Frank Colston said he wasn’t sure he wanted a documentary crew telling the story of how he and his teammates, against all odds, made it into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.
“I actually asked them, ‘You’re not going to make a “Tiger King” out of our baseball club, are you?’” said Colston, referring to the Netflix true-crime docuseries.
Colston in his younger days was catcher and captain of the Salt Lake Trappers, an unaffiliated rookie-league, single-A team whose players were passed over by Major League Baseball scouts. They were not a team that anyone, in the summer of 1987, would predict to win 29 games in a row — a streak that no baseball team, at any level, has achieved before or since.
That improbable story, and what happened to the players after, is told in “The Streak,” a documentary by filmmaker Kelyn Ikegami that will screen for a one-week run starting Friday, Aug. 22, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas, 111 E. 300 South, Salt Lake City.
Ikegami said he’s a lifelong baseball fan, by way of the Japanese obsession with the game. He was born in Tokyo and moved to Seattle in 2001, the year Ichiro Suzuki began his Hall of Fame-bound career with the Mariners. Even so, when he came to Utah for college, Ikegami was surprised to learn about the Trappers, who in 2012 were marking the 25th anniversary of their winning streak.
He and his producing partner, Hunter Phillips, talked about making a Trappers movie for six years. “In 2018, we went to spring training, and we were just vibing with the energy there,” Ikegami said. “And we were, like, ‘We need to start calling the players and see if there’s a story there.’”
They found a website, 29inarow.com, which lists details about the Trappers’ run, including box scores and news stories from each game. From there, they talked to Dave Baggott, who played for the team in 1986 before moving into front-office jobs; he’s now the owner and president of the Ogden Raptors, a team that — like the Trappers — plays in the Pioneer League and is independent from any MLB franchise.
Ikegami said Baggott is “a great character, very charismatic, and had great memories of 1987. … We’re, like, ‘OK, he’s really interesting. If all the other players [have] Dave’s energy, we’ve really got something here.”
Colston was the last of the ‘87 Trappers to come on board for the documentary, Ikegami said. “He was the person that I had to get on board the most, as the leader of the team,” Ikegami said.
Colston said he was cautious at first. “I felt like I needed to guard this sacred baseball story,” he said. “I didn’t want to be a participant if it was going to [depict us] in any kind of negative light. It was too positive of an experience.”
It took a long phone call — Colston said it was three hours, Ikegami said it was four — to convince the one-time team captain to get involved.
“I asked, ‘How did you find us?’ [Ikegami] said, ‘I read an article about you guys 10 years ago, and I knew that day I was going to make this movie,’” Colston said. “It gave me a level of trust to move forward.”
Reliving the winning streak
(The Salt Lake Tribune) Members of the 1987 Salt Lake Trappers baseball team, who won 29 games in a row. From left: Adam Casillas, Jon Leake, Ed Citronnelli, Mat Huff, Barry Moss, Mike Malinak, Frank Colston and Jim Ferguson.
The streak started on June 25, 1987, the Trappers’ home opener, with a 12-6 win over the Pocatello Giants. The Trappers kept going for 33 days, with four days off and one double-header, until the team lost to the Billings Mustangs, 7-5, on July 27.
Seventeen games were played at home at Derks Field — the ballpark that sat on 1300 South where Smith’s Ballpark stands. The remaining 12 were on the road, with the team taking long bus rides to play in small ballparks in Great Falls, Montana; Idaho Falls and Pocatello, Idaho; and Medicine Hat, Alberta.
“When it was going on — when you’re actually in the shoes, so to speak — it might not be as difficult as if you’re right next to it,” Colston said. “We felt that our momentum kept growing, and we were just snowballing.”
Still, baseball players are known for being superstitious — it’s why nobody in the dugout talks about a no-hitter in the seventh inning — so how did the Trappers acknowledge the streak as it was happening?
“When we broke the [Pioneer] League record [at 19 games], and we heard the words ‘Cooperstown’ mentioned, that did a little something to us,” Colston said.
The Trappers kept going, Colston said, by “staying present. When we would walk into the clubhouse, we would say out loud, ‘Who are we going to whip today?’”
Part of that bravado, he said, was “that gift of desperation, of being on the bottom rung of the professional baseball ladder. So that was also something we used for motivation.”
The documentary notes how the Trappers, as they approached breaking the previous record of 27 wins — which had stood for 85 years — the national media swooped in. The team was featured on ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” and in Sports Illustrated (in a photo spread that infamously showed the sun “setting” in the east behind the Derks Field outfield).
Part of the media appeal was the fact that the comedian Bill Murray was one of the Trappers’ team owners. Ikegami didn’t get to interview Murray for the documentary, but he did talk to rock star Huey Lewis, whom Murray invited to a game while Lewis and his band, The News, were in Salt Lake City for a concert — and the band ended up singing the national anthem at Derks Field.
The Trappers’ life after baseball
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Members of the 1987 Salt Lake Trappers are recognized before Friday night's Salt Lake Bees game in South Jordan on Friday, Aug. 8, 2025.
After the streak ended, the movie points out 13 players were signed by MLB teams to join their farm systems. But, as one pro manager says in the movie, the scouts who didn’t draft those players turned out to be right — none ever played in the majors.
Because of the winning streak, though, the ‘87 Trappers can make a claim that most players in Major League Baseball can’t: They’ve been immortalized in Cooperstown, with a collection of Trappers memorabilia in the Hall of Fame’s collection. One of those items is Colston’s bat.
“It was just a kind of magic,” Ikegami said. “Individually, they may not have had what it takes to make it, but then they were greater than their parts. When you put them all together, it was something about that brotherhood and that chemistry and that relationship they had with each other that was able to achieve something this significant.”
That connection continues today. Colston has assembled his old teammates for reunions in 2012 and 2022 — the last, for the streak’s 35th anniversary, was held in Colston’s home town of Belleville, Illinois, and is featured in the documentary. Colston said he and his teammates share a text thread.
“They talk all the time,” said Ikegami, who said he “had the privilege” of being included on that thread for several months.
And, earlier this month, for a premiere screening of “The Streak,” a dozen Trappers teammates, including Colston, were recognized on the field at The Ballpark at America First Square before a Salt Lake Bees game.
Colston said he’s looking forward to Utah audiences seeing the documentary.
“It’s a story of hope,” Colston said. “Hope and perseverance.”
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