It was 10:25 p.m., nearly five hours after they’d opened the gates at Thomas More Stadium, and Neil Diamond is singing “Sweet Caroline” and the Rozzi’s fireworks are just getting going, and Day 1 of the final Frontier League All-Star get-together is finishing up.
The featured Home Run Derby, the night’s headline event that was highlighted by a pair of three-swing “swing-offs,” ended on a dramatic walk-off blast on the night’s very last swing.
And it almost seemed anti-climactic.
There was just so much more going on in Florence as all-star players and the folks who call the shots for this sprawling 18-team league from French-speaking Canada all the way down to Mississippi through most of the big cities in the Midwest in between came together here in Northern Kentucky for a baseball holiday.
And something more.
Where the guess here is that some 2,500 fans welcomed them although guess-timating crowds at TMU Stadium for Y’alls’ games is always an iffy thing with maybe half the fans on the move at any one time.
That’s because so many of them are young people, really young in some cases, even nearly newborns in others. Which seems to be the theory here. Get the kids coming, make it fun everywhere you look and their parents will be here as well. As they were on this night.
There were inflatables as far as the eye could see – ones you could slide on, take batting practice in, test your pitching arm against and most importantly, tunnel through for a cooling water spray as the temperature hovered at 85 at 8:15 or so.
You could get your own personalized baseball card, even if you were barely three years old, get an autograph or maybe your photo taken with one of the 10 mascots here – the Bengals’ Who dey?, the Barrels’ . . . Barrel and the Cincinnati Bearcat among others.
You could catch some wrestling in the ring set up next to the third base coaching box, you could catch up with the Little Y’alls all-star team of 3-7-year olds, take a chance on one of a couple of split-the-pot offers and finish up the pre-game, as it were, watching a home run derby for 12-year-olds that saw Mason Fugate of the Northern Kentucky Stingers dominate with 11 dingers in the final round.
Steve Tahsler, commissioner of the Frontier League that started some 34 years ago as a little old independent league in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana, told the fans this was an “outstanding showing for Florence and Northern Kentucky and such an honor for us.”
But Tahsler, in his 30th year with the Frontier League, wasn’t here to just praise the hosts, he was here for the big announcement for the future of what he described as “the largest, longest Major League Baseball partner league.”
“But we didn’t have a shared ideal,” said Annie Sauget Miller, owner of the league’s Gateway Grizzlies in St. Louis. “What if we didn’t think just a year at a time but three to five years?”
And so they have. Let Northern Kentuckian Jay Becker, founder of the Covington business consultancy BLDG that developed the Y’alls’ branding, explain what his group did over the last year-and-a-half for the league that announced its new name and new mission before the first pitch in the Home Run Derby.
National Association of Professional Baseball, it will be known from now on. They even offered up the French translation. “To know where you’re going, you have to know where you’ve been,” Becker said, honoring lots of history here.
Grizzlies’ owner Sauget Miller can tell you where they’re going: “Our mission is to deliver an exciting, affordable product” called baseball. And as they prove every night in Florence, it has to be fun – for everyone.
Which includes the Canadians, which is why they opened with a thrilling rendition of “Oh, Canada.” In French from singer Eric LaPorte, followed by a terrific rendition of the National Anthem by the Young Professionals Choral Collection.
By 9 p.m, “We are moments away,” the PA man said. And so we were, as the eight finalists in the Home Run Derby whittled their way through a record number of home runs down to a final two – the New Jersey Jackals’ Felix Stevens and the Quebec Capitales’ Torin Montgomery, both Atlantic Conference guys. The two Y’alls, Zade Richardson and Brendan Bobo, did not make it through to the finals.
Montgomery needed two homers in the final swing-off, one on his last swing, and did just that to win this thing. “I knew the number I had to hit,” Montgomery said. And that’s exactly what he did.
But he wasn’t the only one who hit it out of the park on this night as the drone show before the fireworks told the story of a league with a lot to talk about.
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X @dweber3440.