With another team gone, it’s time to put baseball back on the table

Now that we’ve lost another sports team at least for a year and maybe forever – head’s up, Birmingham, we’re gaining on you – it’s appropriate to renew an old debate.

Is it time to bring back baseball?

The answer is yes.

Before looking ahead, let’s look back and see how we got here. Landing the softball venue for the 1996 Olympics changed the Columbus sports scene in dramatic ways. It led to some great moments for our community. Hockey came to town here with the creation of the Cottonmouths. That led to efforts to become the minor league sports capital of the world.

We gained Georgia Pride professional softball. Lost that.

We landed the SuperBall international tournaments. Lost those.

SEC softball, baseball and women’s basketball came here. Lost, lost and lost those.

The NBDL’s RiverDragons. Yep, gone.

And how can we forget the WarDogs of the AF2? (That’s short for Arena Football 2, a minor league of a minor league.) They became the first professional team in American sports to finish a 16-game season without a win. Gone in four seasons. Come to think of it, how’d they last that long?

Oh, and the Columbus Comets, the indoor soccer team who flew across our skies in the summer of ’97.

Meanwhile, the one sport to suffer from neglect was baseball. The arrival of the Olympics booted the Columbus RedStixx out of Golden Park for the summer, and minor league baseball in Columbus never recovered. Not that it was going gangbusters before. But after that one-year move to Columbus State’s campus, attendance for the RedStixx, then Sand Gnats and Catfish, was abysmal. Nightly attendance was worse than a Jeb Bush rally.

The Catfish finally left town. Now the Cottonmouths have suspended operations for at least a year until they can find a buyer.

So here we are, down to one team, the Lions of the National Arena League. Even if they packed the Civic Center – which they don’t – that’s still just six Saturday nights in the spring and early summer. It’s nice to have the Lions around, especially with some local players. Trivia (employees and family members ineligible to answer): Name one.

It’s time to bring baseball back. Yeah, there are challenges. First, we have to have a franchise, which means either an owner or a major-league owned team. Second, there’s the not so little problem of where they would play. Golden Park is considered substandard by major league teams.

Back in the day, the mentality of big league teams was they didn’t care about the quality of minor league ballparks. They just wanted a place for their prospects to develop. The playing surface and lighting were the only concerns, because they didn’t want players getting injured on a bad field, and it’s tough to hit in a dimly lit ballpark. Ask Freddie Freeman.

Everything else could be a toxic waste dump and the big league teams couldn’t have cared less. The old clubhouses at Golden Park, before the renovation in the mid ’90s, were cramped and insufferably hot. But the Houston Astros didn’t care. In fact, some of their player development leaders at the time told me they didn’t want a place where players could be comfortable. They were here to move up or move on. Well, except for Jesus de la Rosa. He played here long enough to establish residency. All of 1972, ’73, ’74, part of ’75 before a three-game cup of coffee in Houston. Back here again in ’77. Four hundred and twenty-four games in all. That might be a record, and so might his 69 errors in that span. I’m not sure whatever happened to de la Rosa, but it’s safe to say he didn’t become a roving defensive instructor.

Anyway, back to the task at hand. At one time, the prevailing thought was we need a new ballpark on the north end of town. But that was before downtown was revitalized and energized. It was also before the city learned that it’s stuck with the ground that holds Golden Park, as it is deeded for recreation use.

It’s time to explore the feasibility of tearing it down and building a new ballpark on the same site. The corporate office and clubhouses might be salvageable. It doesn’t have to be a $50 million state-of-the-art ball park. It does need state-of-the-art lighting, and a training facility where players can work without wilting in the summer heat.

I still think the most logical fit would be to lure the Braves’ Double-A team here. The Braves own the franchise, so that eliminates the problem of finding ownership. And it makes too much sense for the Braves to have three of their top four farm teams within two hours of each other.

A small group of Columbus leaders discussed the idea with the Braves a few years ago, and they shot it down. But what else were they going to say? All we had to pitch to them was an idea.

It will take a commitment of civic leaders, public and private, to make it work. But it can work. It’s time to make it work.

This story was originally published May 6, 2017 at 3:22 PM with the headline "With another team gone, it’s time to put baseball back on the table."