By OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON, D.C., September 15, 2021 – This is a sad, sad story – very sad. I fully expected that I would see Jazz Chisholm Jr., the Bahamian rookie baseball sensation with the Miami Marlins, play live in today’s game against my beloved Washington Nationals, which began at 1 o’clock.
Thanks to Ron Burke, Director of Advertising and Marketing with The Washington Informer, I got two very good tickets for today’s game and my heart was dancing with joy at the prospect of seeing Jazz play in person.
The Washington Nationals is one of the corporate sponsors of the D.C. City-Wide Spelling Bee, which is sponsored by the Washington Informer, an award-winning Black-owned newspaper where I was News Editor for 12 years when I previously lived in D.C. for 21 years before returning to The Bahamas “permanently” in 1996.
Because he Advertising and Marketing Director at The Informer, Ron contacted Gregory McCarthy, Senior Vice President, Community Engagement, with Washington Nationals, who sent me an email with the extremely good news on Monday that he had emailed me two tickets, but I had to go to the App Store on my iPhone and set up account using an email address to retrieve them.
The email included the following instructions:
“The following is a summary of the ticket(s) forwarded to you:
TICKET DETAILS
Wednesday, September 15
1:05 PM
Miami Marlins at Washington Nationals
SECTION 117 ROW J SEAT 17
SECTION 117 ROW J SEAT 18
To access these ticket(s), please do the following:
Step 1: Make sure you have the Ballpark app downloaded (iOS or Android only), and you’ve signed up or logged in to your MLB Account.
Step 2: Tap the “Access Tickets” button below.
The instructions created an immediate problem for me. Because of my current dire financial situation, my cell phone services were suspended three weeks ago because I had not paid my monthly bill in two months, as I prioritized which bills were “essential” to pay every month – the most essential being my Xfinity Internet Service provider, through which I produce BAHAMAS CHRONCLE.
Of course, paying my cell phone bill on Monday immediately became a top priority, but after I did, I was faced with yet another problem. I have always been technologically challenged when using my iPhone, but after I paid the overdue bill, I could not access the necessary Ballpark app to download the tickets.
I frantically contacted several persons whom I considered to be “experts” in Internet technology, but none of them could help me because, as Ron explained, I was the only person who could download the Ballpark app to my iPhone.
I consider myself to be fairly intelligent, but after many hours trying to figure out how to retrieve the tickets to my iPhone, I finally gave up and accepted the fact that this morning that I was not going to see Jazz Chisholm play in person, at least not on this visit to D.C.
Then came the tears that flowed freely for several minutes before I composed myself.
Aside from the fact that baseball is my most favourite sport, I was very much involved in the growth and development of baseball in The Bahamas. I was President of the Bahamas Baseball Association (BBA) for six years in the 1960s before going to London for one year’s training in journalism (1968 – 1969) at the London Evening Standard. On my return to The Bahamas, I again served as President of the BBA for two years in the early 1970s.
As President of the BBA in the 1960s, I took all-star teams to Wichita, Kansas, on two occasions to participate in the prestigious National Baseball Congress (NBC) tournament, which is regarded as a “stepping stone” for players headed to the Major Leagues. I again took a team to Wichita in 1972, and the manager of that team was retired Major Leaguer the late Andre Rodgers, the first Bahamian to play professional baseball.
So you could understand how disappointed I was that I did not get to go to today’s Marlins vs Nationals game. I am immensely proud of Jazz and all the other young Bahamian baseball players who and destined to join him in the Major Leagues.
As it turned out, however, when I started watching today’s game on TV, I quickly realized that Jazz was not in the lineup. A quick search of the Internet produced this brief report:
MARLINS’JAZZ CHIHOLM: DAY OFF WEDNESDAY
Jazz Chisholm isn’t starting Wednesday’s game against the Nationals, Christina De Nicola of MLB.com reports. Chisholm will get a breather after he went 1-for-11 with a run, a stolen base and four strikeouts across the last three games. Joe Panik will take his place at the keystone and bat sixth.”
