Folks keep meeting to try and prop up the Big Bend Cowboys. All these folks who are fighting for the team are just looking for to spend someone else’s money.
Here are the five sure-fire steps to making a professional baseball team profitable in Alpine, Texas:
- Get rid of everyone’s television, computer and newspapers so that they can’t keep up with Major League Baseball
- Find a corporate sponsor who has more money than sense
- Import about 20,000 rabid baseball fans. House them in a tent city near the field.
- Destroy every CD player, video game machine and DVD player so that there is absolutely nothing to do
- Have world class athletes competing at the height of their powers
A pro baseball team is a 50/50 proposition for a town like Pocatello, Idaho, which has local television affiliates and a population of 50,000. For Alpine, a microscopic media market, it’s out of the question. There ain’t enough meat for the seats and eyes for the ads.
We have a beautiful relic of a ball field in Kokernot Field. I don’t think that that ball team that played there was every really profitable, even in the good old days before everyone had a TV. It was just an old rancher’s way of putting on a party for the whole community.
People’s expectations are different now. They’ve watched real athletes competing on TV, so watching a bunch of dudes being paid minimum wage sod off in the baseball field seems a little dull.
This is an ugly ugly truth, but someone needs to say it: the Big Bend Cowboys were an ill-conceived gamble that never paid off.
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Quotable Quotes
–The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.
— Samuel Butler