When you buy a soda are you 'supporting' the bottler? When you visit a drive-through, are you embracing, albeit fleetingly, the franchise holder as part of your community? Do you tend to refer to the gas station on the corner as 'my' station? Do you regard where you grocery shop as a community litmus test?
I'm asking because our (a possessive plural pronoun) local professional baseball team is weighing, via the pages of one of the newspapers, instituting a parking fee, in addition to the price of a ticket for the game. As I read the reports, they'll reach some kind of a decision by the middle of February. I have to imagine the Harbor Management Commission must be thrilled at the idea of their Thames becoming a Rubicon of sorts, but only if Romulus and Remus both qualify for facade grants for that coffee shop they hope to build.
Sports at any and all levels is a business and as such, to survive, it must turn a profit. It has an obligation to its shareholders, owners and employees to make every effort to do that and sometimes that means relocating, as was the case when the Albany (NY) Colonie-Yankees arrived in SE Connecticut nearly a decade and a half ago and set up shop in the constructed-for-them Senator Thomas Dodd Stadium, up in Misnomer Park. I say misnomer, because it was called 'Industrial' except there really wasn't any industry and that was changed to 'business' but that's only a little closer to the truth. The area is filled with condominiums, apartments, assisted living, large and mostly empty buildings that serve as headstones for deceased business plans, a work out center, a legal support center and a beer distributor.
Despite all of that, is there a better place to be on a sunny Saturday in June than Dodd Stadium? I doubt it, and if you agree, then get up there this season, on more than an occasional basis, and root, root, root for the home team. Who cares what affiliate of whoever's major league franchise they are? The kids out on the field in a perfect world, are passing through on their way to 'The Show'; for far too many, perhaps only a cup of coffee and for too few, a career that many of us, adults all, make us wish we, too, could be kids again.
Come to Dodd with romance in your soul, but understand receipts are what counts at the box office. If the baseball team doesn't make the money it needs to make, it'll move. And we won't have the quiet joy (though there are some neighbors on Plain Hill who might question the use of 'quiet') of watching a child's game played out on our Field of Dreams. A couple of years ago, I was unable to be at the stadium the night my childhood idol, Willie Mays, came to visit. As disappointed as I was to have missed him, I was pissed off, to find out there were hundreds, if not thousands, of empty seats. The yawn of indifference being what it is,once if gets started it can be impossible to stop.
We built Dodd Stadium, and for awhile, they came. If they'll keep coming is another matter entirely. I'll be out front, Clueless Bill, waiting on Shoeless Joe.
-bill kenny
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