All this and Cracker Jack too

Times are tough all over, even in professional sports. Maybe not for the New York Yankees, based on the headlines earlier this week on C. C. Sabathia and A. J. Burnett (are they gonna hire anyone with actual first names this season, or we're just doing shorthand? And all those years ago, G. Gordon Liddy and H. Ross Perot were ahead of their time--who knew?). Is this the year we get to see the Kansas City Royals infield collecting cans and bottles by the side of the road to redeem for the deposit so they can pay Kyle Farnsworth? Strange Days Indeed (most peculiar, Mama).

Strange days as well here in the Rose City which has our very own Double A Eastern League baseball team, the Connecticut Defenders who are an affiliate of the San Francisco Giants (though, to my knowledge, neither GM wears flowers in his hair--which would be a stretch for Charlie D). They started out as a New York Yankees affiliate, transferred from Albany, New York in the middle of the last decade. We built a ten million dollar plus stadium in our then-Industrial Park to house them when they were called the Norwich Navigators (and Tater still wowed the crowd last Sunday at the Norwich Winterfest Parade) and for the first couple of years, fans flocked to the new attraction and then, as now, it was a great place to watch young baseball players chase their dreams, hone their skills, and have some fun for very little money.

If you've bought tickets for anyone's Major League team in the last decade, you know, before even getting to the ballpark and paying for the parking, you're out hundreds for four tickets, a soda, a bag of chips and a hot dog per person (and who does only one of each of those for nine innings?), so we've been lucky to have had great, reasonably-priced entertainment for close to a decade and a half. Attendance started to flag some years back in what is probably already the smallest market in the Eastern League (the Defenders play teams from Harrisburg, New Britain, and Trenton, as three examples, where not only is the host city considerably more than our 37,000 souls, but the surrounding areas put them over a quarter to a half million in population).

Jerry Seinfeld noted years ago, in light of the money involved in professional sports, we the fans are basically rooting for clothes. The Red Sox fans who loved Johnny Damon half a decade ago hate him now, now that he wears the most despised pinstripes in baseball. And so it goes. We have childlike and childish enthusiasms for our teams, but we lose sight that they are businesses and that means they have to make money. Same is true for minor league teams.

The Defenders had a lot of ink this past week for 'overdue' rent and other payments owed to the city of Norwich, to the tune of 310,000. It shouldn't have been as pseudo-newsworthy as it appeared in the newspapers. The Norwich Baseball Stadium Authority, NBSA, citizen volunteers appointed by the City Council to manage and monitor the relationship of Senator Thomas Dodd Stadium and its tenant, the CT Defenders, meets once a month with representatives of the team to review where all of them are and where they need to be going. The minutes of those meetings (and December is and was still 2008 for what it's worth) are shared with the elected and appointed leadership of the city.

The indoor batting cages and pitching mounds in the adjunct practice facility (I'm told it's beautiful, I've never seen it from the inside), the large screen video display and scoreboard, the the new playing surface, warning track and outfield fences and the to-be-completed-before-opening-day renovations to the concourse bathrooms, all funded by tax dollars (municipal and state) are all the result of those meetings and the collaboration between the volunteers and the Defenders' staff. And all of us who've ever been to the stadium are the beneficiaries and should be grateful for all of their work.

That said, $310,000 is a LOT of money. And it's good to read that the team will catch up by opening day, which is 16 April against the Trenton Thunder (with the proceeds of the game going to the Girard Family in Voluntown, CT), but how did they fall this far behind without the City's leadership NOT knowing. The NBSA, when you read their minutes, have done their job--but never had a means of enforcing rent collections. It was good to read comments by the City's Comptroller and City Manager on the resolution of the situation, this time, because, Gentlemen, that's your job.

I was a little non-plussed to read in the papers a note that the team will pay the back rent as well as interest on it, even though there's nothing in their lease agreement about having to do so. That's probably true, except I have to believe everyone involved in the lease operated from a belief that all portions of the lease would be binding on all parties and that both the city and the team would be as good as their word (judging from readers' comments in one of the papers, I wasn't alone in my reaction to the remark.)

Something I forgot I knew about, turned up in both papers on Saturday, the portion of the parking fee the Defenders donate to the Mayor's Food Pantry. One had the dollar figure at thirteen thousand and the other ten--three grand is three grand as my mother the accountant might say, so I'm curious as to which number is real, but even more curious as to where this number is in the Norwich City Budget (248 pages of fun, from cover to cover) as I can't find it.

Maybe because it's NOT a fixed, but variable, revenue stream it's just harder for me to identify-but that's not my bigger, or sole, question: where is this money, who gets it and for what? Somewhere is an accounting trail-it needs to be more visible-and the Defenders should be thanked and the Mayor applauded for creating and maintaining the fund, especially in these aforementioned tight times.

If I were to be $310,000 in arrears on my rent or mortgage, where might I be sitting right now while typing this? Orange crate under the Eighth Street Bridge (is that a Wi-Fi zone? How will I upload this to the site?) or seeking out a warm bed someplace? We all have obligations, to ourselves and to one another--that's sort of why we banded together as communities which, in turn, evolved into larger political-economic units.

I'd like to think we created government to better harness and channel the time and talents of some for the benefit of all-to do for one another as a group that which we couldn't do as individuals. Being honest and honorable with one another makes us better people and a better city and we improve one person at a time, one day at a time.
-bill kenny