OSWALD BROWN WRITES
WASHINGTON, D.C., May 27, 2019 — Monte A. Pratt posted a “Bahamian Sporting Classic Photo” that brought back some wonderful memories of those years when baseball could legitimately be described as the most popular sport in The Bahamas.
Historically, cricket was considered the Number One sport in the country 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 fact, virtually all of the players in the classic photo accompanying this article developed and honed their skills during my first term as President of the BBA from 1964 to 1968. Moreover, according to the information provided with this photo, it was taken 1969, when I would have still been President of the BBA if I had not resigned to take advantage of a life-changing opportunity to improve my journalistic skills.
During my years as a young journalist, I was always able to effectively juggle my time between my love for sports and my involvement in politics 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.
However, If my memory serves me rightly, in 1964 I was simultaneously President of the BBA and the Bahamas Amateur Basketball Association (BABA), which Fred (Papa) Smith – one of the baseball players in that classic sports photo — and Sterling Quant, the current Bahamas Ambassador to China, can verify because they were both on an all-star basketball team that I took to Miami to play a series of basketball games with high school teams in the Miami area.
But 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 basketball team and high school teams in Miami. It has always been a strongly held belief of mine 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 were considered better than them.
It was this philosophy that made it mandatory for me to continue a program put in place by the previous BBA administration, which included the late Lester Mortimer and the late Reno Brown, to send a Bahamas team to compete annually in the National Baseball Congress (NBC) tournament in Wichita, Kansas, which was considered to be a major “stepping stone” towards making it to the Major League.
I took my first BBA team to Wichita in 1965 and several of the players in the classic photo accompanying this article were members of that team—again, depending on the accuracy of my memory. I am sure that Fred “Papa” Smith was the team’s third baseman, and I was equally as certain that the late Edmond Moxey was a member of the team, until I did an obligatory Internet search and uncovered information that Moxey played Class A professional baseball at Modesto in California in 1963. He had a great Minor League career, but never made it to the Major League, and his professional career ended after playing the 1969 season in the Mexican League, which is classified as Triple A.
It is nonetheless true, however, that every player in that classic photo had sufficient talent to make it to the Major League, but considering the massive “pool” of extremely talented players from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and South American countries during their era in the pipeline at various levels of professional baseball, it is surprising that five of them followed Andre into the Major League.
Tony Curry became the second Bahamian to make it to the Majors when he was “called up” by the Philadelphia Phillies in 1960. Other Bahamians who followed in subsequent years included Ed Armbrister (Cincinnati Reds 1973), Wenty Ford (Atlanta Braves), Wilfred Culmer (Cleveland Indians 1983) and Antoan Richardson (Atlanta Braves 2011).
What many Bahamian sports aficionados may not remember is that the late Vince Ferguson — who is better known in The Bahamas as an educator and in sporting circles as long-time president of the Bahamas Amateur Basketball Association — was also an outstanding baseball player. Vince played professionally for seven years and was one step away from making it to the Major League when he decided to abandon his quest to become a Major Leaguer, after playing the 1967 season with the Richmond Braves, which at the time was a Triple-A International League affiliate of the Atlanta Braves.
When I returned from London in November of 1969, the following year I was again elected President of the BBA. Along with team of 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.
A top priority 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 our 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 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, some or whom will almost certainly make to the Majors – one or two quite possibly before the current season ends.
There is no question that baseball in The Bahamas has been restored to good health, and with the new Andre Rodgers National Stadium nearing completion, the future surely looks exceedingly bright for the continued growth and development in The Bahamas of my most favourite sport.
