But Morby lingered for one more day, heading about a half hour southeast of the city, past ranchland and new housing developments to a spot \u200b\u200bwhere an enormous neon-lit baseball crossed with two bats rose like a pirate flag above the treeline. There, on an unseasonably hot afternoon, he and a loose crew of friends and fellow creatives took the field before an audience of more than 1,000 people. <\/p>\n The built-from-scratch venue, called The Long Time, is equal parts concert hall, art compound, and social outpost. As Morby, an avid athlete in a former life, took the mound, spectators sprawled across lawn chairs and blankets or ambled between the bar, gift shop, and pop-up flea market. Parents chased after scampering kids. A woman sold enchiladas from a cart.<\/p>\n Morby has made a habit of stopping by The Long Time<\/a> whenever he\u2019s in town. He seems, like so many others, captivated by the place\u2019s strange alchemy: live music, throwback jerseys, families, and the game all folded into a single dusty spectacle. \u201cSomeone recently described it as a little league for adults,\u201d he tells me, \u201cwhich hits the nail on the head.\u201d <\/p>\n Over nearly a decade, The Long Time has evolved from a local curiosity into an epicenter locus for players, musicians, artists, and public figures. Jack White has played here a few times (and famously socked a homer<\/a>). So has Beto O\u2019Rourke (who famously didn\u2019t<\/a>). St. Louis Cardinals great David Freese, an Austin local now, plays on a team. What began as one man\u2019s eccentric experiment is becoming a blueprint for a revivalist sports culture that is, as Morby puts it, \u201cabout bringing that childlike wonder for baseball into our adult lives.\u201d<\/p>\n Morby may have been the day\u2019s marquee draw, but Jack Sanders\u2014who purchased the land The Long Time sits on in 2017, built the space, and runs its home team, the Texas Playboys\u2014is the true star of the show, and the person I\u2019d come to see. Walking up to the makeshift ticketing booth (a folding table staffed by a woman with a clipboard), sweat already pooling beneath my arms, I explained that I\u2019m here to speak with him. <\/p>\n Within seconds, I found myself at a shipping container that had been fashioned into a dugout. Sanders, 49, stood just outside, wearing a straw hat and aviators and a denim jersey with \u201cPlayboys\u201d etched across the front. At roughly six feet tall, with a salt-and-pepper beard, he looks like a Depression-era ballplayer.<\/p>\n We chatted for a short time before Sanders was called back to the field. He excused himself in a thick drawl delivered at what feels like 75% of the average conversational speed. (When later I remark on Sanders\u2019 slow cadence to his friend, the Texas hotelier Liz Lambert, she shoots back, \u201cIn some places, we call that thoughtful!\u201d)<\/p>\n The Long Time’s playing rules are intended to flatten the talent curve. Hit a home run, and your next at-bat must come from the opposite side of the plate, regardless of your switch-hitting ability. Homer again<\/em>, and you\u2019re handed Gracie, an enormous, unwieldy bat reserved for repeat offenders. If a team hits five home runs, any additional balls that leave the yard count as outs. Everyone gets a chance to hit.\u202f <\/p>\n By day\u2019s end, I couldn’t to tell you the final score, and it hardly seemed like anyone else could either. But during the mid-game stretch, my attention held rapt as Morby, who\u2019d had a couple decent at-bats throughout the day, played a short set on a modest wooden stage tucked beneath a towering oak.<\/p>\n Sanders was 18 when his competitive baseball career came to an ignominious end. It\u2019s a story as old as time\u2014or at least, as old as sports: Sanders had been a pitcher and first baseman on his high school team in Fort Worth, Texas, and one practice, his coach asked Sanders to move to the outfield for a spell and give this younger kid a shot at first base. <\/p>\n The surprise relegation proved too much for Sanders, who, by his own estimation, missed just about every ball hit in his direction. A knee injury soon after finished the job, slamming the door on baseball for good. (For those curious: That younger guy helped lead the team to a state championship the following season and went on to play for Texas Tech.)