A certain melancholy hung over TD Ballpark on Aug. 27.
Maybe it was the leaden overcast skies that shrouded the homey confines of the Dunedin Blue Jays.
It could have been that people were kept away by thunderstorms that had lumbered around Pinellas County that day, the annoying sudden, disruptive downpours that came and went like the local Wheely Boys and their bikes.
But perhaps it was a sense of finality, the sense that as far as weeknight ballgames, there would be no more this year, that cast a pall over the proceedings. After the game that followed on Aug. 30, the Blue Jays’ season was over.
The ballclub’s stalwarts, the folks with Blue Jays gear who always populate the home first base side of the grandstand, the loyalists, the season ticket holders, nearly everyone but the three little girls squirming in and around their seats behind home plate with their loving daddy knew the season was just about over.
The atmosphere wasn’t exactly funereal, but it was subdued.
Even a bit lonely.
Game attendance was listed at 223, and the 8,000 or so empty grandstand seats served as a dark harbinger of a winter without baseball. Ballpark regulars exchanged greetings with the always-jovial ushers, and concession staff members served their fare with typical amiable jollity and efficiency.
But there was subtext. Everyone knew that it could be an arduous trek through the off-season.
The threat of baseball’s owners locking out players in 2027 lurked, and no one was sure when they’ll be playing professional baseball again in Dunedin. Or Clearwater. Anywhere.
“We don’t talk about that,” one vendor said, quickly waving a hand in dismissal of the topic while grabbing a soft pretzel for a fan.
By appearances Blue Jays attendance has been healthy this year, and although final attendance figures aren’t available yet, it’s clear that Blue Jays promotions such as $2 Wednesday, which included $2 beer, goosed numbers noticeably. It’s amazing to see what $2 beer can do to people. The almost staid ballyard fills with boisterous amateur comedians on Wednesdays, and the atmosphere turns giddy with cheering and helpful advice for umpires and players.
Thursday’s quiet gathering included dozens of Palm Beach Cardinals followers who made themselves known with polite “whooo”s and muted call-outs of Cardinals players.
The young father who sat behind home plate with his three patient daughters — ages 1 (in a front harness), 3 and 5 — made it almost through the fifth inning before the girls began making it clear that they would not be getting credit for a complete game. As he gathered them up to leave, he walked to the exit sweetly smiling. “Making memories,” he said as he passed.
The building was quiet enough so that conversations on the first base side of the stadium could nearly be fully discerned on the third base end. Of course, the volume of the PA speakers was set to 11 so that any conversation within three blocks of the stadium was rudely interrupted.
Fans will miss baseball this winter, and perhaps beyond. But will anyone miss hearing the clichéd “charge!” riff rip through the air? Will there be no handclapping without the ballpark instructing “ever’y’bo’dy” to do it? Like the big-league Tampa Bay Rays who seem to operate under the notion that every nano-second of time spent at their dreadful ballpark must be spent with musical stingers and other racket, TD Ballpark likewise overdoes the sound.
While only 200 or so were in the stands, the stadium PA volume could have cleared out downtown.
No, that won’t be missed.
Time without baseball is bad enough. But TD Ballpark otherwise has a collegial, almost familial, atmosphere.
If it seems like everybody knows everybody, fans, staff, security personnel, it’s not just because that’s largely true. And it’s because fans at TD Ballpark are greeted at the gate like they’ve been expected, like the game wouldn’t be the same without them in the stands.
That spirit will be missed almost as much as the beauty of a mammoth home run ball disappearing into the inky August sky or the crack of a fastball hitting the catcher’s mitt.
For anyone who came to Florida from the north, it can seem inconceivable that they’re not playing baseball year-round here.
But following the early September Florida State League playoffs, we will be bereft of baseball.
No one wants to think about the length of its absence.
After the holidays come and go, fans will gaze longingly at TD Ballpark as they pass and wonder when the whole gang will regroup for another season.
Common sense says that in a contract dispute between billionaire owners and millionaire players an agreement will be reached in time for a full 2027 season.
But applying good sense to sports is a fool’s errand.
That’s the scary part.