Former two-time National League MVP and longtime Utah resident Dale Murphy isn’t the only big name around here who’s been asked the question, the one that goes like this: Can Utah get and successfully maintain a Major League Baseball team?
Another familiar face, long ago, took it and ran with his answer.
At first, in truth, the man looked equal parts perplexed and intrigued by the question, as though a flop wedge had been swung straight into his forehead and, strangely, it somehow felt soothing and satisfying to him, as though that wedge had knocked loose some new and old thoughts, pleasant thoughts, big thoughts super-colliding in a big brain. And then, after a few moments, a smile emerged on his sizable mug and he said, “Yes, under certain circumstances I can see it happening. It could happen. It should happen. I’d like to see it happen. It will happen.”
When?
“Within 20 years,” he said.
The temptress, or temptresses, the ones standing like Marlene Dietrich, silhouetted in the doorway turning a heel, opening vast resources?
A coalition led by the Miller family, the Miller Group, Rocky Mountain Power, other Utah investors, state and local government officials, as well as all the stuff that comes alongside them, namely money, eager corporate sponsorship, money, a growing population, and money. Everything fast-emerging Utah has to offer.
The Millers, they announced on Wednesday, have plans for a baseball park on a 100-acre stretch of Rocky Mountain Power land on the west side of Salt Lake City as part of a large mixed-use development. The plan is for a baseball park unlike any other that has been heretofore erected in Utah, one that could and can — and will? — house a home team playing at the game’s highest level, in either the American League or the National.
The Miller coalition has been in talks with MLB and its commissioner Rob Manfred over the past year. And now, the push has come in earnest.
Other cities want a team, too, so there’s that.
Fitting it is, though, that the aforementioned answer man was Larry H. Miller, former king of the empire that’s shaking the possibilities loose now. Fitting also that I asked those questions about 17 years ago. Another question I once asked Larry was this: What’s your best quality when it comes to business? His answer: “Vision. I see things others don’t see.”
In a statement released on Wednesday, Gail Miller, Larry’s wife, said:
“Larry and I risked everything to acquire the Utah Jazz, and it was a tremendous honor to ensure it thrived as a model franchise. We now have an opportunity to welcome Major League Baseball to Utah and invite all Utahns to join us in this effort.”
Yeah, Larry saw this, and those who were close to him are now soldiering to make it happen. Whether it will or would happen without a stack of taxpayer cash is a question left yet unanswered.
Either way, LHM was pragmatic and optimistic about it becoming real.
And I was happy to believe him, but not thoroughly convinced.
A poll was taken a decade or so ago, a survey asking American sports fans in every state whether they planned on watching at least part of MLB games on that new season’s opening day. A majority — 68 percent — answered that yes, they would. In 49 of the states, better than 50 percent of respondents indicated they would. The one dissenting state?
Utah.
Maybe nobody around here cared about baseball anymore. Maybe they’d rather be out hiking or biking or skiing or hanging out with family or doing church service or being distracted by watching the Jazz play. On that last one, it’s forever been an argument in these parts whether residents in Utah are huge basketball fans or just huge Jazz fans. Some claim the rudiments and reach of the game itself didn’t captivate them, rather it was the community pride that comes with identifying with a professional team that represents them. Perhaps the authentic answer is a combination of both sides of that argument.
Surely, interest across most demographics in any sport at the college or pro level is enhanced when there’s a reason to root.
If the Millers have their way, Utahns will possess a big reason inside of the big leagues, a reason they’ve never had before.
The Triple-A Bees, owned by the Millers and headed to a new stadium to be built southwest of Salt Lake City, have always been a nice little diversion, providing a chance for baseball fans — and people in general — to gather on one of the state’s spectacular summer nights to sit back, scarf a polish dog, slam a cold beverage, and absorb bits and pieces of the national pastime. It was chill, a night out, a time to visit with friends and/or family, with the sounds of the crack of the bat and the pop of a ball in a mitt as background music. Not infrequently, people in the seats not only didn’t care whether the Bees — a group of athletes always on their way to somewhere else — won, but they didn’t even know who was playing.
Spectators felt no real connection, no real anxiety, no real happiness over the games’ outcomes.
If the Miller coalition is successful, they would now.
And wouldn’t that be a glorious thing: Enjoy the grand ol’ game, the one Abner Doubleday didn’t really invent but mistakenly got credit for, the one Lou Gehrig played, the one Stan Musial and Roberto Clemente and Mike Schmidt and Bob Gibson and Nolan Ryan and Murphy played. And care deeply about whether the Utah Whatevers win, enough to let it lift their souls or drown them in sports sorrow, further bringing residents of the state together in a common cause, a common interest.
Gail Miller said it, has said it a thousand times, and it’s true. That’s the best a professional team can do for a place like this — bring it together. There already are enough divisions out there, be they political, religious, social education-related, economic, environmental. To sit or stand in a cathedral, a green cathedral, that unites rather than divides is a blessing, indeed.
We’ll see if Larry Miller, who loved this place, was, in fact, a prophet. It’s something worth rooting for, rooting for one more rooting interest, rooting for one more something to feel passionate about — together.
And then everyone around here, if they’re lucky, if they’re like fortunate fans in other cities, might begin to relate to just a little of what former Major League pitcher Jim Bouton said about the game: “You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out it was the other way around all the time.”
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