Tylicki fosters team mentality in baseball, military

BINGHAMTON, New York -- Working in a Minor League Baseball front office is a world away, sometimes literally, from serving in the military. Richard Tylicki, director of stadium operations for Double-A Binghamton, nonetheless finds similarities between the two pursuits.

"I think in Minor League Baseball you work a lot -- a lot -- of hours, and most people can't handle it," he said, speaking at Mirabito Stadium prior to the Rumble Ponies' game on Aug. 3. "I think the military is like that too. You work a lot of hours in the Army. I mean, sometimes it's 24/7, especially when you're deployed, so I think there's a comparison there. There's a lot of outdoors work here [at the ballpark]. You gotta pull tarp. You get muddy, you get dirty, even if you're in the front office. Same thing happens in the Army. There's some training that's done indoors, and office work, but then you're in the field working."

Tylicki knows of what he speaks. In July 2020, he concluded a nearly 30-year career with the Army National Guard, retiring as a lieutenant colonel. Throughout most of his time in the National Guard -- during which he was deployed on five occasions -- he was also employed by the Rumble Ponies. The native of Parma Heights, Ohio, began working for the team in 1995, when they were known as the Mets. He landed his job with the the Mets' Double-A affiliate after attending the Baseball Winter Meetings in Dallas the previous year.

"I've [always] been operations. I handle the cleaning of the stadium and maintenance," said Tylicki. "I oversee the ushers, oversee the parking. On and off, I've overseen the bat boys as well, and I still am doing that now. And then I've always sold, and maybe have taken on a more prominent sales role as the years have gone by. But when I came into baseball, pretty much everybody sold."

Tylicki pursued his baseball career while his military one was underway. He was in the ROTC while attending college at Kentucky State, and that was followed by short stints in the Illinois and Kentucky Guard.

"When I moved to New York in 1995, I saw that [Binghamton] was near the border and I called both New York and Pennsylvania," he said. "Pennsylvania was more aggressive in recruiting me, so I ended up landing in the Pennsylvania Army National Guard, originally being military intelligence but converting to armor because there were more leadership opportunities with that. So then for the next 25 years that I lived here, it was one weekend a month, two weeks a year, at the minimum. But oftentimes there was school, training exercises, five deployments. I deployed to Bosnia, Iraq, Egypt and then Kuwait two times."

Four of those deployments were for a full year, and one of them was preceded by a preparatory year in active duty. That obviously necessitated taking long leaves of absence from the Rumble Ponies, resulting in what Tylicki says "a lot of preparation."

"In the instances where I was gone for a year, they either got someone to replace me or it was done by committee," he said. "You got a duty, somebody else got part of a duty, and it just varied in different years.

"One of my deployments, the Serbian president got indicted by the International War Crimes Tribunal and we were talking about that and I'm thinking, 'Wow, if I was back in Binghamton, I'd be worried about whether Section 100 was clean or not."

While his work in Binghamton has put him into various leadership roles, the Army National Guard provided that at a scale not possible in Minor League Baseball.

"In Binghamton, we have maybe 12-15 employees full-time. Where in the Army, you have hundreds and thousands of people," he said. "So there were leadership opportunities for me in the Army that I never would have gotten in baseball, where I was able to command larger formations."

His ongoing work with the Rumble Ponies might not be able to match the scope and intensity of his Army National Guard service, but Tylicki still keeps plenty busy at Mirabito Stadium. He said he appreciates the job now more than ever, especially after a stint working in a warehouse when the team was non-operational during the pandemic.

"I could be out on the road selling. I could be meeting with a contractor, pulling tarp, fixing something," he said. "There's a lot of variety. You work outdoors. You work indoors. It's a lot more fun than your normal job, I would say."