Austin’s sandlot baseball scene—built from salvaged materials and stitched into indie music culture—has grown into a lifestyle magnet. At The Long Time, Jack Sanders’ Texas Playboys blend “adult” baseball with concerts, family crowds, sponsorships, and social-
When Kevin Morby arrived in Austin in mid-March for South by Southwest. he had a tight plan: perform a six-song solo set promoting his forthcoming album. Little Wide Open. After South by Southwest, he was set for a months-long international tour in support of the record. It was, by his own timing, the kind of trip that should have been quick.
Instead. Morby lingered one more day—about a half hour southeast of the city. past ranchland and new housing developments—until he found a spot where an enormous neon-lit baseball crossed with two bats rose above the treeline. On an unseasonably hot afternoon. Morby and a loose crew of friends and fellow creatives took the field at The Long Time before an audience of more than 1. 000 people.
The built-from-scratch venue sits like an art compound that happens to be a baseball field: part concert hall. part social outpost. As Morby pitched. spectators spread across lawn chairs and blankets. weaving between the bar. gift shop. and a pop-up flea market. Parents chased after scampering kids. A woman sold enchiladas from a cart.
Morby said he’s made a habit of stopping by The Long Time whenever he’s in town. He’s captivated. he said. by the place’s “strange alchemy: live music. throwback jerseys. families. and the game all folded into a single dusty spectacle.” Someone had recently described it as “a little league for adults. ” Morby told me—and he said it “hits the nail on the head.”.
In a scene that began as eccentric experiment, the guests now read like a cross-section of modern culture. Jack White has played here a few times and famously socked a homer. Beto O’Rourke has played too, with the detail that he famously didn’t. St. Louis Cardinals great David Freese, now an Austin local, plays on a team. And for all the marquee attention Morby brought that day. the person the event seemed to orbit was Jack Sanders—the man who purchased the land where The Long Time sits in 2017. built the space. and runs its home team. the Texas Playboys.
Sanders was easy to spot: 49 years old. straw hat and aviators. denim jersey with “Playboys” etched across the front. salt-and-pepper beard and the look of a Depression-era ballplayer. He also spoke in a slow, thick drawl that landed like a different tempo from the surrounding heat. When he stepped away to the field. he excused himself with the kind of pause that later drew a reaction from his friend. Austin hotelier Liz Lambert. who said. “In some places. we call that thoughtful!”.
The rules at The Long Time were designed 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. Hit another homer, and you’re 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.
By day’s end, it was hard to tell what the final score even was. During the mid-game stretch, Morby played a short set on a modest wooden stage tucked beneath a towering oak.
Sanders—who. in his own telling. used to be “the weirdo” in baseball—may be the reason so many people treat the game like a communal performance. He didn’t start out building a cultural phenomenon. He was 18 when his competitive baseball career ended. after a practice his coach asked him to move to the outfield for a spell and give a younger kid a shot at first base. Sanders said the change proved too much; he missed “just about every ball hit in his direction.” A knee injury soon after finished the job. closing the door on baseball.
Around that time. he leaned into his bohemian side: listening to Pink Floyd. smoking weed. smoking weed. taking art classes. and settling into his role as the “weirdo” among his jock friends. After high school. he enrolled at Auburn University in Alabama. where he found a campus culture that felt familiar in the way Fort Worth had—football. Greek life. Southern orthodoxy—and he said he realized Auburn wasn’t that different than where he grew up.
What changed his trajectory was Auburn’s architecture program and his discovery of Samuel Mockbee’s Rural Studio in Newbern. Alabama. Mockbee was a MacArthur “genius” grant-winning architect whose Rural Studio was built around the reformist idea that architecture could serve poor. rural neighborhoods while functioning as art. Sanders said it landed like a revelation. describing it as “the most impactful architectural relationship that I’ve ever had. ” even while he said he “doesn’t really ever remember talking about architecture at all.”.
Mockbee died in December 2001 after a long battle with leukemia, just months before Sanders graduated from Rural Studio. Sanders stayed on for another three years as an instructor. helping shepherd one of his mentor’s unfinished visions forward by encouraging Mockbee’s daughter. Carol. to complete Subrosa Pantheon. a subterranean concrete meditation space.
Carol said Mockbee had built Rural Studio around the idea that design should involve and serve the surrounding community, and she said Sanders “was always the creator of his own world,” and “and he was always welcoming others into it.”
That sense of welcoming followed Sanders into sandlot baseball, too. Childhood friend Adam Isbell described it from the beginning: during college breaks back home. Sanders organized late-night “Olympics. ” made from improvisation—scavenger hunts. tequila shots. whatever came to mind—and if someone suggested a version of it. Isbell said. people would dismiss it as the stupidest idea. But when Sanders did it. “it was like. ‘I’m in.’” Years later. Isbell said. Sanders talked him and other Fort Worth friends into starting a sandlot team.
