CANCELED SEASON PUTS MANY OUT OF WORK
Ticket-takers, other seasonal employees are missing income
NORFOLK — Typically, when Mike Holtzclaw is tendered an invitation to play tennis or attend a concert in the summer, his first order of business is to check the Norfolk Tides’ schedule.
If they’re home, he has a decision to make: As the Tides’ official scorer for nearly 20 years, is the offer worth skipping a game and its $50-60 nightly paycheck, or would he rather call in his backup for last-minute duty?
A former reporter at The Daily Press, Holtzclaw almost always turns down the offer and drives from his home in Chesapeake to Harbor Park, where he might sit for three or four hours a night and render quick judgments.
For the foreseeable future, those social decisions are already made for him.
The dreaded perpetual rainout has unsung victims.
Minor League Baseball officially canceled its season this week, putting Holtzclaw and hundreds of the Tides’ other seasonal employees out of their avocations and without extra income for the summer.
Minor League Baseball president Pat O’Conner said he and MLB commissioner Rob Manfred could not come up with a way for players and fans to convene safely at minor league ballparks around the nation in light of the coronavirus pandemic.
That leaves Holtzclaw and thousands of other part-time ballpark employees throughout the minors without, in his case, about $3,000 this year.
“It doesn’t put food on the table, but it makes it easier,” Holtzclaw said. “It’s enough that you miss it.”
On a busy night, the Tides employ as many as 200 seasonal employees, from ushers and ticket-takers to restaurant workers and the people who run the stadium’s scoreboard and video board.
In what O’Conner described as “a fans-in-the-stands business” in which TV revenues can’t make up