BILLINGS — On June 12, Gabe Wurtz was in a ballpark in Charleston, West Virginia, trying to make the grade with a new team in a new phase of his baseball career.
A week and about 30 hours of driving later, Wurtz marked his return to the Billings Mustangs — the team he played 181 games with over the prior two seasons — with a two-RBI night in his second game back at Dehler Park in a win over the Pioneer Baseball League first-half champion Missoula PaddleHeads.
The independent baseball scene can make for a turbulent life full of long travel days and uncertainty, but once Wurtz’s third season in The Magic City was set in stone, he returned to a place where he knew he had some comfort and familiarity waiting for him.
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The Billings Mustangs’ Gabe Wurtz watches his teammates from the dugout during the Mustangs’ game against the Northern Colorado Owlz at Dehler Park on Saturday.
Whether or not he and others have arrived just in time to help Billings pull off a similar second-half surge to last season— which saw the Mustangs go on an incredible joyride to the PBL Championship Series — remains to be seen.
“I loved my first two seasons in Billings,” Wurtz, a 27-year-old Alabama native, said at Dehler on Thursday prior to the Mustangs’ game against the Ogden Raptors. “It’s good to be back, getting to see a lot of familiar faces. … I was excited to be back here.”
Wurtz is one of multiple midseason signings that Billings, which is currently 20-24 and eighth in the 12-team Pioneer League standings prior to Thursday, has acquired to try and give it a spark just ahead of the start of the second half of the season.
Prior to his return to Montana, Wurtz played in 33 games this year for the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs in the Atlantic League of Professional Baseball, batting .200 with four home runs and 25 RBIs for the Waldorf, Maryland-based ballclub. He played his final game for the Blue Crabs on June 12 against the Charleston Dirty Birds, then two days later was traded back to the Mustangs.
Picking up right where he left off after a 19-homer, 71-RBI campaign in Billings a season ago, Wurtz’s numbers with the Ponies have improved relative to his time with Southern Maryland as he is currently batting .250 with six homers and 23 RBIs in just 19 games thus far this season.
His go-ahead run scored off of a wild pitch in Billings’ 10-9 win over Ogden on Wednesday night in a rematch of last season’s Championship Series was a particularly explosive way to show that he was back to cause some damage, too.
“It seems like a lot of the guys are starting to get a little closer together,” Wurtz said. “(It’s) my first time coming in the middle of the season anywhere, so it’s kind of different. You don’t build the relationships in spring training and at the beginning of the season, so I kind of kind of missed out on part of it. But it feels like (I’m) kind of getting closer with the guys and guys are starting to connect a little more.”
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