Tuesday night, the Yankees and Red Sox battled it out in Tampa in a meaningless spring training game. Naturally, both teams’ starting lineups were close facsimiles of the projected Opening Day lineups. Well, the Yankees’ lineup was, anyway. It would be surprising if the Red Sox opened their season with the likes of Chris Carter, Nick Green and Angel Chavez all taking the field.
Despite the inconsequential nature of Tuesday’s game and the presence of our nation’s annual all-you-can-eat basketball festival dubbed March Madness, something about seeing Austin Jackson hit an eighth-inning grand slam awakens this columnist’s longing for baseball. As the basketball season drifts away into memory, something has to replace it.
Unfortunately, that something isn’t happening on Boston University’s campus anytime soon. Every year, while the last winter snowfall melts and the trees begin to bloom, the same series of thoughts arrive. Why doesn’t BU have a varsity baseball team? How can a school whose campus lies virtually adjacent to Fenway Park not engage in America’s pastime? How is Nickerson Field, long ago the home of the Boston Braves, bereft of a pitcher’s mound? This cannot be!
Yet it is sadly true. Baseball, noble though it may be, is not one of the numerous varsity sports in which this institution currently competes. The club team is alive and well, winning fully three-quarters of its games last fall. But although the club players are passionate about their sport, neither varsity status nor a venue closer than Cleveland Circle accompanies that passion.
Most BU students are at least vaguely familiar with their school’s football tradition, abruptly cut short in 1997 just a few years after making a historic trip to the NCAA Division I-AA Championship quarterfinals and defeating Kurt Warner’s Northern Iowa Panthers in the process.
Baseball’s history at this institution is less celebrated, yet equally important.
When Terrier football was relegated to the realm of history, thousands clamored for its return. Many still do. Fewer remember baseball’s disappearance, which occurred in 1996. Perhaps the relative quiet accompanying varsity baseball’s death was rooted in a familiarity with the occurrence ‘-‘- 1996 wasn’t the first time baseball had been cut. Yet, ignoring the financial limitations currently interfering with baseball’s re-introduction, the sport has a place here.
Consider BU’s setting, for one. Boston is not nationally recognized as a football town. No, this city is and has been known for baseball.’ Whether it be Harry Frazee’s sale of Babe Ruth, the Impossible Dream, or the emergence of Red Sox Nation in recent years, the Boston sports scene revolves around Fenway Park. For an institution bound so strongly to professional baseball by geography to try and separate itself from the collegiate version of the sport is peculiar, to say the least.
BU Athletics doesn’t ignore the presence of baseball in the surrounding community. Just look at the hockey arena’s namesake. As one of the pregame videos reminds spectators, Harry Agganis was a rising star for the Red Sox up until his untimely death. Meanwhile, Hall of Famer Mickey Cochrane, considered the greatest catcher of the pre-Yogi Berra era, is honored in nearby Walter Brown Arena. Varsity baseball may no longer be a presence on campus, but these and other details are lingering reminders of BU’s baseball past.
Playing baseball in the Northeast is a challenge, to be sure. The high probability of poor weather forces teams to spend much of the season down south, playing against competition with more available resources and doing so at significant cost. For some schools, meeting those requirements is too much to bear: the University of Vermont just recently announced the termination of its varsity baseball program.
Yet many other schools, even those with little to no tangible connection to the rest of the baseball-playing world, find a way to compete. The University of Maine, despite dealing with significantly worse weather conditions than those experienced in Boston, continues to play Division-I baseball and just won two games against Sacred Heart on the Black Bears’ newly renovated baseball field up in Orono.
To be sure, baseball does not present an opportunity for BU to make any substantial profit. Nor is it likely that the presence of a varsity baseball team on campus would be of much significance for most BU students. It’s not easy to make a logical argument for how baseball would be of any major value to the university. When one considers the state of the nation’s economy and the need for appropriate limits on non-essential expenditures, the odds of a varsity baseball team on campus in the near future decrease from slim to none.
But as someone whose overall sports experience isn’t predicated on the fortunes of the men’s hockey team and who doesn’t care for the titans of college basketball, late March isn’t exactly a sports paradise ‘-‘- especially when the Sweet 16 is composed almost entirely of chalk. Instead, a baseball dream butts heads with reality.
To reiterate: there is no varsity baseball team at BU. There has not been one for some time. In all likelihood, there will not be one for the foreseeable future, which leaves just one option for anyone in search of a BU baseball team: club baseball.
I can’t wait for April 4.
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