I was thumbing through a copy of Baseball America that I picked up over the weekend at a Shorebirds game and saw a little article that may change next year’s schedule quite a bit.
According to the magazine, there is a buyer interested in buying the Columbus Catfish (who play in Columbus, Georgia) and relocating the team to Bowling Green, Kentucky for the 2009 season. Despite being the reigning league champions, the Catfish have lagged in attendance for several years and finished dead last for support in the 16-team loop last year.
While we don’t play the Catfish this year and have not done so here in the three seasons I’ve followed the Shorebirds, a move would likely force a league realignment that might end some of the lengthy long road trips the Shorebirds have. As the schedule has been done of late, Delmarva plays in a divisional subgroup that includes cross-state rival Hagerstown, Lakewood, New Jersey, and Lake County, Ohio. That Ohio trip is an 8-hour trip that the Shorebirds have been forced to take several times a season (four times this year.)
Obviously the relocated Catfish would have to shift from the Southern Division to the Northern Division while my guess is that Hickory, NC would be the team to shift to the Southern. But it would allow the league to redo its subgroups to include a western one with the two Kentucky teams (Bowling Green and Lexington), West Virginia, and Lake County while Greensboro would be added to our group. Then the longest drive for Delmarva in this group would be the 6.5 hours to Greensboro. And while this setup would make the Lakewood-to-Greensboro trip problematic, their jaunt to Lake County isn’t easy either – both are 8 hour journeys.
For a league that bills itself as the South Atlantic League, in the last 15 years they’ve shifted their geographic center out of the Georgia/Carolinas area that once defined them into a region that includes a large area west of the Appalachians. Whether that can be sustained in this era of $4 per gallon diesel fuel is another question the league will have to ponder as it enters its second fifty years. If the move of the Catfish franchise does come to pass, a little help could be on the way for the Shorebirds.
Coming back to the here and now, the Shorebirds are away until Monday as they visit Hagerstown and Lakewood before returning home Monday for three against Lake County. Those contests will be 7:05 Monday night and Tuesday night, with a Wednesday morning matinee at 10:30, the first of their “Silver Slugger” days.
Tonight I’ll have a new Shorebird of the Week, so stay tuned for that.
