Tag: minor leagues

The Gwinnett Braves have bad attendance?  YOU DON’T SAY

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About as easy to predict as rain in Florida – the Gwinnett Braves suffer average attendance drop for the fourth straight year

Sometimes I wonder at what point will people see beyond all the rah-rah rhetoric about how the Atlanta Braves and all their owned affiliates are good for economies, communities and are actually burdens and ballasts to towns that weren’t exactly unanimously ecstatic about their presences?  Will a player have to kill someone?  I mean, Braves players have been busted in various forms of domestic abuse, and nobody seems to sour on the organization.  The organization has fleeced pretty much every small town in which their minor league affiliates exist in, as well as the future home of the big club.  When will people realize that baseball isn’t just America’s Pasttime, but also a cold, calculated, greedy, money-grubbing business that often acts like a leech on the places they invade?

But anyway, about as sure as the sun rises in the morning, the Gwinnett Braves are struggling to draw people to their ballpark.  I mean, who would have thought a minor league ballpark that’s barely 60 miles away from the major league parent, with ticket costs equivalent to major league prices and has a staunch no-outside food policy unlike the parent, would suffer weak attendance numbers?  I mean, who wouldn’t want to see Sean Kazmar instead of Freddie Freeman, or whenever a superstar visiting player like Clayton Kershaw or Andrew McCutchen comes to Turner Field?

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Remembering Tommy Hanson

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In short: former Major League Baseball pitcher Thomas J. “Tommy” Hanson passes away at the age of 29, due to “catastrophic organ failure.”

Talk about something that came out of nowhere; it’s not often that I expect to hear about spontaneous deaths from people much younger than I am. And in spite of my faltering indifference to the game over the last few years, I’d like to write some words about Tommy Hanson, because if anything at all, he represents a player that was pretty prevalent during my peak of baseball fandom, and I’m genuinely sad to hear about his unfortunate and way too early departure.

Forget about the win-loss record, the ERA, and the list of teams that he had played for in his career, that one might expect to see within the final paragraphs of a professional athlete’s online eulogy and/or obituary. This isn’t to say that they weren’t pretty, quite the contrary, his overall numbers were positive and respectable, despite the obvious observation that he was declining quickly, mostly on account of shoulder troubles that plagued the tail end of his baseball career.

To me, Tommy Hanson represents the link, the gateway, into my eventual love and appreciation for minor league baseball.

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Photos: Frawley Stadium, Wilmington, Delaware

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Because I’m a baseball hipster that prefers minor league baseball over the majors, I had to capitalize on proximity, and take advantage of the fact that my friend and I would be passing Wilmington on the way back down to Virginia, and stopped for food and MiLB baseball, at Frawley Stadium, the A+ affiliates of the Kansas City Royals.

As the classic film Wayne’s World inquires what there is to do in Delaware, we at least found one decent thing to do in catching some minor league baseball at a pretty clean and comfortable ballpark.

Not that anyone but me would care, Frawley Stadium is one more park closer to achieving a smaller accolade than visiting all 30 MLB parks; which is seeing all of the stadiums in the Carolina League of minor league baseball.  With Wilmington now off the list of eight ballparks, that leaves just two more Carolina League parks to see for completion.

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Ballparks: Danville, Virginia

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It only took three years, but finally everything worked out as they should of, and I was able to make my long-awaited visit to sleepy Danville, Virginia, where I could get to see the Danville Braves rookie-level squad.

With Danville visited, I can now say that I’ve seen every single level of the Atlanta Braves minor league system, to which I am very pleased with.

Salty feelings

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Do any of you guys ever get the feeling like either too much of the world is into all the same things you’re interested in, or perhaps you yourself are too much like the rest of the world, and are more or less falling in line with a parade of similarly behavioral people?   I’ve been feeling like this recently.

When I was a broody moody teenager, I recall taking great lengths in deliberately going in directions that “everyone else” went.  Whether it was class selection, choice in artistic expressions, to simply things like routes I drove, and the things I decided to do.  I was trying to differentiate from the crowd, and it required effort.

Eventually, and it’s probably closest to my current state of being, I simply stopped trying, and kind of let life dictate itself as if it were water flowing, moving constantly, but at a default motion.  However, by doing such, lately I feel like in spite of my past efforts, when the day is over, I’m not quite the unique butterfly that I like to think everyone likes to think they are sometimes.

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Photos: Minor League Baseball in Kodak, Tennessee

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I chose to visit Kodak kind of on a whim.  Initially, I was planning on making Asheville a day trip, where I’d go straight back to Atlanta in the wee hours of the night, but when I found out that the Mississippi Braves were playing against the Smokies, I decided to make my one day trip into a two day one, because Kodak is just 90 miles from Asheville, as opposed to driving the 290 miles back to Atlanta.

Despite the fact that Kodak is a small town seemingly in the middle of nowhere, I was still really excited by the idea of going there.  There’s something ironically amusing to me about small towns in the middle of nowhere that I look forward to.  I guess I like the experience of seeing what those deep out into the country are like, and if they can handle when an English-speaking Asian guy comes romping into their towns, trying to see what’s up.

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