SAUGET • Charlie Lisk walked out onto the field, pushing aside the long years and longer odds, content to chase his dream through another humid day.

Sweat stained his gray training shirt. Sunglasses and a Gateway Grizzlies ball cap shielded his eyes against the late August sun. A bag bulging with catching gear and bats was slung over one broad shoulder. There was a deep familiarity to it all, from having done this so many times before.

He's 27 now. The oldest player on the field. Second-oldest in the entire Frontier League. He's married. He owns a house in Wentzville. On road trips, he likes to do the newspaper crossword. But he still plays with an intensity that can spook teammates, some of whom call him "Pops."

Lisk is playing on the lowest rung of professional ball, in an independent league that favors youth, in a place that has no formal ties to the majors or any minor-league farm system. Independent ball is free of frills, no perks, little pay. You can see the shimmering lights of Busch Stadium from the right field bleachers of the Grizzlies' home GCS Ballpark. But it might as well be on another planet. The path out of here can be hard to find.

But Lisk still harbors the hope, nurtures it, fights off the bitterness that has sunk so many others, despite being nine years removed from what he used to be — the kid celebrated for swinging one of the most fearsome bats in all of South Carolina, the schoolboy prospect bird-dogged by scouts, the one drafted by the Chicago White Sox and wooed by a $390,000 signing bonus to skip college and turn pro, the cocky young stud with a five-year plan for making the majors.

He's someone else now. And playing perhaps the best ball of his life.

"I've made peace with what I'm doing," Lisk said.

Crossing the field, he reached the dugout steps and stopped cold. He stared into the corner. An orange bucket that had served as the dugout bathroom was gone. Replacing it was a sleek porta-potty. A luxury in independent ball. But why now, Lisk wondered. Why 80-something games into a 96-game season?

"You're about to break the record, that's why," outfielder Jareck West said with a laugh.

"You're going to break that thing tonight," added Brandon Peters, Lisk's road roommate.

The 6-foot-4 Lisk dropped his bag. He plopped down in a seat and cracked a smile.

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The record. At this moment, Lisk was among the league leaders in all hitting categories. And after four seasons with the Grizzlies, he was two home runs shy of breaking the Frontier League's career home run record of 86. It would be an honor. But it also meant something else: He'd been here too long.

Bill Lee, the Frontier League's commissioner, likes to welcome new players with a speech: "You're welcome to stay in the league as long as you want. But get the hell out."

Get out. That's the whole point of independent ball. Play well enough and get signed to a minor-league team. Find a way into that pipeline they call "affiliated ball" — the Class A, AA and AAA teams that feed the big show.

It happens often enough. But the final step is the hardest. Of the thousands of players who have cycled through the Frontier League since it began in 1993, just 19 have played in the majors. Most were pitchers, like Josh Kinney, a River City Rascal who first made the Cardinals roster in 2006.

Only three position players have gone from the Frontier to the Bigs. And one of them holds that home run record. In the late 1990s, Morgan Burkhart, an undrafted St. Louis native, crushed the ball for four seasons with the Richmond, Ind., Roosters. At age 26, he signed with the Boston Red Sox. He played 42 games over three years in the majors.

Burkhart's stay was brief. But that is not what matters to the players in the Frontier League. The point is: He made it.

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Lisk clearly recalls the day he realized that his dream might be more than idle fantasy. He was 15. It was summer, and his Fort Mill, S.C., high school team was in a preseason tournament. He was throwing before a game — with 20 scouts standing behind him. Lisk asked the player he was throwing with to keep moving back and back, until he was rifling the ball clear across the field.

"I was trying to throw balls out of the stadium trying to get noticed," he said.

Lisk got noticed. But his senior year, he signed a letter of intent to play baseball at the University of South Carolina, a top program. Some teams were scared off, thinking Lisk would go to college instead of turning pro. The White Sox, short on catchers, took a chance. The club drafted him in the 24th round of the 2001 amateur draft, the same draft that saw future major-league stars Ryan Howard (of Wildwood), Joe Mauer and Mark Teixeira. The White Sox agreed to pay Lisk the same bonus as a third-round player, plus $28,000 for college classes.

Lisk earned more in that one day than he would over the next 10 baseball seasons combined. But that money, socked away, funded the long pursuit of his dream.

At age 19, he walked into the White Sox spring training complex in Arizona thinking he was ready for pro ball. He was shocked by the daily grind. He got injured. He played only a little rookie ball that year.

"I was really in over my head," Lisk said. "And it showed."

He bounced around the minors for four more years, never rising above Class A ball: from Winston-Salem, N.C., to Bristol, Va., to Kannapolis, N.C., to Great Fall, Mont., and back to Kannapolis.

One moment from that time still stands out, when it seemed his career might tip in the other direction. In his first game with Winston-Salem in 2002, Lisk hit a home run. He went 3 for 5. At the next game, Lisk's mom snapped a photo of the scoreboard, capturing her son's early season brillance: AVG .600, 1 HR, 3 RBI.

But Lisk hit below .200 for the season.

"You're a hot commodity until someone better comes along," he said.

The White Sox released Lisk in early 2006 after five middling seasons. He would go on to sign minor-league contracts with the Florida Marlins, San Diego Padres and Detroit Tigers. But they were all short-lived.

