Category: History and More

Once upon a time, I absolutely loved baseball.

I’d watch it on TV as often as I could, but the real thrill was seeing a game live.

Growing up in Birmingham, that meant I had the Southern League Birmingham A’s and then Barons to root for, and I was in the stands frequently when they called Rickwood Field home. During the Barons’ championship season of 1983, they set a Southern League record for most home wins (57), and I saw the vast majority of them.

There were lots of beers, lots of hot dogs, and lots of fun.

Of course if you wanted to see big league ball, all you had to do was hop on I-20 and head to Atlanta.

Back in the old days the Braves mostly sucked, so you could get great tickets at face value (or less) and sit pretty much anywhere you liked at Fulton County Stadium.

A buddy and I used to go every season when the Braves would host the Chicago Cubs, catching the Friday and Saturday night games and then the Sunday matinee.

I’ll never be able to explain it, but there was something life-affirming about watching a couple of losing teams battle it out.

It didn’t really matter who won or lost, it was just a chance to soak in the National Pastime.

But that was a long, long time ago.

The Barons left Rickwood Field for Hoover Metropolitan Stadium, and then returned to the city limits when Regions Field was built on the hip side of town.

The Braves stopped sucking, and moved from Fulton County Stadium to Turner Field to Sun Trust Park in Cobb County.

Sadly, I’ve moved, too – away from baseball. At some point, we broke up and I started seeing other sports.

I’m not sure who’s at fault or why it happened.

When I retired from working at newspapers, one of the things I vowed to do was to become a real sports fan again – someone who was free to simply enjoy the games without having to worry about chronicling those games for other people.

And I had every intention of reigniting my passion for baseball.

Although the Cubs have been my favorite National League team since I was a little boy, the New York Yankees are my favorite team overall.

Before the Braves came along they were my dad’s faves, too, and he used to tell me about the days when the Southern Association Barons were the affiliates of the Yankees back in the 1950s.

I had fully intended to rock my Yankees dad cap and Mickey Mantle replica jersey and take a deep dive in Major League Baseball this past spring and summer.

I also planned to pop over to see the Braves and go back home to watch the Barons since I haven’t been to their new digs yet.

But … it never happened.

Oh, I wore my Yankees cap plenty of times, but I was usually watching soccer or rugby when I did.

I spent the first two months of the 2018 season trying to get interested, and spent the past five months coming to grips with the fact that – for whatever reason – the game simply doesn’t appeal to me right now.

I wish there was some tangible reason, because then it would make more sense. But even though I don’t like interleague play, the designated hitter rule or games that run past three hours, none of those are deal breakers.

MLB has great pitchers, great hitters, great teams, and there have been exciting story lines throughout the 2018 campaign.

All I know about any of it, though, is what I’ve read.

During the Yankees’ winner-take-all wildcard game against the Athletics, I fell asleep in the third inning.

Worse, I never made it through an entire division series game and have yet to watch a league championship series matchup in its entirety.

I’ll put the game on TV, but I wind up playing on my iPhone or watching United States Football League videos on YouTube.

And that’s kinda sad.

I’m not going to claim that baseball was ever my favorite sport, because it wasn’t. But it was a favored sport, and one that I took great joy in for so many years.

I wish I could find that feeling again, because I really want to be a baseball fan. Yet just as people drift apart, I guess people can drift apart from sports, too.

Love is fickle, ain’t it?

Had things gone as planned, I would currently be pontificating about the future of the Pacific Pro Football League, which was set to play its inaugural summer season with an eight game schedule contested from early July through late August.

I might’ve made room to look back at the Major League Football campaign, too, which in 2016 announced a two-year television deal with American Sports Network.

Alas, there’s nothing to report – at least not from the playing field.

Pac Pro pushed its start date back to the summer of 2019, and last month started looking for a new CEO – which perhaps means there is no definitive timeline for when it plans to get started.

I subscribe to the Pac Pro email updates, and the last one I received came in February when the league announced a “founding partner” relationship with Adidas.

You can also ask questions via the website although, to date, none of mine have been answered.

Then again, they never promised to answer, so …

MLFB, on the other hand, has become something of a joke, defined by a series of missteps. It seems less like a sports league and more like a wrecked car in a locked garage; it’s never going anywhere.

