Normally, the only thing anyone draws in baseball is a walk. But that wasn’t true for two players in the Cape Cod League this summer.

Joan Lockhart, an artist who lives in Eastham and has hosted players from the Orleans Firebirds for six years, says she has never been the least bit surprised that none of her charges ever showed any interest in painting.

So, this summer, when Ryan Kucherak and Cashel Dugger asked her about plein air painting, “I didn’t believe it,” says Lockhart. But they had often seen her packing up her supplies. And “one night before an off day, they asked me if I would take them with me,” she says.

She was happy to oblige. The trio went to Boat Meadow in Eastham and spent several hours painting beachscapes. “I figured I’d take them for an hour, and we would be done, but they wanted to stay until they were finished,” Lockhart says.

Both of the players’ first works belie the fact that they are first-time efforts. Both say they had some interest in art growing up. Dugger took a high school art class. Kucherak took a ceramics class in school and would draw occasionally when he was bored. But art was not something either one pursued.

Dugger, a catcher who just turned 20, plays at UCLA and is coming off a stellar sophomore season that saw him bat .274, helping his team earn a spot in the College World Series. He says he has been around baseball all his life — his father, Keith, is the head athletic trainer and director of medical operations for the Colorado Rockies — and in all that time he’s never run into a player who paints.

Kucherak, also 20, is an accomplished infielder who played for the Northwestern Wildcats last year after spending his freshman season at Louisiana State University. He set Northwestern’s single-season record by belting 18 home runs.

“When I saw Joan was a painter, I was interested,” said Kucherak, who at six-foot-one towers over the easel.

For both Dugger and Kucherak, painting turns out to be one thing that can take their minds off baseball.

“It’s therapeutic,” says Dugger, adding that their first session at Boat Meadow Beach went on for four hours yet seemed to go by quickly.

Kucherak agreed. Playing in the top college league in the country has for him been “tough and a little stressful,” he says, but “when we go painting, we get to think just about that.”

As with playing baseball, when you’re painting, Kucherak says, you have to notice the details. “In baseball, you are always paying attention to mechanics and breaking down the swing. When you paint, you need to pay attention to shapes and shadows and depth.”

Lockhart majored in fine art and art history at SUNY Binghamton. In 2014, after a career in sales and marketing, she retired and moved to Eastham, where she paints and teaches painting. She admires the Impressionists for their sense of light and atmosphere and on her website writes about the influence on her of the strong forms of Cézanne, the bold colors of Gauguin, the masterful brushstrokes of Sargent and Sorolla, and the immediacy of the Cape Ann plein air painters.

Kucherak and Dugger are still in the beginning stages of formulating their own styles, but they are on the right track. Asked to name a favorite painter, they paused for a split second, glanced at each other, and replied in unison, “Joan Lockhart!”

The players kept at their plein air sessions throughout the season. On a warm day last month, a reporter watched them at Fort Hill. They went right at it, quickly setting up their easels as if grabbing a bat to go hit. Kucherak immediately began sketching an outline using charcoal, while Dugger turned his attention to mixing paints on his palette.

“At this point, they are kind of painting on their own,” says Lockhart. “They were very intuitive when it came to mixing colors. They got it just like that.”

They aren’t entirely on their own, however. A crowd gathers to observe as the players paint, many surprised to learn that they are watching new artists who also happen to play for the Firebirds.

Their teammates are surprised, too, they say. “No one on the team believed us at first, especially A.P.,” says Kucherak of Anthony Potestio’s reaction. “He still doesn’t believe us.”

Their teammates were presumably impressed when they learned that each player has received at least one offer to buy their paintings. They’re not for sale, though. Dugger plans to give his first painting to his grandparents, and Kucherak is giving his to his parents.

Dugger’s and Kucherak’s achievements have sparked enough interest that it would not be at all surprising to see some 2026 Firebirds behind an easel with Lockhart by their side next summer.

As for painting after this season on the Cape, Kucherak says he’ll pursue it if he can find the time between baseball practice and his other studies. Painting is “probably something I’ll do at night to take my mind off things,” says the rising junior. “Northwestern has a really pretty campus, and I am looking forward to painting there.”