Stolen Season by David Lamb

Author:David Lamb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SPORTS & RECREATION/Baseball/History
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2014-03-21T00:00:00+00:00

Our deeds follow us, and what we have been makes us what we are.

—SHAKESPEARE

Charleston is to a Southerner what Jerusalem is to a Muslim or Jew—a spiritual capital. Gentile and gracious, it is the embodiment of the Old South. The plantations and aristocracy and stately mansions predating the Civil War all are comforting reminders that the Miamis and Atlantas are but orphans of the Southern soul, and as if to make the point, Charleston’s people seem to stroll, not walk, and steep their accents in vats of honey. The city is crowded into a peninsula, bounded by two rivers and a harbor, and it was here, in 1946, that black workers adopted from a white Baptist hymnal a theme song for their strike against the tobacco industry, “We Shall Overcome.”

I poked along up Florida’s Atlantic coastline and arrived at College Park in Charleston on an afternoon so blistering that even the magnolias looked drained of life. The Rainbows’ general manager, Kevin Carpenter, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt and drenched with sweat, was on a ladder in center field, replacing bulbs in the scoreboard. “I ought to be done up here in an hour, if the heat doesn’t kill me first,” he called down. Carpenter, who was twenty-five, had been at his job long enough to know there was no executive privilege in the low minors: general managers counted the night’s receipts, put toilet paper in the men’s room, and helped spread the tarpaulin when it rained; assistant GMs sold advertising space in the scorecard, then sometimes had to walk through the stands selling the scorecard, too; concession managers cooked hot dogs and any owner worth his salt knew how to take tickets, pound down a pitcher’s mound and handle a broom.

The Rainbows in recent years had been best known around the Sally League for having an abundance of twenty-five-cent beer nights (with free tickets on Saturdays) and a plenitude of drunken fans, most of whom sat behind third base giving each other beer showers. Families were no more likely to show up for an evening at the park than they were at the local tavern. It got so rowdy that South Carolina revoked the Rainbows’ liquor license, and with that, the drunks stayed away as well. Carpenter’s job was to put the Charlestonian civility back in College Park.

Discount beer nights were gone, and the Rainbows had begun a Good Sport campaign, sponsored by Anheuser-Busch, the beer company. Good Sports, the program reminded fans, wore shirts and shoes, never used bad language and knew when it was time to drink a Pepsi instead of a beer. In little more than a year College Park had been transformed, and the wolves in the third-base grandstands had sobered up and become the guardians of decency; if someone’s language got foul, a fan wearing a Good Sport button would say, “There’s no cussing allowed in the park,” and the offender would fall obediently silent. Try that in the bleachers of Boston’s Fenway Park,

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