Baseball's Return

After an absence of several years, professional baseball returns to Reno tonight. It's not the Triple-A Pacific Coast League, as many of us have been hoping for years now, but it is still baseball and that's gotta count for something.

Tonight at Peccole Park the newly-minted Reno Silver Sox will begin play in the Golden Baseball League. The league bills itself as "Double-A equivalent", and all it's teams are independent of Major League affiliations. Independent league baseball can be fun, but you have to go in with the right expectations.

When I was in college in Mobile, Alabama in the mid-90's, an independent league called the Texas-Louisiana League started up a team called the Mobile BaySharks. It wasn't all that impressive an operation, as I recall from attending a few games in '94 and '95. Like the Silver Sox, the team had no Major League affiliation and played at a ballpark owned by the local state University. But it was baseball, and it was fun. Plus, it brought the national passtime back to a town that had somehow gone over two decades without professional baseball despite an incredibly rich history in the game (There's definitely something in the water in Mobile--for a small city it's the hometown of an incredible number of baseball legends including Hank Aaron, Ozzie Smith, Satchel Paige, and Willie McCovey, the Hall-of-Famer for whom the Giant's McCovey Cove is named; also Jimmy Buffett is from the Mobile Bay area, though that has nothing to do with baseball).

The BaySharks were a short-lived operation that folded after the 1995 season. But attendance had been great despite the team's terrible record, and in 1997 the Southern League, a real Double-A league with over a hundred years of history, relocated a team there. As a result the Mobile BayBears have been playing at Hank Aaron Stadium for almost a decade now.

Most of the co-workers that I have talked to say that professional sports can't succeed in Reno, that this isn't "that kind of city." They cite Reno's history of short-lived, failed sports franchises and argue that people come to Reno to gamble, not to see a baseball game or do anything else. I'll concede the point that Reno's history of supporting pro sports is pretty grim (although the original Silver Sox did survive here in one form or another from the 1940's until 1992), but that sort of history was also true of Mobile in 1994. A lot has changed in Reno in the last few years; although old ways of thinking die very, very hard, I truly believe that people here are finally starting to realize that this town doesn't have much of a future as a gambling-only destination, but that the potential is unlimited if Reno can recreate itself as a diverse, vibrant, well-rounded community. Like The University of Nevada's much-heralded basketball success, professional baseball could be a small but highly visible part of this community transforming itself from a national punch-line into the sort of place in which people dream about living and raising their families.

Tonight's game starts at 6:35, and the Sox will be playing the Long Beach Armada. I know I'll go to a few games this summer. Probably the level of play won't be world-class, and if the experience is anything like what I've seen from other independent leagues then the emphasis at times will probably be as much on dizzy bat races and Pat Sajak bobblehead dolls (they're giving those away on Saturday, by the way) than on the game itself. But as I said, it's baseball, and that's gotta count for something. And maybe, if we can finally prove that this city can support a pro sports team, we might be able to move up to where we belong.