<\/p>\n Around the time the high school team fell away, Sanders started leaning into his bohemian side: listening to Pink Floyd, smoking weed, taking art classes in school, and settling into his role as the \u201cweirdo\u201d (his noun) among his jock friends. <\/p>\n \u201cI didn’t really care too much that baseball was out of my life because I shifted towards art,\u201d Sanders told me a few days after the game against Morby.<\/p>\n Which is a fitting thing to hear as we sat inside another retrofitted shipping container dugout, this one at The Wishing Well, his newer field on the outskirts of Lockhart, about 35 miles south of Austin. Around us, a small crew of Playboys teammates was working through a slate of final preparations ahead of the field\u2019s first game of the season. When I arrived, they were building a makeshift porch roof onto a small building being converted into a gift shop; every so often, the whine of a drill cut through our exchange. \u201cSorry for the noise,\u201d Sanders says with a grin.<\/p>\n After high school, Sanders enrolled at Auburn University in Alabama, where he found a campus culture that turned out to be, to his dismay, eerily familiar: football, Greek life, Southern orthodoxy. \u201cI got to Auburn and pretty quickly realized that Auburn was not that much different than Fort Worth, Texas,\u201d he admits.<\/p>\n But it was through the school\u2019s architecture program that he discovered Samuel Mockbee\u2019s Rural Studio, an innovative design-build program in Newbern, Alabama, that would fundamentally alter his trajectory. Mockbee, a burly guy whom The New York Times<\/em> once wrote<\/a> \u201creveled in the art of ribald storytelling,\u201d was also a MacArthur \u201cgenius\u201d grant-winning architect, and had built Rural Studio around the reformist notion that architecture could serve poor, rural neighborhoods while also functioning as art. For Sanders, Mockbee\u2019s approach landed like a revelation. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the most impactful architectural relationship that I\u2019ve ever had,\u201d Sanders says, \u201cbut I don\u2019t really ever remember talking about architecture at all.\u201d<\/p>\n Mockbee died in December 2001 after a long battle with leukemia, just months before Sanders graduated from the Rural Studio. Sanders stayed on for another three years as an instructor, helping shepherd one of his mentor\u2019s unfinished visions forward by encouraging Mockbee\u2019s daughter, Carol, to complete Subrosa Pantheon, a subterranean concrete meditation space. <\/p>\n Mockbee had built Rural Studio around the idea that design should involve and serve the surrounding community, and Sanders carried that philosophy forward not only in the work itself, but in the way he brought others into it. \u201cJack was always the creator of his own world,\u201d Carol says, “and he was always welcoming others into it.”<\/p>\n That sense of conviviality makes Sanders a fun hang, the kind of guy who, during college breaks back home, would organize sprawling late-night \u201cOlympics\u201d involving improvised scavenger hunts, tequila shots, whatever idea popped into his head. \u201cAnybody else that came up with that idea, you\u2019d be like, \u2018No, that\u2019s the stupidest idea,\u2019\u201d says childhood friend Adam Isbell. \u201cBut when he did it, it was like, \u2018I\u2019m in.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n Years later, Sanders even talked Isbell and a crew of old Fort Worth buddies into starting a sandlot team. <\/p>\n Mockbee wasn\u2019t the only one shaping Sanders\u2019 worldview in Alabama. During his sophomore year in 1998, Sanders stumbled onto the Newbern Tigers Baseball Club, a grassroots institution in a town of barely 200 people where game days could draw crowds of 500. Vendors sold catfish and tilapia sandwiches, cold beer, even shots of whiskey, and for the largely older Black players and families who sustained it, baseball functioned as a social glue among neighbors. In a town where 31% of the population was living below the poverty line, the gate money helped fund funerals. <\/p>\n \u201cIt sort of blew my mind,\u201d Sanders says.