Summer vocation

When you stroll into a Cape Cod League baseball game, there's a feeling that you've entered a Norman Rockwell painting. Admission is however much you feel like dropping into a pail. Free scorecards are usually on a table, the stack held down by a rock. Old-timers sit in torn lawn chairs and talk about how scrawny "Nomah" was as a college kid. Wide-eyed kids swarm around ballplayers who treat them like little brothers. You half expect the public address system to play "Old Cape Cod" by Patti Page.

In some respects, it is the end of the innocence.

The players are not yet millionaires.

Some even work second jobs in libraries, factories, fish markets, and restaurants. The majority work mornings in baseball clinics up and down the Cape.

But there's a good chance that the kid who just weighed your lobster at the Brewster Fish and Lobster Co. will someday be making the average salary for a major league baseball player of $2,866,544. In fact, a third of the major leaguers who played in college played in the Cape League. Three Red Sox starters -- Jason Varitek, Mike Lowell, and Mark Loretta -- played Cape ball.

The Globe recently journeyed across the Cape talking to these young players about their summer jobs and their big league dreams.

Larry Day, for example, a catcher for the Orleans Cardinals, gets up at 6:15 a.m. to work in the Fairways Restaurant and Pizzeria in Eastham. He works 30 hours a week at $10 an hour.

"While baseball is the reason I'm here, work keeps it in perspective," he says. "I love the game to death, but it helps me to get away from it. Then I appreciate that I'm playing a game."