By OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON, D.C., August 6, 2024 – Mrs. Beth Burrows, wife of Freedom Farm Baseball League Founder and President Greg Burrows in Nassau, Bahamas, shared a collection of photos on Facebook that I absolutely had to share with readers of my Washington, D.C. – based online publication, BAHAMAS CHRONICLE, which has a huge following among the Bahamian diaspora across the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom as well as in The Bahamas and the wider Caribbean.
The photos were taken at the Washington Nationals Stadium on Sunday, August 4, during a visit to Nationals Park by Mr. Burrows — along with several Freedom Farm coaches and a number of young Freedom Farm baseball players – for the game between the Nationals and Milwaukee.
The group stopped in D.C. en route to the Cal Ripken 9- & 11-year-old Baseball World Series at the City of Florence Parks & Recreation Sportsplex in Florence, Alabama, from Sunday, August 4, to Sunday, August 11. Teams from around the globe are competing for what is describes as “the ultimate title in baseball.”
While in D.C., the group paid a courtesy call on His Excellency Wendall K. Jones, Bahamas Ambassador to the United States, on Friday, August 2.
Some of the photos taken at Nationals Stadium are featured with this article.
I have never met Greg Burrows, but I can’t sing his praises too highly for the remarkable job he is doing in developing and nurturing young baseball players in The Bahamas. My unbridled appreciation for the job he is doing is rooted in the fact that I was also very active in the administration of baseball in The Bahamas for many years when it could have legitimately been described as arguably the most popular sport in The Bahamas.
Historically, cricket was considered the Number One sport in The Bahamas because of our British colonial heritage, but after Andre Rodgers became the first Bahamian to sign a professional baseball contract in 1954 and made it to the Major League three years later in 1957, “baseball fever” spread through the country like an infectious disease.
I had a front-row seat in the arena during baseball’s early developmental years, first as a sports reporter at The Nassau Daily Tribune and later as President of the Bahamas Baseball Association (BBA), the governing body of the sport in the country. In 1964 I was simultaneously President of the BBA and the Bahamas Amateur Basketball Association (BABA), and I often took an all-star basketball team to Miami to play games against high school teams in the Miami area.
However, baseball was and still is my favourite sport, so when I was faced with having to make a decision to give up the presidency of either the BBA or the BABA, it was not that difficult a decision to make, even though I had well-established plans in place to continue annual trips to Miami for games between a Bahamas all-star team and high school teams in Miami. It has always been my strongly held belief that one of the best ways to improve the level of play of participants in any sport is for them to play against teams that are considered better than them.
I took my first BBA team to Wichita in 1965. However, as a die-hard supporter of the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP), following the PLP’s historic victory at the polls on January 10, 1967, which paved the way for the first black-majority government in The Bahamas, on one of his visits to London, Lynen O. Pindling, the then Premier of The Bahamas, in 1968 arranged for me to go to England for one year’s “advanced training” in journalism at the London Evening Standard as a sort of “reward” for my contributions to the struggle for majority rule.
When I returned from London in November of 1969, the following year I was again elected President of the BBA. Along with a team of very effective BBA officers and the late Allan Jackson, who was a great Baseball Commissioner for many years, baseball had what I often describe as some of its best years since it became a popular sport in The Bahamas.
One of my top priorities was to resume participation in the NBC tournament in Wichita, and we had the good fortune of having Andre Rodgers as manager of the team we took to Wichita in 1971.
During my first tenure as President in the 1960s, we frequently took teams to play against a team at Bimini, which historically produced some of the best baseball players in The Bahamas. When I became president again after I returned from London, one year we experimented with including teams from Bimini and Grand Bahama in the BBA’s regular season schedule.
It was an extremely expensive experiment that included chartering a DC-3 aircraft out of Miami on weekends when games were simultaneously played in New Providence, Bimini and Freeport. The chartered plane was kept quite busy transporting teams to and from the destinations where games were played.
Back in those days, however, baseball fans on Bimini were very supportive of their teams and whenever the Bimini Marlins travelled to Nassau to play, the stadium at the Queen Elizabeth Sports Center generally was filled to capacity and gate receipts amounted to thousands of dollars, often enough to cover the costs of the weekend charter fights. What’s more, baseball fans in Bimini also contributed generously to the housing costs of teams from Nassau and the organizers of the games in Bimini also contributed part of their gate receipts to the BBA.
This arrangement worked extremely well for two seasons, and I can’t really recall why it ceased, but my presidency ended in 1973 due to personal reasons that eventually resulted in me relocating to the United States in late 1974.
Baseball continued to have relatively good years both administratively and on the field under subsequent Presidents Tony Curry and George Mackey, but its popularity and level of play declined gradually under the presidency of the late James Woods, who became embroiled in an acrimonious dispute with the founders of the Bahamas Baseball Federation (BBF) over which of the two organizations was the governing body for baseball in The Bahamas.
It was because the BBA had ceased to function as an effective organization that Greg Burrows and other devoted baseball fans founded the BBF, with Burrows serving as President. For a number of years, the two organizations were at loggerheads over which group could officially send teams to represent The Bahamas at international competitions.
Meanwhile, Burrows also founded the Freedom Farm Baseball League and focused his attention on the development of young baseball players by teaching the sport of baseball at the Freedom Farm Baseball Fields in Yamacraw Beach Estates.
Today, thanks mainly to Burrows, The Bahamas has a talented contingent of young baseball players in the pipeline of professional baseball, some of whom will almost certainly make us as proud as Jazz Chisholm Jr. is currently doing playing for the New York Yankees.
There is no question that baseball in The Bahamas has been restored to good health, and with the new Andre Rodgers National Stadium fully operational, now is as good a time as ever for Prime Minister Philip E. Davis, who is a die-hard baseball fan, and Minister of Youth, Sports and Culture Mario K. Bowleg to give serious consideration to actively conducting a campaign to encourage a Major League team to relocate its Spring Training camp to The Bahamas.