It was supposed to be up and running in the spring of 2016, and then 2017, and then this past spring.

Go to its website today, and you see five players dressed in colorful uniforms under the announcement: Coming Soon, New MLFB Website.

Visit its Facebook page, and you’ll see a lot of people making fun of it.

Of course those of us who grasp at any shiny object (and by “shiny object” we mean upstart pro football leagues) don’t have to wallow in disappointment.

The Alliance of American Football – now with all its cities, coaches, nicknames and colors lined up – begins play in February.

A year later, the XFL is supposed to rise from the gridiron grave, giving fans of spring football another option.

Personally, I’m putting all my chips in the AAF basket since my hometown of Birmingham has a team and the city closest in driving distance to me – Atlanta – has one as well.

Still, before I ever heard of the AAF or XFL: The Sequel, I was enamored with Pac Pro.

Of all the leagues that have come along – spring, summer, whatever – this one appeared to have a business plan that could actually turn the league onto a viable entity.

I wrote about the league back in 2017, and am still intrigued by the concept.

“Pacific Pro is the first professional football league ever created to provide developing football players with a choice to play professionally directly from high school – a league where emerging players can hone their craft, play football, and be compensated for it,” reads the release on the league website. “Pacific Pro will be the first league to professionalize players who are less than four years removed from their high school graduation. Players will receive a salary, benefits, and even paid tuition and books for one year at community college. Players also will be able to market themselves for compensation, and begin creating a financial retirement plan if they so choose.”

Salaries are approximately $50,000 per player, which is pretty sweet money coming right out of high school.

It makes a lot of sense when you think about it.

Certainly, there are many “student-athletes” who are interested in getting a quality education while playing college football, but there are some who aren’t.

Whether they can’t make the grade or simply don’t want to go to college, Pac Pro would work like a trade school in the football trade.

The original plan was to start with four teams, all in Southern California, and then then expand from there.

Now, who knows if it’ll ever get off the ground?

When fledgling sports leagues delay their start, that delay often becomes permanent.

I’d still like to see Pac Pro become a reality, if for no other reason than to find out how many hot shot prep players are willing to go straight to the professional ranks.

If it doesn’t, though, that’s OK, too.

The AAF will garner my attention in the spring and come June, the Canadian Football League will be my primary football concern.

Everything else is just gravy.

One of the things I vowed to do when I retired from the newspaper business was write books.

Or at least a book.

Right now, I’m about halfway through a work of fiction, three chapters into a non-fiction sports book, and have a decent start on a fiction novel geared toward young adults.

Problem is, I’m so accustomed to short form pieces that I’ve concentrated more on this website than I have the books. And, in all honesty, I’ve used adamsonmedia.com as an excuse to put them on the backburner.

Truth is, for the first time in my writing career, I’m out of my comfort zone.

Put me in a stadium or gym, and I was always confident I could recreate what happened there in a way that informed readers in an entertaining way.

When I wrote columns, I was sure that even if you disagreed with the opinion, you’d have no quarrel with the craft.

But I’ve never been much of a swimmer, and right now I’m in the deep end of the pool – fully clothed and lacking a water noodle.

While the non-fiction sports book feels more natural, I still have a whole lot of work to do. And I’m straight-up struggling with the other two.

It’s frustrating.

I know where I want them to go but I can’t figure out how to get there; I want to take shortcuts but I know that only winds up in dead ends.

So ….

I’m taking a break from this website in order to spend all my writing time on my long form projects.

If I had more talent I could juggle all of it, but I don’t and, therefore, I can’t.

Newspapers have deadlines, and deadlines always gave me a mark to hit.

Without them, I’ve discovered that I have all the time in the world to write and all of the time in the world to waste – and I’ve opted for the latter.

I mean, those cat videos on YouTube aren’t gonna watch themselves.

That being the case, I’m going to impose my own deadlines and set an actual work schedule. Once I do that, hopefully the words will come more easily and find their way onto pages that will eventually (hopefully) become books.

If and when that happens – when I see some real progress – I’ll return to this site.

It could be a week, a couple of weeks or a couple of months … I really don’t know.

But one way or another, I’m going to find out something important about myself.

Namely, am I a writer capable of writing books?

I’m about to find out.