Category Archives: Sports

Baseball column, with links

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It’s time to step up
to the plate, and swing away
By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
    THIS IS A SPECIAL time in the world of baseball. We are approaching a critical cusp of opportunity, a point in the cosmic space-time continuum at which anything can happen, when one bounce of the ball can either fulfill our fondest dreams or crush them altogether.
    No, I’m not talking about the Major League playoffs or the upcoming World Series. I’m talking about something more important: the future of professional baseball in Columbia.
    You say you didn’t know it had a future? You say you thought it all went bye-bye when the Bombers (curse their names and spit) deserted us for Greenville?
    Well, it didn’t. We can still have a joint-use ballpark — in the perfect location, down by the Congaree River — for both the University of South Carolina Gamecocks and a minor-league team.
    But anyone in a position to make this happen needs to move quickly, because this window may only be open for the next few days and weeks.
    Consider the following:

  • USC is looking for an alternative to the crowded Vista site that has been frowned upon by Columbia City Council. This was the site that, until a few weeks ago, the Gamecocks were absolutely, positively going to build on (which caused all my colleagues to tell me to give up my dream). Expect that new site to be identified soon, because the university wants to show coach Ray Tanner and all the fans that a replacement for Sarge Frye Field will happen sooner rather than later. Of course, with a private partner chipping in, that new stadium could be a lot nicer than anything the university would build on its own.
  • Contrary to conventional wisdom, USC President Andrew Sorensen would be open to said ballpark being shared with a minor-league team. Actually, “open” is too weak: “I’m completely supportive of that and wide-open to that,” he told me Friday. In fact, he said he was contacted by a team in the last few months, and while that didn’t lead to anything, he remains “wide-open” to a favorable overture from a pro team. “I’m a big minor-league baseball fan myself,” he said, adding that he goes to see the Jamestown Jammers in Upstate New York when he visits there in the summer. One caveat: “I’m not going to subsidize” a private partner. Any deal with a pro team must be advantageous to USC. When I said I saw no reason why a deal couldn’t be structured to benefit both parties, he agreed.
  • The university recently reached an understanding with the Guignard family
    that could lead to the new research campus extending down to the river. Consultants are working on giving shape to the new possibilities that this opens up. This would be an excellent time for someone — say, a minor-league team in search of a new home, and there are plenty of those out there — to step forward and say, “Why not make baseball a part of that vision, and let us help you?”
  • Developer Alan Kahn is on the verge of presenting Richland County Council with a detailed plan for a ballpark at his Village at Sandhill. He anticipates laying this proposal before the county by the end of this month. He’s been talking with the Columbus Catfish, and has secured from the South Atlantic League exclusive rights to this market for the Catfish. What that means is that for the next few months, no other SAL team can talk to Columbia. Mr. Kahn says he has nothing against a downtown ballpark, and nothing against a joint-use deal with the university — but Columbus is only interested in the suburbs.

    This, sports fans, is where the ball could take a really bad hop. I continue to wish Mr. Kahn all the best in his development out there, but if a minor league team locates way out in the Northeast, what should happen won’t ever happen. Mr. Kahn is just trying to meet a demand. He says the team wants to go where people live. Well, I responded, that’s not where I live. That’s the trouble with baseball in the suburbs — it becomes one neighborhood’s team, rather than bringing the whole community together. It does Columbia, and the Midlands in general, no good at all. And no minor-league team or university can build as fine a park by its lonesome as the two entities can build together.
    You might say that the fact that Columbus — which doesn’t want to build a park where Columbia needs one — has exclusive SAL rights precludes any other team from coming in and rescuing us from a fate worse than sprawl.
    But not all minor-league teams belong to the Sally League. Consider, for instance, the West Tennessee Diamond Jaxx, a Southern League Class AA franchise (as opposed to those fickle deserters, the Class A Bombers) that is in a hurry to leave Jackson, Tenn.
    Dan Morris, longtime sports guru of The Jackson Sun (and my former colleague, since I worked there from 1975 to 1985) tells me the Diamond Jaxx plan to be there for one more season, but “I don’t anticipate them staying after that.” In fact, Dan said, they’d rather leave sooner. “They just don’t have a facility to move to, or they’d move right now.” (Anybody hear opportunity knocking?)
    Yes, the team has been in a dispute with the city of Jackson over its lease, but Dan seems to believe the Jaxx are pretty much free to leave. The team can get out of the lease if it draws fewer than 180,000 fans two years in a row. Last year, only 150,000 attended. This year, he said, it may have been fewer than 100,000.
    Here’s the bottom line for this community: We could take a giant leap forward in our efforts to develop our riverfront — and further the university’s exciting expansion — with the kind of ballpark that two strong partners working together could build. This could be a jewel for people throughout the Midlands to enjoy, in an unsurpassable setting.
    This can happen. Given all of the above factors, I refuse to believe that it can’t.
    And the time for someone to step forward and make it happen is right now.

