Silenced summer

I wrote this today for my old employer, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette.  Please subscribe, on account of local journalism is a vital public service and has never been more so than now.

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So now we know, finally, and here is another hole in our Plague Summer.

There will be no baseball this year at the corner of Ewing and Jefferson. Game called on account of respiration.

Respiration is how COVID-19 spreads and it’s what it affects, and so minor-league baseball, which dawdled until the shadow of July hoping it would abate, finally pulled the plug Tuesday. The minors are shuttering the season, and that means the TinCaps are shuttering the season, and that means the lights are not going to come up in Parkview Field this summer.

This is more than just a shame. This is a financial hit that will resonate far beyond 2020.

Part of that is because the minors do not have the chunky TV deals that clubs could use to sustain themselves if protocols dictate they must keep their ballparks empty or half-empty. And part of it is because Major League Baseball, which never saw a dime on a sidewalk it wouldn’t stoop to pick up, figures it hasn’t yet shaken enough coin out of the Fort Waynes and Lansings and South Bends.

And so last fall, MLB decided to put the squeeze on. It rolled out a plan to kick 40 or so minor-league teams -- and their communities, of course -- out of the affiliate club. That’s almost a quarter of all minor-league affiliates.

In other words, MLB didn’t want to just prune the minor-league tree. It wanted to cut the damn thing down and chop it up for firewood.

Then came the plague, of course.

And now a lost summer.

And now the likelihood MLB will use the resulting financial distress to strong-arm a better deal out of the minors.

Lovely. Just lovely.

And in the meantime?

In the meantime, our summer evenings are full of tumbleweeds.

There will be no lights, no camera, no action. No one will be dropping into JK O’Donnell’s or Rudy’s or O’Reilly’s or the Sidecar for a postgame drink. Jake the Diamond Dog will not be eliciting “awww’s” from his legion of admirers; the Zooperstars will not be bobbling around the place; the Bad Apple Dancers will perhaps take a crack at ballet.

Worst of all, there will be no September 14.

There will not be the late-summer dark coming down and the joint  rocking and Robert Lara coming to the plate in the bottom of the 10^th, the score tied and the season teetering. There will not be a pitch, a swing, a tiny white dot sailing into the black night.

Coming down, finally, in the lawn seating beyond the center-field wall, out there among the dads and the moms and the kids on their spread blankets.

Game over. TinCaps win the Midwest League semifinals, three games to two. Eleven years ago.

It was the first summer in Parkview Field and the best summer, full of magic and wonder and a championship, and a downtown stirring from its long slumber. And that September 14 was the best of the best, with the baseball growing smaller against the night and the place erupting and Lara screaming for joy after he crossed the plate.

A photo of that moment hangs in the hallway outside The Journal Gazette newsroom. I used to pass it every morning as I came upstairs.  Every time I did, it made me smile.

I’m smiling now, just thinking about it.

 

And then I’m not.