<\/p>\n Soon enough, Sanders began imagining how he might apply his design expertise to the team. At first, he envisioned larger interventions, the kind of upgrades more commonly associated with suburban sports complexes than a rural ballfield. But Newbern quickly altered his assumptions. As Sanders embedded himself more deeply within the Tigers and their fandom, he came to understand that effective design required mindfulness of the landscape and its people, not just the visual considerations. <\/p>\n The lights Sanders once envisioned would have extended games after dark, but also invited unwanted police attention. Sanders\u2019 Rural Studio thesis ultimately centered on building a new backstop and dugout system for the field using donated materials like utility wire. (The steel-and-chain-link configuration, which he built alongside two fellow students, would later be featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial<\/a>.)<\/p>\n The racial and social dynamics of Newbern sharpened Sanders\u2019 perspective as much as Rural Studio itself. Sanders was a young white outsider stepping into an older Black baseball culture; trust, he felt, had to be earned gradually, which meant spending a lot of time around the team before ever playing on it. <\/p>\n But over the next three-and-a-half seasons, Sanders became just the second white player on the team, and its only regular member under 30. \u201cThey really liked me there because they didn\u2019t have any young people,\u201d Sanders says. \u201cThe old men that were playing were basically doing what I\u2019m doing now. They\u2019d been doing it for 30 years.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2004, Sanders left for graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin. The city would also become the place where he met his future wife, fellow designer<\/a> Ann Tucker, and where the two continue to raise their children. Soon after arriving, Sanders founded the creative practice Design Build Adventure, <\/a>his design and creative practice, which for the past 20 years has done everything from eclectic custom home gigs to boutique hospitality spaces, even a leaderboard for an urban pitch and putt<\/a> golf course. <\/p>\n \u201c[Design Build Adventure] was very much in the spirit of what we do now,\u201d he says, waving a hand out toward the baseball field around us at The Wishing Well. <\/p>\n Sanders also became an influential figure within Austin\u2019s broader design culture. Liz Lambert, the force behind destinations like Hotel San Jos\u00e9 and Marfa\u2019s El Cosmico, recalls meeting Sanders in the early 2000s as she began work on the latter property, the quirky campground and hotel filled with vintage trailers and yurts (that is now being reimagined as a 3D-printed resort slated to open next year). Before long, the two were camping on the land, sketching site plans together, and figuring out how to build the place from scratch.<\/p>\n Lambers says Sanders helped shape much of El Cosmico\u2019s distinctive look, conceiving of and building fencing and shade structures from used oil pipe and other regional leftovers. \u201cHe\u2019s inventive but he\u2019s also a craftsman,\u201d she tells me. \u201cWhat looks like you\u2019re just coming up with a solution out of found things from a junk pile ends up being very elegant.\u201d<\/p>\n But it would be a different client, one whose own fixation on baseball had already become part of cinematic lore, that ultimately pulled Sanders back onto the diamond.<\/p>\n The strain of baseball Sanders had fallen in love with in Alabama was once woven into everyday American life. Sandlot ball was, according to the historians, born 1,700 miles from Austin, amid the vacant lots and public parks of San Francisco<\/a> in the 1870s, where fields sprung up in whatever space was available and rules were negotiated on the fly. <\/p>\n In rural areas, games unfolded in open fields; in dense cities, they morphed into stickball, played in the street with a rubber ball and a broomstick. For much of the early 20th century, this was the pro leagues\u2019 unofficial farm system, where future Hall of Famers like Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, and Dizzy Dean got their start.<\/p>\n But by the 2000s, its popularity had begun to fade. The Associated Press warned<\/a> in 2008 that sandlot was \u201con the verge of extinction,\u201d squeezed out by the rise of travel teams and private coaching, and a mounting reluctance among parents to let kids roam unsupervised. (Video games didn\u2019t help.) <\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s not as much value placed on those types of play that we had when we were growing up,\u201d says Nicholas Mortensen, a kinesiology professor at Michigan State University\u2019s Institute for the Study of Youth Sports. Parents supervise to the point of surveillance. Kids now have fewer chances to \u201centertain themselves, be creative, be problem solvers.