Out amongst ’em

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    Just a few more minutes — a precious few — and the mob will be sufficiently distracted by their bread and circuses that I can make my escape. Until then, I’m trapped…

Forgive me, but this situation brings out the very worst, most prejudiced, least tolerant elements of my character.

I was out amongst ’em today. By "’em," I choose a semi-articulate means of expressing my strong sense of "otherness" when compared to a certain very broad swath of the folk of our land.

I’m talking about football fans. Yes, yes, I know, many football fans are otherwise good and decent people in whom I would find many fine and admirable qualities. Many of them are friends of mine. (But we bigots always say that, don’t we?) But when they are in fan mode, I find them intolerable.

I suppose this is to some extent, like all prejudices, an irrational response. I have an excuse, though. I think I’m suffering from a mild form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Football has been very, very bad to me.

I haven’t been a football fan myself since 1969, when that snotty Joe Namath led the Jets to beat my team, the Baltimore Colts, in a drastic distortion of the natural order. I had waited what had seemed like forever (a year or two is like forever at that age) for Johnny Unitas and company to prevail over the hated Packers, and they finally had. That meant they had achieved their rightful place as the best team in the world. Sure, there was that mere formality of a post-season exhibition against the AFL, but everyone knew that the AFL was profoundly inferior to the NFL, so it hardly counted, right?

What that stunning experience taught me was that football is an unforgivably capricious sport. Too much rides on the uncontrollable flukes of a single game. In baseball, as in life, you’ve got to be good over the long haul to achieve the pennant. That builds character. In football — because the game is so insanely harsh upon its practitioners’ bodies — there are so few games that every single one is all-important. You can’t afford to lose a single one, if you want to be the champs. Such inflated stakes make each game ridiculously overimportant to fans. They lose all sense of proportion, which is very off-putting.

But I didn’t really learn to hate the game until I came to work at The State, and spent my first year here being the editor in charge on Saturdays. You can see where this is going, can’t you? It seemed that the sadists over in the Roundhouse had contrived to schedule every single home game that year to begin shortly after the time I had to be at work — meaning that there was no way I could get to work in less than an hour and a half. You’ll recall that back then, the newspaper offices were located in the very shadow of the Grid Temple. We’re a little farther away now, but not enough so to make it easy to get in and out on a game day. Oh, excuse me, isn’t that supposed to be capitalized — Game Day?

I would travel around and around a circle with a five-mile radius centered upon Williams-Brice, probing for weaknesses in the wall of flag-bedecked vehicles, looking for a way in to work, always frustrated. Up Bluff or Shop road? No. Around Beltline to Rosewood and back in? No. A frontal assault up Assembly? That was as mad as Pickett’s Charge. Through Olympia? Are you kidding?

By the time I was finally at the office, I was foaming at the mouth. Seriously, I wasn’t fit to talk to for hours, I was filled with such hostility for every single fan (you know the word is short for "fanatic," don’t you?) out there. I was in such a degraded, paranoid state of mind that I actually believed (temporarily) that they had all conspired to cause me this frustration intentionally (they couldn’t possibly be enjoying that gridlock themselves, so there HAD to be a nefarious motive somewhere). My embarrassing discourses on the subject to fellow employees were as profane as they were unwelcome. I think the worst day was the one when I was almost arrested by a Highway Patrolman who refused to let me up Key Road to The State‘s parking lot when I had finally worked my way to within 100 yards of it — an obstinacy on his part to which I responded with a distinct edge of barely-contained rage.

This afternoon, I had to go out a little after 1 p.m., and had to pass twice through the heart of the fan encampment. Folks were already tailgating. There was no yardarm in sight, but I’m quite certain the sun wouldn’t have been over it if there had been, and these folks were already getting a six-hour jump on the liquoring-up process. (They couldn’t really like football, if they need that much anesthetic before a game.) This shouldn’t have bothered me, but I couldn’t stop thinking thoughts such as these: This is Thursday, a workday. I’ve got more work waiting for me back at the office than I can get done by the weekend, and there’s a war going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Gulf Coast from Texas to Alabama has just been essentially wiped off the map, the price of fuel has jumped practically 50 percent in a matter of days, and these people can’t think of anything better to do with their time.

But they’re not the problem. It’s me. My response is contemptibly irrational. I’m only harming myself. Case in point: I’ve been ranting about this so long, I’ve almost lost my window of opportunity to escape before the fair-weather types start slipping out at halftime and clogging Shop Road.

Gotta go. Bye. I’ll try to be more civil and tolerant of my fellow humans in my next posting. But I’m not promising anything.