In 2007 he joined the Gateway Grizzlies.

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The Grizzlies' locker room was crowded with players getting ready for the game. The lockers were overflowing, with tennis shoes and black cowboy boots and T-shirts and blue jeans leaking onto the floor. The Grizzlies' white and blue uniforms, fresh from cleaning but still bearing faint dirt stains on the knees and rear, were piled high on a center table. The room smelled of sweat and Febreze and Axe body spray. An iPod hooked up to speakers blasted Lil Wayne's "Drop the World," a song that includes the lyric, "I work and forever try / But I'm cursed, so never mind."

The team manager, who calls Lisk the best catcher he's seen in pro ball, sat in his office with the door closed to block out the music. A player sat by his locker rubbing a cow bone along a bat. Several players sported fresh mohawks. They gobbled plates of microwaved chicken nuggets, pork steaks and Chef Boyardee pasta.

Lisk made himself a ham and cheese sandwich on white bread, happy not to eat the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches — "minor league steaks" — provided by the team on the road. He called his wife, then went to work cleaning his cleats.

Some players sprayed bathtub cleaner on their shoes. He preferred soap and water.

As he scrubbed, Lisk talked about the home run chase. He played down its importance. But he recalled when a former teammate broke the league's hits record, the game was stopped and the commissioner came out onto the field. Lisk didn't know whether something similar was planned for him. He looked up in the mirror with the slightest hint of pride.

"It'd be cool if they did," he said.

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The Grizzlies' front office staff quietly hoped Lisk would not break the home run record — at least not during this home series against the Traverse City, Mich., Beach Bums. They had a problem. The two commemorative engraved bats they ordered still had not arrived. They didn't want Lisk breaking the record empty-handed.

Lisk did not homer against the Beach Bums. And he didn't homer the next night at home against the Oakland County, Mich., Cruisers. At the second game against the Cruisers, Lisk's parents and his wife, Randi Lisk, were in the stands.

Jim Lisk has tracked his son's career from his home back east. He supported his son's decision to keep playing, "because he still has the dream." And the father has come to believe something else about his son's journey.

"Everywhere he's been, there hasn't been the right sequence of luck," Jim Lisk said. Talent and hard work are most important. But luck plays a role, too. Ballplayers hate to think about luck. It's why so many are superstitious. They can't control it. Why his son didn't get hot at the right time, or was mired in slumps at the wrong time, was, to some extent, luck.

"He and I never talk like this," Jim Lisk said. "But it's true."

In the third inning, Lisk hammered a ball toward the 385-foot sign in right centerfield. Randi Lisk cupped her hands over her eyes. Lisk's mom gasped.

"That's enough!" shouted Jim Lisk. "That's enough!"

And just then the Cruisers' centerfielder, flying across the grass, reached over the short outfield wall to snare the ball.

Lisk, midway between first and second base, always running hard out of the box, tipped his hat toward his opponent to say, "Nice play."

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Lisk tied the record the next night. He led off the bottom of the ninth inning by smashing the ball again to right centerfield. Career home run No. 86.

The record-setting home run came on the road, against the Florence, Ky., Freedom. Lisk hit the ball over the centerfield scoreboard. The commissioner came out onto the field. And Lisk was presented with the commemorative bats.

"It felt pretty good," Lisk said.

He didn't have time to savor the moment. After the game, the Grizzlies boarded the team bus and drove straight through the night to Marion, Ill. Lisk, enjoying one of the few privileges of his seniority, had a row of seats to himself.

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So how much longer, Charlie Lisk?

He won't say.

With season's end near, he sat at BC's Kitchen in Lake Saint Louis, enjoying a rare off-day and dinner with his wife. She works as a geospatial analyst with regular hours, while he works the second shift as a ballplayer.

Randi Lisk doesn't want him to quit. Not yet. She's known him since they were kids. She comes from a baseball family. Her dad played in the minors. She understands why Lisk keeps playing.

And it wasn't to break the home run record.

Lisk almost didn't come back to the Grizzlies this season. In February, he got a chance to chase the dream, to play in the Atlantic League, more independent ball, but with a clearer path to the majors. Ex-major leaguers and AAA veterans play there. But that meant leaving the Grizzlies. Leaving his home in Wentzville. Leaving his wife. Lisk hesitated.

"I was the one pushing for it," said Randi Lisk, her blue eyes glancing at her husband. "I just don't want him to think, what if? I'm always the one saying go for it. Try it."

So Lisk joined the York, Pa., Revolution. He was expected to play every day, at third base or catcher. But Lisk struggled at the plate. A cold streak. Then a former major-league third baseman joined the team. And an ex-AAA catcher. The manager told Lisk he was being cut.

Lisk asked to be sent back to the Grizzlies. It was mid-May. He was a player in the final innings of his career taking a big step backward on the long ladder toward the major leagues.

"I went up there to get a question answered," Lisk explained.

And he did.

He might get another shot. He doubts it. That's OK with him. He just wants to keep playing, every day, to keep chasing, every day, even if what he's pursuing is something that a certain young prospect, swinging one of the most fearsome bats in all of South Carolina, would probably never understand.