Sanders wasn’t shaped only by Mockbee. During his sophomore year in 1998. he stumbled onto the Newbern Tigers Baseball Club—an institution in a town of barely 200 people where game days could draw crowds of 500. Vendors sold catfish and tilapia sandwiches, cold beer, and even shots of whiskey. In Newbern. where 31% of the population lived below the poverty line. gate money helped fund funerals. and baseball functioned as social glue.
“It sort of blew my mind,” Sanders said.
He began imagining how to apply his design expertise to the Tigers. At first, he envisioned larger interventions like upgrades more common in suburban sports complexes. Newbern quickly forced a different understanding: effective design required mindfulness of the landscape and the people, not just the visuals. He said the lights he once envisioned would have extended games after dark, but also invited unwanted police attention.
Instead, Sanders’ Rural Studio thesis centered on building a new backstop and dugout system for the field using donated materials like utility wire. The steel-and-chain-link configuration he built alongside two fellow students later appeared in the 2002 Whitney Biennial.
The racial and social dynamics of Newbern sharpened his perspective, Sanders said, too. As a young white outsider stepping into an older Black baseball culture. he felt trust needed to be earned slowly—meaning spending time around the team before ever playing. Over the next three-and-a-half seasons. Sanders became just the second white player on the team and the only regular member under 30. He said the old men “really liked me there because they didn’t have any young people. ” and that those players “had been doing it for 30 years.”.
In 2004, Sanders left for graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin. The city became where he met his future wife. fellow designer Ann Tucker. and where the two continue to raise their children. Soon after arriving. Sanders founded the creative practice Design Build Adventure. and he described it as a design and creative practice that over the past 20 years has done custom home gigs. boutique hospitality spaces. and even a leaderboard for an urban pitch and putt golf course.
In the years that followed, Sanders became a known figure inside Austin’s wider design culture. Liz Lambert. behind Hotel San José and Marfa’s El Cosmico. recalled meeting Sanders in the early 2000s as she began work on El Cosmico. She said Sanders and Lambert camped on the land. sketched site plans together. and figured out how to build the place from scratch.
Lambert said Sanders helped shape El Cosmico’s distinctive look. conceiving of and building fencing and shade structures from used oil pipe and other regional leftovers. “He’s inventive but he’s also a craftsman. ” she said. adding that what looks like someone just coming up with a solution from found things ends up being “very elegant.”.
But it wasn’t a typical client project that brought Sanders back to baseball in a way that stuck. It was filmmaker Richard Linklater—whose movies Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some!!. use baseball as a psychic backdrop, a space where wayward young men stretch out the final elasticity of youth.
Sanders had taken on a commission building a treehouse for Linklater at Linklater’s ranch outside Austin. After long construction days, Sanders and Linklater played catch as the sun went down. Sanders said he told Linklater about the Newbern Tigers and the rural baseball culture he’d stumbled into in Alabama. Linklater immediately grasped what Sanders had described. Sanders said: “He said. ‘I’d like to see that. ’” and Sanders said he “went home that night and started the Texas Playboys.”.
He assembled the team named after Bob Wills’ band, from Austin’s loose creative circles orbiting art, music, and design. Playboys teammate and The Long Time announcer Robert Gay joked that the whole thing began “as a midlife support group.”
Sanders also connected with his Newbern friends and organized a friendly double-header between the Playboys and the Tigers. Linklater briefly practiced with the group, Sanders said, but a shoulder injury kept him from making the team’s inaugural trek to Alabama.
That first road trip to Newbern proved formative. Sanders said hundreds of people showed up to see the scrimmage. He added that the Playboys lost pretty badly and that it was “snake bit” in his words—but the loss didn’t matter. The team immediately wanted to return.
Over the following years. the Playboys visited Newbern annually and also other cities. wherever someone from the Austin creative circle had friends who could put together a little sandlot squad. The excursions operated like traveling cultural exchanges. Sanders said the Playboys wanted to know where the competition hung out. which restaurants they frequented. where they drank after midnight—and he compared the trips to “an Anthony Bourdain episode.”.
Sanders said those temporary teams often stayed together afterward. Gradually, the impromptu games helped seed a national network. Sandlot scenes took root in Tulsa, Nashville, the Carolinas, and Philadelphia as well as across Texas. Teams appeared in Vancouver and outside Mexico City too, sometimes finding each other through Instagram before any formal organization existed.
Howard Carey, an early Playboys teammate and creator of the online directory Sandlot Revolution, said many teams didn’t initially realize they were part of something larger. “They just thought they were the weird ones in their town doing this,” Carey said.
To give the Playboys a permanent home. Sanders bought the land that became The Long Time in 2017 and built it piece by piece. using salvaged materials gathered from scrapyards. open fields. and castoffs from his design clients. Sanders described the field as a “folk art project. ” and said he wanted it to become a setting where people could “fall into a conversation. drink a beer. talk about your life.”.
