League rains on Scorps' parade
It’s actually a refreshing change for there to be a North American Baseball League controversy not involving the Scorpions and delinquent paychecks, foreign affiliations or vengeful Tweets.
Nope, the league canceling the final eight days of the season is a relief in a way.
Of course in another, more accurate way, it’s a complete disaster. But at least it’s not Yuma’s fault.
Maui and Lake County will not play any more this year. Well, the Fielders will fill out their season-ending homestand against the Kenosha County Fielders, made up of Chicago-area players that aren’t playing baseball. And seeing how the team is put together at the last minute, you know those players must be good. Paging Carlos Zambrano.
Yuma was supposed to play at Lake County, but will instead likely go to Chico to end the year, though nothing is official. The team is scrambling to schedule an exhibition game or games to fill out their post-Aug. 28 schedule.
The league was formed in the offseason, combining the remnants of the Northern, Golden and United leagues. The master plan certainly was ambitious, with “pods” of team in the Midwest, Texas, California and the Southwest. But that, as many things with independent sports, failed to come to fruition. What was left was a smattering of teams with no real link geographically.
The four Texas teams played a schedule made up almost entirely of each other. Yuma, rounding out the five-team South Division with the four Texas teams, will go the entire season without playing one of them.
If this is the obituary for the league — and despite protestations from league officials, it’s hard to imagine this is not — then let it be said the plan was ambitious. But most unfortunate.
Of course, even if the NABL is done, it will probably pop up in some form or another next year. I think the smart money is on the reborn Golden Baseball League. Tucson has been rumored to be in play for next year, and Yuma is — gasp! — stable. Or at least, stable by Yuma standards, in that games are not being played on the back fields at the Ray Kroc complex in the middle of the afternoon because the team can’t afford Desert Sun Stadium.
San Rafael, just north of San Francisco and a much closer rival for Chico than, say, Edmonton, is waiting city council approval before joining the league. Plus you throw in the possible return of a couple of southern California teams, and the old band can get back together.
As for an international league that covers more square miles than Major League Baseball, that’s probably not a good idea. It probably never was. And unless someone hurries up and invents the transporter, it probably never will be.
Once again, the future of baseball in Yuma is a question mark. But if it survived its own past incompetence, surely it can survive something that wasn’t its fault.
