My first true love was Lauren Pardini, a pig-tailed brunette, in the first grade. My first true sports love was baseball. I’ve loved it since youth, played it and collected baseball cards. (If you need an extra for your softball team, my e-mail is listed above.) And unlike my courtship of Miss Pardini, baseball has stuck with me through the years—from covering the Waynesburg College Yellow Jackets to the Harrisburg Senators to the Philadelphia Phillies to now the Virginia Cavaliers.
 Where’s the game? Followers of America’s pastime have trouble finding their way in this town. |
To those who reside in Central Virginia and share my love of baseball, I say: Welcome to the minority. Yes, passionate Orioles, Yankees, Mets, and Red Sox fans do live in the Blue Ridge Mountains area, but we are the few and the proud.
One caller to my radio show last week (a New York transplant to Virginia) said to me, “You bring your passion for baseball with you.”
So true.
But if you were born in Central Virginia and baseball is not on your sports agenda, who can blame you? The closest Major League teams require at least a two-hour drive plus an extra in traffic. And what do you get? A Baltimore club that has had only one winning season in the past decade and the Washington Nationals which look more like Morris Buttermaker’s Bad News Bears than a Major League franchise.
Off the field, when was the last time either franchise sent their annual Winter Fan Caravan to the nether regions of Charlottesville, Orange or Ruckersville?
What have they done for you lately?
Ever try watching a game on TV? Ha! Due to the petty regional ratings wars among Comcast, the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network and the Baltimore Orioles ownership in 2005-06, trying to find a televised Nationals game during the team’s inaugural two years was like trying to find Jimmy Hoffa.
Within the last two weeks, Major League Baseball has decided not to totally screw its out-of-market viewers. First, MLB extended its deadline for reaching an agreement with the cable companies to carry out-of-market games, and then it closed a deal with iN DEMAND. There was a strong possibility that MLB could have gone exclusively with Direct TV, thereby cutting out 200,000 viewers. The number doesn’t sound like much, but it would have been a bad idea for baseball to start cutting itself off from paying viewers.
But MLB’s ignorance of the areas that lie outside of a major market city has created a regional backlash that even affects local baseball.
Has anyone noticed that the No. 3 ranked baseball team in the NCAA plays in Charlottesville? Do you know that one of the most beautiful ballparks in America, UVA’s Davenport Field, is in your own backyard? The field is so attractive, in fact, that EA Sports placed it in the videogame, MVP ’07 NCAA Baseball.
The truth is that Central Virginia is only one of baseball’s forgotten areas. There are more suburbs than major markets after all.
Major League Baseball and Commissioner Bud Selig will tell you that attendance is at an all-time high and that financial success is abundant.
The present looks very good, but what about the future?
(Author’s Note: Miss Pardini remains a good friend and a successful singer in California and New York… Should have stuck with the girl, and not the game.)
Wes McElroy hosts “The Final Round” on ESPN 840am. Monday-Friday 4pm-6pm.