Part of the glory of being a fan of a Major League Baseball team winning the World Series is getting to celebrate that victory for a whole year.
You know – gloating.
Like: “Our team with its small payroll and its thrown-together collection of players beat your high-salaried team” or “beat your team with all its superstars.”
The Atlanta Braves were in such a position after winning the World Series last year. Their fans across the Southeast – and they are legion – could celebrate being at the top of the baseball heap for a year after first baseman Freddie Freeman caught the last out of Game 6 to secure the championship on Nov. 2, 2021.
Lest you doubt the fandom of the team in this area, check out obituaries in this or other newspapers in the Mid-South. They’ll often be peppered with phrases like “he was a huge Atlanta Braves fan” or “she never missed an Atlanta Braves game.” You don’t see those same phrases for the Atlanta Falcons, Tennessee Titans or Atlanta Hawks.
In recent years, MLB teams that have won the World Series have thanked their fans by taking the World Series trophy, officially called the Commissioner’s Trophy, on a tour of cities and towns outside the larger city in which the team is located.
When the Boston Red Sox snapped an 86-year drought and won the World Series in 2004, the team’s owner declared the trophy would go to every city and town in Massachusetts. By the time the tour ended in June, it had traveled more than 16,000 miles in the state and more than 37,000 miles overall.
When the Chicago White Sox snapped an 88-year string without a championship a year later, the trophy went to 125 cities in nine states, each one of the team’s minor league affiliates and, briefly, Venezuela, the home of then-manager Ozzie Guillen. And, collecting $10 from everyone who wanted to be photographed with the trophy, the White Sox collected $200,000 for the team’s charity.
The Atlanta Braves announced their six-state, 151-stop trophy tour in January and launched it in mid-February. Every few days since then, it seemed, the team would add stops.
Earlier this week, it was announced Chattanooga would be one of those stops. In fact, the 2-foot-high, 11-inch-wide trophy will stop three times in the area – at the Nightfall Concert Series at Miller Park in downtown Chattanooga on June 3 at 7 p.m., at the Riverbend Music Festival on June 4 at 3 p.m. and at Cambridge Square in Ooltewah on June 5 at 1 p.m.
Supposedly, there will be team programming around each appearance, and fans will be invited to have their photos made with the trophy. But details are sketchy.
There’s also one giant elephant in the room, at least for now.
Major League Baseball on this day should be in the midst of spring training games in Florida and Arizona, the Braves and the 29 other teams tuning up to see who will wind up with 2022 gloating rights that come from fighting their way through a grueling, 162-game season, battling through several rounds of playoffs and then winning the World Series.
But there’s a lockout and no baseball, and no agreement between the team owners and the players association appears imminent.
MLB already has announced that the first couple of series of the regular season will be canceled. If negotiations drag on, other series likely will be axed.
We won’t, in this space, get into the negotiations, the numbers and who’s right and who’s wrong. You can find that on the sports pages, television or the internet. But we will opine that the fans have been put last.
It’s likely some agreement will be worked out in time, and there will be baseball in 2022. But when that occurs, will the new agreement cause ticket prices to be so high that only the super rich can take their families? Will the resentment be so heavy that fans stay away all together or boo team and management alike when they do come to the stadium?
After the last baseball season in which a number of games were canceled, 1994, it took the sport several years to regain the popularity it enjoyed before the work stoppage.
And for the Braves, once an MLB agreement is reached, they’ll have another contract to secure – that of Freeman, their longtime star who wasn’t signed for a longer term during the 2021 season or after it, and is now a free agent. So, when an agreement is reached, he’ll be able to negotiate with any team as well as the Braves. Starting the season without him would be unthinkable, but it’s a definite possibility.
Thus, depending on what happens between now and then, once that World Series trophy reaches Chattanooga, it may have more fans wanting to throw rotten vegetables at it than pose with it.
For Braves fans and all baseball fans, let’s hope they work things out, and soon.