DELAYED OPENER BRINGS BACK MEMORIES OF 1980
Opening day never gets old for Miles Wolff, not even after 45 of them as either a general manager, team owner or league commissioner in either the minor leagues or independent baseball.
In the hours leading up to the first pitch of the 2017 season Thursday night, the Ottawa Champions owner and Can-Am Baseball League commissioner took to reminiscing about some of the lighter moments of opening days from years gone by.
Wolff says he will never forget opening day 1980, his first as an owner, after purchasing the Carolina League’s Durham Bulls, a franchise that had yet to become a national phenomenon by way of the big screen.
Wolff ’s horror of horrors story actually begins two days before opening day, when thieves broke into the Bulls’ refurnished clubhouse at legendary Durham Athletic Park and stole all the uniforms, forcing the rookie owner to make a frantic call to the Atlanta Braves to see if they would ship him some used pants and jerseys while testing the reliability of FedEx delivery.
And 48 hours later, his team took to the field in a night opener, returning minor-league baseball to Durham, N.C., by confusing the home fans with “Braves” written across their chests and Wolff figured the worst was behind him. Not so. “We had a huge crowd ... maybe 4,500 on a Tuesday night ... and the (stadium) lights went out in the seventh inning and the toilets stopped working,” said Wolff, now able to laugh about it 37 years later. “I guess if anything could have gone wrong, it did that night.
“It wasn’t so much panic as having things go wrong that you just can’t control.”
Wolff had spent years as a general manager of the Atlanta Braves’ double-A club in Savannah, Ga., and teams in Anderson, S.C., and Jacksonville, Fla., before getting the idea to reboot the Bulls, never imagining eight years later that Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins would make the team infamous in the movie Bull Durham.
He sure wasn’t thinking of infamy that first night.
“The park was built in 1938 and hadn’t been used in 10 years and I guess the people who installed the new plumbing lines ... well, they weren’t working and we had huge lines outside the ladies’ rooms,” Wolff said. “Then the lights went out.
“We had this handyman at the park named Doug and he went a got a screwdriver and jammed it into a fuse box and held it there and the lights came back. I think we had like a 10-minute delay.
“I was sure Doug was going to be electrocuted. But he kept that screwdriver in that box the rest of the game and kept the current going and we finished with lights.”
With a story like that, Wolff was hardly fazed when rains and high winds invaded Raymond Chabot Grant Thornton Stadium in the bottom of the third inning in the Champions’ opener.
The storm hit at 8:08 p.m. and the accompanying winds left the crack grounds crew scrambling to keep its footing as the tarp flew into right field.
Once the winds let up, the crew was able to pull the tarp back onto the infield and save the game, though the delay lasted 49 minutes, only resuming at 8:57 p.m.
And when play did begin again, the Champions’ offence came to life to make it 3-0 in Can-Am season openers, beating the TroisRivieres Aigles 7-1.
Designated hitter Adron Chambers hit a rocket over the fence in right field in the third to send the Champions ahead.
One inning later, doubles by Steve Brown, Gustavo Pierre and Danny Grauer padded the Ottawa lead to 3-0 behind the pitching of Austin Chrismon.
The Champions added another in the fourth and three in the fifth to put things away as Chrismon went seven strong innings, allowing just one unearned run.