It was the most surprising spring training cut of all.
Outside Turner Field on a recent Friday evening, dusk had descended on Hank Aaron Drive. Inside the stadium, meanwhile, the megawatt smiles had finally started to falter on the faces of some of the women waiting to hear if they’d made the Opening Day roster.
During three days of tryouts, these would-be members of the Atlanta Braves’ Tomahawk Team had danced to “Thank God I’m A Country Boy” enough times to summon the spirit of the late John Denver, rewritten the lyrics to popular songs on the fly (“Ice Ice Baby” became “Braves Braves Baby”), and undergone one-on-one interviews where their answers to questions like “Who’s your favorite Brave?” were scrutinized more closely than the results of Babe Ruth’s Rorschach test.
More than 200 women had turned out to compete for a place on this much-more-than-a-pep-squad, which over the past decade has become as closely identified with Braves games as foam rubber tomahawks, traffic jams on the Downtown Connector — and unparalleled success. Ranging in age from 18 to their early 20s, most of these young ladies had come into the world right around the time the Braves had won the first of their 14 straight division titles and essentially never looked back.
“My favorite player was always Andruw Jones and my new one is Jason Heyward,” said one finalist, Mattie Logan, 23, of Marietta. “It’s one young and good and classy player after another.”
Down in Florida at that very moment, new Braves manager Fredi Gonzalez was putting the finishing touches on the team that returns here Tuesday and Wednesday to play its final two preseason games at the Ted. The Tomahawk Team would need to be in major league form by then as well, and it had come down to 19 finalists vying for 8 open spots.
Or had it?
‘Girl next door’
“There are three people here who have no chance of becoming rookie members of the team this year,” Braves Entertainment manager Brandon Bissell announced as the trio in question peeled away from the others. Two were already members of the Tomahawk Team, Bissell explained to audible gasps; all three had been acting as undercover “moles” during the audition process.
“They were taking mental notes the whole time,” he continued. “So we could learn more about what you’re really like, away from the judges.”
Gulp. One can only hope the Braves’ pitching coaches vet their potential closers this carefully.
Meanwhile, to fully appreciate the surprised reaction this revelation elicited, imagine you’re a rookie ballplayer at the real spring training. Now imagine finding out that the supposed unknown you’ve been battling all along for playing time was actually Chipper Jones in disguise.
“It’s probably a really smart idea,” said McKenzie Beach, 21, of Marietta. “Because you don’t want girls on the team that are really catty.”
No. Cattiness is definitely not in the $10-an-hour job description of the Tomahawk Team, which fields eight women each game. Here’s what is:
● Involving fans in pre-game activities on the Turner Field plaza.
● Cheering on contest participants in the stands when their tongue-tied images suddenly flash across the outfield scoreboard.
● Firing off the T-shirt gun without accidentally clipping Homer the Brave’s oversized baseball head.
● And, most memorably, dancing to “Country Boy” atop the dugouts during the seventh inning stretch.
That’s every game, without fail. Even when it’s as humid as the inside of an umpire’s chest protector at the end of a doubleheader, or when the first five rows on the visiting team’s side are full of obnoxious Mets fans.
“She should be a girl-next-door type,” said Bissell, pointing out that Tomahawk Team-ers — whom he dubs “brand ambassadors” for the Braves — interact closely with fans who might attend numerous games, and who might recognize them more easily than the Braves players outside the stadium. “When it’s 100 degrees in August and you’re working your 10th game in a row, if you have any sort of, uh, an edge, it’s going to come out.
“That’s not the girl-next-door type.”
Beware the ‘moles’
Well, that all depends on the neighborhood. Still, Bissell, 34, is clear on what the Tomahawk Team is not: It’s not a cheerleading squad roaming the sidelines at NFL games, or a sexy dance squad shimmying at center court during NBA timeouts.
(“We openly welcome all forms of self-expression,” team captain Cierra Gilchrist, 22, said with a laugh during dugout dance instruction on Day 1, when some participants’ over-the-head twirls and tomahawk chops were all over the map.)
Nor is it a group of highly specialized position players. The Braves went into their spring training looking to plug some holes in the bullpen and develop right-handed power hitting. But the Tomahawk Team wasn’t specifically in search of a trained gymnast, say, or even a particularly perky blonde. (That they ended up with a few of the latter anyway was just plain luck.)
Apparently, Mom was right all along:
“A lot of it is about having a good personality,” said Bissell, who made the final selections along with game entertainment director Scott Cunningham.
That sounded a lot like one Mercedes Montalvo. The 22-year-old Kennesaw State University senior and substitute teacher is “full of life” and “will talk to anyone,” according to the scouting report compiled by Bissell’s “moles.” By contrast, another aspirant didn’t fare quite as well: “Interrupts ... [and] not friendly,” read the comments on her.
Making the cut
From the moment the original 200-plus women had arrived at Turner Field, in fact, they’d been quietly observed by everyone from top-level Braves employees to staff trainees showing them how to put on their registration numbers.
Those who made it through to the interview portion were asked to rate their baseball knowledge on a scale of 1 to 10. A 10 response usually elicited a follow-up question like, “So what’s a 6-4-3 [double play]?”
Meanwhile, it wasn’t enough just to be able to name a favorite Brave. They also had to make a good case for why. Better, anyway, than “Because he’s hot,” which pretty much doomed any chances of advancing.
“I said Chipper Jones because he’s the one player who’s been here my whole life,” said Aria Thompson, a 19-year-old University of Georgia student from Fayetteville. “Whatever the time, whatever’s been going on, he’s always been there and played hard. He is the face of the Braves.”
And now, Thompson is one, too. The judges finally returned from their huddle in one of the private suites on the stadium’s concourse level and welcomed her, Montalvo, Mattie Logan and five other newcomers to the Tomahawk Team. They’re an incredibly promising group of rookies, Bissell would muse a few days later.
Of course, managers always say that during spring training, right?
“There’s things we can do to prepare them,” Bissell said. “But until you climb on top of a dugout in front of 55,000 people, you can’t really know what it’s like.”