The shift from odd local curiosity to operating business showed up in the details. In the nine years since it began, The Long Time moved toward a lifestyle brand. Major brand partnerships. a robust social media presence. and a flood of national media attention—including a stylish documentary produced by Yeti—have transformed the field. Outside the baseball. evidence of sponsorship sits in plain view: signs for Rambler Sparkling Water and Madre Mezcal hang above the bar. The outfield fence doubles as ad space for Hattie B’s Hot Chicken. a local record store called Waterloo. and Rivian.
Companies sponsor tournaments and special events. The venue now hosts weddings and corporate retreats.
The gift shop has evolved into a miniature economy, too. Overseen by Sanders’ friend Tippi Clark—described as a former designer for Kate Spade and Marc Jacobs—the shop sells records by Playboys-affiliated musicians. wool caps that were once worn by Pedro Pascal. allegedly. and assorted animal trinkets. Clark said, “We even sell the little plastic hawks because there are hawks flying around here all the time.”.
Sanders declined to get specific about the finances. saying. “We’re not a million-dollar company. ” but he acknowledged that sponsorships have become the operation’s largest revenue stream. He said Instagram plays a big part in that. While Sanders noted community baseball existed long before the Playboys. including his grandfather playing on a recreational team in the 1940s. he conceded that Playboys were among the earliest drivers of “the social media era of community baseball. ” where teams discover one another through Instagram posts.
The posts arrive nonstop. Sanders’ Instagram handle has 8,400 followers, and the Playboys’ and Long Time’s accounts have 9,000 and 15,500 followers, respectively. Sanders said you could lose an entire day to sandlot-themed content. Many of the posts could be ads for cowboy boots, craft beer, or artisanal sunglasses, and often they basically are.
A local player who spoke on the condition of anonymity bemoaned the self-promotional element. “There are sandlot teams for people who want to play baseball,” the player said. “And there are sandlot teams for people who want you to know they play baseball.”
Sanders pushed back. He insisted that beneath the micro-influencing. his sandlot circus still has its “shaggier qualities.” And on a punishingly hot March day when the reporter visited. he said the impromptu mid-game breaks for music and line dancing were still there. and children still climbed the scaffolding above the bar. The game remains, in Sanders’ phrase, “the least that it can possibly be, and not even one bit more.”.
That blend—casual and ambitious at the same time—seems to be what draws high-profile friends back into Sanders’ world. Jim Ward. the musician known for his work with Sparta and At the Drive-In. called Sanders “the Johnny Appleseed” of sandlot. Risto Lawson. a woodworker who plays for the Texas Tallboys. credited Sanders with building “his Field of Dreams here.” Joel Manzo. a city employee and Austin sandlot organizer. praised Sanders for building what Manzo sees as “the mecca of sandlot ball.”.
But Beto O’Rourke’s enthusiasm might be the most telling. The former congressman. a constant presence in Texas politics. first encountered the Playboys through Austin’s overlapping indie-rock and creative circles before eventually joining the El Paso Diablitos. O’Rourke said Sanders has a kind of authenticity that people usually reserve for bandmates. “Jack’s able to exude an authentic chill while also being extraordinarily ambitious,” O’Rourke told me.
O’Rourke also described how a visit from Sanders became something personal and spontaneous. Several years ago, Sanders was working out in Marfa when he called O’Rourke on impulse. O’Rourke said his wife and kids were out of town. and Sanders drove the three hours to El Paso almost immediately. O’Rourke said the two spent the next few days hiking the Franklin Mountains. going to a local Minor League baseball game. listening to music. and talking late into the night. Sanders slept in one of O’Rourke’s kid’s rooms.
“I don’t get those kinds of calls at this point in my life,” O’Rourke said. “Somebody saying, ‘I don’t want anything from you. I just want to know if you want to hang out and have some fun.’”
Sanders laughed when the story was brought back to him. He said he was surprised. “I was surprised,” he said. “I probably thought I’d have lunch or dinner and he was like, ‘My family’s out of town, why don’t you stay here.’ And I was like, ‘Okay.’”
After enough conversations with Sanders, the reporter said, it becomes clearer why that kind of visit might happen more often than outsiders would expect.
In the end, The Long Time’s appeal doesn’t come from pretending the rules of baseball don’t matter. It comes from making room for life around them—music on the field, families in the grass, brand logos overhead, and a game that, for everyone stepping in, still feels like it could turn into a story.
Austin The Long Time Texas Playboys Jack Sanders sandlot baseball South by Southwest Kevin Morby Little Wide Open Richard Linklater Beto O’Rourke Liz Lambert El Cosmico Design Build Adventure Instagram sponsorship lifestyle brand indie rockers