Harvey: Baseball is meant to be simple game

By Coley Harvey - charvey@macon.com

There are fancy machine-operated retractable roofs, plush, leather seat-filled luxury booths and large digital video screens keeping computerized track of a game that once sold 10-cent scorecards with a box of Cracker Jack.

This is the new age of baseball game viewing, and these technological advances tug at the emotional sleeves of diehard, old-time baseball fans who desperately long for this great pastime's simpler days - like those in 1929 when Macon's own gem of baseball history - Luther Williams Field - first opened.

On Thursday, the Florida Marlins, a major league team born into the modern baseball era in 1993, received the long-awaited news that the city of Miami, as well as Miami-Dade County, approved the building of a new ballpark at a popular south Florida site.

Until the new ballpark's completion at the University of Miami's Orange Bowl in 2011, the Marlins will continue to play at the football stadium that has housed them the past 14 seasons - Dolphin Stadium.

Throughout the Marlins' young existence - one that has been highlighted by two World Series wins - the playing space was their biggest complaint: It is a dual-use football stadium with far too many seats for a baseball crowd; they share it with the Miami Dolphins, who routinely tear up the playing surface before late-season Marlins games; and daily south Florida afternoon rainstorms drench the field, leaving it incredibly soggy and humid for evening games, a weather phenomenon that forces many fans to stay home.

While it's hard to side against the Marlins for wanting a new facility for those reasons, the old-time baseball fan still has to question the excessive, flowing spaceship-looking proposition for the new venue. Just do a google search of images for the "Marlins' new ballpark" (or even better, the "Tampa Bay Rays' new ballpark") to see it. Isn't baseball supposed to be played in just a regular, old, open-air facility?

There's something to the quaint charm of ancient ballparks like Luther Williams: ballparks that are completely open-air venues with rows of grandstands that put the fans close into the game's action. There's something about the old red-bricked paneling outside those baseball fields and the tin roofs that clank loudly and sharply with every foul ball that hits them.

When New York's original Yankee Stadium closes after this season, only Chicago's Wrigley Field and Boston's Fenway Park will remain as such icons on the major league stage.

True, retractable roofs will allow games to go on without delay. But isn't it part of the joy of baseball to sit through rain delays of indeterminable lengths, sticking around sometimes for hours at a time to finally watch play resume.

Those slow periods can also be fun, as spectators at times get a chance to watch the silliest, fan-appealing players come out of their dugouts to slide and dive across the slippery tarp that protects the infield dirt from moisture.

On more than one occasion last summer I had the fortune of watching that transpire at Luther Williams, as players from the Macon Music giddily dove and ran on the slip-and-slide surface that replaced the park's usually dusty infield. Glancing at the smiles on their faces, it looked like the game had been transported some 10 or 15 years back in time and they were playing as if children again.

Now that's baseball; a childhood game - a simple game.