It was as American as Mom, apple pie, and creative accounting practices: minor-league baseball.
There I sat two Saturdays ago, in a packed baseball park, watching the boys of summer play their hearts out, trying like heck to make it to The Show, as I wolfed down a hot dog and a beer. It was bliss.
Yeah, there were a few glitches in the system. The hot dogs, which weren't that great, cost $3.50 each. The beer was $4. And the pitcher was actually a major leaguer on a rehabilitation assignment, coming back carefully from elbow problems and back surgery. "Carefully" is the key word, because the pitcher is in the middle of a $100 million-plus contract.
Yes, $100 million pitchers and crappy $3.50 hot dogs provide evidence that the sport has some problems, especially considering that a strike could happen at any time. Of course, this is just what this country needs as stocks plummet and the one-year anniversary of Sept. 11 approaches: a bunch of freaking millionaires shutting down the Great American Pastime.
But, dammit, that is not the point, which is: Despite its whaleload of problems, baseball is still pretty cool. Seriously -- a day or night at the ball park is a great thing. It's wholesome, and it can be cheap -- yeah, the dogs and beers were pricey, but my ticket was only $6.
And it's a good thing I live in Las Vegas. (I'll take "Things I thought I would never hear myself say" for $1,000, Alex.) Because if I were living in Reno, a night of minor-league baseball would not have been possible without at least a two-hour drive to Sacramento.
Reno/Sparks, of course, has no professional baseball whatsoever, because -- and I say this with all due respect -- the city of Reno has acted like a bunch of idiotic dunderheads in terms of dealing with baseball teams.
For decades, Reno had a single-A level team in the California League. I grew up watching Reno Padres and Reno Silver Sox games at Moana Stadium. It didn't matter that the teams often blew chunks -- it was just fun to be at the ol' ballpark. And a nice handful of Truckee Meadows residents felt the same way. I remember that one year, the Silver Sox had the worst record in all of baseball, both the major and minor leagues. Using a bunch of rejects from other teams -- they did not have an affiliation with a major-league team that year -- they finished were 39-103.
But Moana Stadium was getting old and grungy -- quite frankly, it wasn't well taken care of -- and the teams there, despite decent attendance, started rumbling about moving in the 1990s. And the city responded by -- this is the truth -- building a fire station in the stadium's parking lot without alerting the team's owners.
Last-minute efforts to get the team to stay by promising to renovate the stadium failed, and they left. A year or so later, a Western League team came to town. Where the California League was a league teeming with players on their way to the majors, the Western League was an "independent" minor league. In other words, Major League Baseball had nothing to do with them, meaning they used mostly cast-offs, just like that win-challenged Silver Sox team did. Needless to say, the quality of baseball was awful. And, sadly, Moana Stadium -- old and decrepit -- was still awful, too. Soon, the Western League team, which was known as the BlackJacks and the Chuckars (!) was gone. They left Reno for Marysville, Calif.
That's right: Marysville, Calif. When Reno loses something to Marysville, that's a kick to the ol' civic pride groin.
Reno/Sparks now sits as one of the largest cities in the country not to have minor-league baseball. The Reno City Council has been exploring the issue off and on for a while now, but only wheel-spinning has thus far occurred. Yes, new stadiums are expensive, and there are problems with tax money going toward projects that benefit the private owners of ball clubs. But in almost every other city in the country, these issues have been resolved.
As I watched Las Vegas 51s play the Memphis Redbirds that night, I realized that I was actually GLAD to be living in Las Vegas for those three hours. That speaks volumes.
Jimmy Boegle is a fifth-generation Nevadan who says "Go Dodgers!" Jimmy's column appears here Tuesdays, and he can be reached via e-mail at jiboegle@stanfordalumni.org.