\u201d<\/p>\n Nonetheless, baseball has maintained a powerful grip on the American imagination. Or, at least, a certain type of American\u2019s imagination. Novelists from Bernard Malamud to Chad Harbach have centered their novels around our nation\u2019s pastime. Members of R.E.M. and The Dream Syndicate have a supergroup called The Baseball Project, which basically exists solely to mythologize the game. Perhaps its greatest evangelist, though, is filmmaker Richard Linklater, whose films Dazed and Confused<\/em> and Everybody Wants Some!!<\/em> use baseball as a psychic backdrop<\/a>, a space where wayward young men stretch out the final elasticity of youth.<\/p>\n Shortly after arriving in Austin, Sanders took on a commission building a treehouse for Linklater at his ranch outside the city. After long days of construction, the two would play catch as the sun went down, and Sanders found himself recounting stories about the Newbern Tigers and the baseball culture he\u2019d stumbled into in rural Alabama.<\/p>\n Linklater immediately grasped the appeal. \u201cHe said, \u2018I\u2019d like to see that,\u2019\u201d Sanders says. \u201cAnd I went home that night and started the Texas Playboys.\u201d <\/p>\n Sanders assembled the team\u2014named after the country crooner Bob Wills\u2019 band\u2014from the same loose creative circles orbiting Austin\u2019s art, music, and design scenes. Robert Gay, an architect and Playboys teammate who now serves as one of The Long Time\u2019s announcers, jokes that the whole thing began \u201cas a midlife support group.\u201d<\/p>\n He also connected with his old friends in Newbern and organized a friendly double-header between the Playboys and the Tigers. (Though <\/strong>Linklater briefly practiced with the group, a shoulder injury kept him from making the team\u2019s inaugural trek to Alabama.) <\/strong>That first road trip to Newbern proved formative, with hundreds of people showing up to see the scrimmage. The Playboys, for the record, lost pretty badly. But that didn\u2019t matter; the team was \u201csnake bit,\u201d according to Sanders. They immediately wanted to return.<\/p>\n In the years that followed, the Playboys would visit Newbern on an annual basis, but also other cities\u2014places where a Playboy had a friend who was willing to put together a little sandlot squad. The excursions operated almost like traveling cultural exchanges. The Playboys wanted to know where their competition hung out, which restaurants they frequented, where they drank after midnight. Sanders likened the outings to \u201can Anthony Bourdain episode.\u201d <\/p>\n But those temporary teams tended to stay together afterward, and gradually, those impromptu games helped seed a national network. Sandlot scenes took root in Tulsa, Nashville, the Carolinas, Philadelphia, and across Texas. Teams appeared in Vancouver and outside Mexico City, too, often discovering one another through Instagram long before any formal organization existed around them. <\/p>\n Howard Carey, an early Playboys teammate and creator of the online directory Sandlot Revolution<\/a>, says many teams initially had no idea they were part of a broader movement at all. \u201cThey just thought they were the weird ones in their town doing this,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n With the Playboys in need of a permanent home, Sanders bought the land that became The Long Time in 2017 and slowly built it out<\/a> piece by piece, using salvaged materials gathered from scrapyards, open fields, and even castoffs from his design clients, turning the field into what he describes as a \u201cfolk art project,\u201d a setting to, in his words, \u201cfall into a conversation, drink a beer, talk about your life.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit,w_1024\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/06\/11-91550844-austin-sandlot-baseball.jpg\")
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A \u201cweirdo\u201d among the jocks<\/h2>\n
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\u201cIt sort of blew my mind\u201d<\/h2>\n
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Like an Anthony Bourdain episode<\/h2>\n
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