August 1, 2006
Sports
Coincidentally enough, our town’s AAA baseball team is called the Nashville Sounds. It’s the farm club for the Milwaukee Brewers. Just as a matter of convenience and with geography being of little consequence these days, they’re also members of the Pacific Coast League. Some of us would rather have major league ball, of course, and would readily trade both our professional football [Titans] and hockey [Predators] leagues together with their big, fatcat, drain-on-the-taxpayers venues. But you take what you can get.
At least, we’ve got a new class-act public library. It wasn’t easy selling book-reading as a major league sport. But we’ve also got an opera company, a ballet troupe, a pretty good symphony, and a jazz workshop, all ideal places for folk to hear tunes with more than three chord changes played on something other than a dobro.
Our town is home to the Southern Baptist Covention [AKA Baptist Vatican] and has some kind of a church if not a bank on just about every other downtown corner plus a scattering of religious publishing houses here and there. It’s not without reason that along with the Athens of the South, we’re also called the buckle on the Bible Belt. There’re some images you just can’t shake.
So, it wasn’t much of a surprise to hear that to pep up attendance at the baseball games, the latest evangel angle is Faith Night. The entrepreneurs say that free Bibles are a better draught than free beer when it comes to getting folk out to the ball game. My research on this is negligible and will probably stay that way, but I wouldn’t be surprised that before long, baseball may probably join all those other faith-based organizations.