Cloudy and Cool…
Major league baseball in Tucson ended yesterday with a routine ground out. Score it an Owners Choice. Tradition flies out to the almighty dollar. Loyalty strikes out to a bus ride. Some of the joy went out of spring with that ground ball.
The Rockies are gone for good from historic Hi Corbett Stadium and they take with them six decades of spring baseball in the Old Pueblo.
Some of the old timers didn’t take it well. The Kleenex boxes came out and the crowd of 6,817 was more subdued than feels right at a ballpark. The wake began when they laid down the foul lines.
Ted Robbins on NPR did a fine piece over the weekend that captures what the old ball yard means to spring baseball fans in Tucson. There is some talk – maybe just to ease the reality of what has been lost – that Japanese or Mexican professional teams might spend some of the spring in Tucson in the future making use of the stadiums that now risk becoming relics in the desert. We’ll see.
The city fathers in Tucson didn’t exactly distinquish themselves in securing a strategy to keep baseball where it’s been since 1947. Then again, with greedy suits ruling the game, there is little room for sentiment or history or something different. Baseball is a business. Ask Tucson.
Oh, yes. The Rockies won 4-3 on the last day. Their opening day starter Ubaldo Jimenez got a nice tuneup for his first season start. When it was over the crowd filed out – quietly. They knew they had just seen something important, something fun and affirming, something historic, end.
Appropriately, with baseball gone not just for a season but likely forever, it dawned couldy and cool in Tucson today.
Some how that feels about right.