Major League Baseball is poised for its first work stoppage since the supposedly disastrous 1994 strike, and so baseball-loving Americans like you and I should be crying in whatever we happen to be drinking.
Not me, though. I’ve still got minor-league ball.
Point of information: I have never been to a minor-league ballgame in my life. Everything I know about minor-league ball comes from Bull Durham. That’s right. So as far as I’m concerned, minor-league players are all drunks and Susan Sarandon is hanging around the locker room waiting to sleep with them.
My minor-league notions also come from compatriots residing in more minor-league friendly areas. See, I don’t come from a minor-league friendly area. I come from Northwest Indiana, which is more of a smokestack-friendly area. So when I hear Minnesotans get all excited about how great it is that Bill Murray owns the St. Paul Saints and when I hear people gush about Cal Ripken, Jr.’s Aberdeen IronBirds, I’m fairly certain minor-league baseball is a good thing. You know, it’s small, and cheap, and romantic-like. Everything that’s good about ? something.
That said, I don’t feel deprived for never seeing a game. There’s one big reason for this: Until recently, I could witness the very same minor-league crowd-pleasing antics with major-league talent in nearby Comiskey Park on the south side of Chicago. This, of course, was the initiative of the greatest team owner in baseball history, Bill Veeck, the man who signed 3-foot-7 pinch hitter Eddie Gaedel, invented the (now obligatory) exploding scoreboard, masterminded the ill-fated “Disco Demolition” night and was the all-around king of baseball promotion.
But we loyal Northwest Indiana White Sox fans have fallen most certainly on hard times. Under the leadership of hard-hearted businessman Jerry Reinsdorf (the man who broke up the Bulls, and has given up on multiple White Sox seasons shortly before the summer trading deadline), we’ve lost most of those fan perks, save the scoreboard and the occasional Elvis night. This year, we don’t even have a winning team to show for it.
So I’m ready to embrace minor-league ball. It hasn’t been given much of a chance in Northwest Indiana. Sure, there were the ill-fated East Chicago Conquistadors and Merrillville Muddogs, but playing in high school stadiums, however large or modern, does not encourage a team’s legitimacy. Minor-league baseball, according to my aforementioned body of knowledge, needs a real minor-league stadium, with miles of bleachers and billboarded outfield walls.
But now we have such a stadium in lovely downtown Gary, Ind., with a fine view of the Indiana Toll Road, U.S. Steel Gary Works and all related sounds and odors. The Gary SouthShore RailCats (yes, that is the team’s real name) began Northern League play earlier this year, albeit before the stadium was actually finished, so the team is playing its entire first season on the road. So that’s a problem. And, the team name could stand to lose a few syllables. Plus, it’s a tad disconcerting that the stadium was built $20 million over budget in a city rife with crime, poverty and pandemic decay; most likely some of the $20 million lined the pockets of the mayor and his friends.
Complicating the issue is that more is riding on the RailCats’ success than cheap beer and free stadium giveaways. Many openly hope the team will jump-start some sort of urban revitalization, but I’m not quite so optimistic. Minor-league baseball can do a lot of things, but there was nothing in Bull Durham about resurrecting a rotting Rust Belt city.
But I’m riding comfortably on the bandwagon, cause after tomorrow, it’s all I got left.
