chock full of great photos and stories, tracing the evolution of the forlorn team of beautiful losers and misfits. In doing so, they remind us of the importance of community, friendship, and the restorative joy of senseless play.
In the foreword, we’re introduced to 123 Pleasant Street, a bar owned by Louis “LJ” Giuliani. This is where the Chico’s players congregate, a sort of home away from home for the team since 1998, the year after their inception. They changed their name to “Chico’s Bail Bonds” after watching and being inspired by the 1976 film The Bad News Bears. Giuliani has since quit the team, but the squad is still mostly composed of bartenders, bar patrons, and musicians, with the bar being not only the team’s ground zero but also an open and tolerant space that welcomes all newcomers.
Another of the team’s hallmarks: their jerseys are modeled on orange prison jumpsuits, and this perfectly reflects the sardonic and comical tone of both the authors and the players on the team. We get a chapter for every season,[i] and the losing record is stamped proudly across the header of each page. By the time we get to 2025, the final chapter, they have one of their worst years, going 1-25.
Thus, as you can clearly see, it’s impossible to give you any spoilers for this book. They tell you what’s coming from the very first page. We’re not reading these stories in the hope that the team will finally win that “big game.” The heart of this tale is the people, the community, and the connections made through sport.
Giuliani, the team’s best outfielder, is often compared to Kelly Leak from The Bad News Bears. Then there’s ace pitcher, Dave Foreman. How many pitchers do you know who use Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream” as their walk-up song? Even Antonioni, one of the authors, is a team member, and the shortstop claims to have brought exactly 4,778 beers to the parking lot post-games. He even won MVP in 2008!
Still, there’s more to the narrative than just post-game beer drinking and kvetching with the boys at the bar. The juicy little bits are in the asides, such as their game against Riverside Church in 2007. The authors aren’t joking when they say that Whiston Field is clearly haunted, and they take the time to explore the history of the surrounding area. They ruminate on the weirdness that haunts rural America, talk about disappeared young girls, murdered prostitutes, and farmers struck by lightning. At one point, they imagine the bleachers filled with the dead soldiers from all of America’s wars.
Still, there’s not too much heaviness, and in a world like the contemporary America we live in, where the pressure to win at all costs ensures a majority of bitter and dispossessed citizens, I find it very healthy to embrace failure. And really, that is not what the guys from Chico’s are doing at all. They are defiantly stating that no matter what life throws at us, there is joy in commiseration, in community, in friendship, in music, art, and sport, and that there are ways to create meaning in a tough contemporary world.
And you don’t have to lose your sense of humor to accomplish this.
[i] The period from 2003-2006 is called “The Lost Years” and contains nothing but a photo and a 404 error page, like one seen after a failed online search.