Ted's Polish-Mexican Page

Well, it appears that we are losing our PCL franchise here in Tucson. It's too bad, really. For some dumbass reason, people would rather sit home and watch American Idol than hang out at the ball park.

In the first few seasons of the Sidewinders, it appeared that folks were bound and determined to keep people from Tucson Electric Park. The location, the name of the park, the name change of the team, all of these seemed to alienate some portion of the fan base of the relatively successful Tucson Toros. It probably didn't help much that the first season's version of the team was awful. Remember that they were guys that couldn't make it on to the 1997 Arizona Diamondbacks.

My rant: we have too many people in this town who act like they are ashamed to live here. It seems that we have a strain of thought here that anything local must suck: the food, the bands, the sports. The knock I'd hear against the Sidewinders was that it wasn't "quality" baseball. This said as if these folks were baseball gourmands that would know what a truly quality team looked like. Somehow, actually being at a decent baseball game wasn't as cool as sitting at home and watching the Washington Nationals lose on TV again.

Let me give you an example of this problem: we had a In-and-Out Burger franchise open at El Con. For weeks, yes weeks, there were lines out the door of this place. To this day, the drive thru is always crowded. You'd think there was no place else to get a half way decent burger in this town, but there are at least a half dozen local places I could rattle off to those who would listen. Hey, we moved to Tucson from wherever, so we'd rather go with the greasy fast food from the national chain we've heard of.

The most bizarre is listening to morons who actually say there is no quality Mexican food here because what ever midwestern chain there is back home ain't here. Baja Fresh and La Salsa shouldn't even find a market here if we had any local pride.

Enough ranting...off to the ballpark so I can bitch that the park isn't as cool as, I dunno, someplace in Chicago, then go to a bar and complain that it isn't as cool as Seattle or Los Angeles.


Well, for better memories of local baseball, check out this article from the Tucson Weekly about the 1991 Championship Season. The 1991 Tucson Toros included Arizona Wildcats hero Kenny Lofton and a relief pitcher named Curt Schilling. The best part was at the end, the Toros were down when Joe "Never Surrender" Mikulik drove himself and three runners in (including Lofton). The crowd went nuts and stormed the field. It was like a cheesy movie. The only time I've seen that level of passion from a crowd was when I attended a soccer game between Guatemala and Mexico.

Hi Corbett field, by the way, was sold out for that game.


In an interesting post script, Mikulik was the Asheville Tourists manager that went a few bubbles off plumb last year. The video from ESPN includes a shout out to the Toros


Hasta la proxima. Do zobaczenia.