This is an historic day in Nashville sports history. It’s also a day that brings back some special memories to many people, including me. In a summer of baseball recollections, these may be the most significant in my mind.
The Nashville Sounds will play their final home regular season game at Herschel Greet Stadium tonight. Next year they are to move into what is expected to be a beautiful new ball park near downtown Music City in the area where the Nashville Vols played for decades at Sulphur Dell.
When the Sounds opened as a Class AA team in 1978 at Fort Negley Park, they rocked minor league baseball by drawing 380,000 fans, more than double any other Southern League team. They’ve played about 2,500 games in the park just off Eighth Avenue with over 13 million fans in attendance.
The first principal owner was former successful Vanderbilt baseball coach Larry Schmittou, a Nashville native. He had assembled several music celebrity part-owners, including entertainers Larry Gatlin, Jerry Reed, Conway Twitty and Richard Sterban (the bass of the Oak Ridge Boys). The guy who made the Sounds a success, though, was Farrell Owens, a former Lipscomb University baseball player who was general manager.
Schmittou was a big picture guy. Farrell is a people person. Ferrell, who was one of my best friends as a college student, introduced me to Larry several times. Yet Schmittou never would remember having met me. Meanwhile there were hundreds—maybe thousands—of people in the stands every night who were on a first-name basis with Farrell, who walked through the crowd greeting and exchanging pleasantries.
Because of my press pass and my friendship with Farrell, I pretty well had unlimited access to the inner workings of Greer Stadium as well as the playing field. So did our family. While thousands of kids (and their parents) were eagerly waiting for the appearance of the San Diego Chicken, Ted Giannoulas was alternately holding our son Clay and donning the Famous Chicken’s costume down in the recesses of Greer’s dugout area.
Elaine’s parents, Bob and the late Virginia Hooper, lived in Nashville. We visited them in Green Hills on the average two weekends per month. During the summer, I would take off for Greer Stadium, watching a few innings before heading back to the house. Sometimes the kids went with me. Sometimes we all went. It was a great place to spend a summer evening.
One thing that always pleased me was I never once felt in danger at the Greer Stadium parking lot or the field. A few years earlier, I had left two men fighting on the hood of my rental car outside Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, arguing over who should keep the money I had paid to park in a place neither one of them had the rights to. Nothing like that ever happened at Greer Stadium.
The early Sounds teams were talented. The team everyone there in the early days remembers was a Manager Stump Merrill’s Yankees’ AA squad that included “Donnie Baseball” (long-time Yankee captain Don Mattingly, now the manager of the Dodgers); Willie McGee, who played 19 seasons in the majors, 13 of them with the Cardinals; Buck Showalter, one of major league baseball’s best managers, currently heading the Baltimore Orioles; and home run hitting Steve “Bye Bye” Balboni, who was a force while playing for the Kansas City Royals.
I enjoyed the Yankee years best, especially when the major league pinstripes would come to town. In one visit I recall, The Boss (New York owner George Steinbrenner) and Yankee catching/managing great Yogi Berra, were in evidence. The Toronto Blue Jays made a stop one cool April day. Cito Gaston, who would later manage the team to a World title, was there, as was slugger Cecil Fielder. Later Fielder’s son Prince was a Sound before becoming a major league stalwart.
Among the Sounds who had long solid major league careers were Otis Nixon, who was an integral part of some of the Braves’ championship teams, Pat Tabler (12 years in the big leagues), Stan Javier and UK product Greg Norton (up 12 years each years) and Ray Durham (14 seasons).
One of the guys who made the early years so much fun was Chuck Morgan, the public address announcer who was already well known as a radio deejay and for being an announcer at the Grand Ole Opry. He put life and humor into the Greer Stadium atmosphere. When Schmittou left Nashville to run the Texas Rangers in 1982, he took Chuck with him. The Rangers and Schmittou parted ways, but Chuck is still there as executive vice president of baseball entertainment, according to The Tennessean’s Mack Burke.
Bob Jamison was the radio play-by-play guy for the Sounds in the early days. He was major league quality, but I never could get the games on radio until recently when 102.5 The Game started broadcasting them.
One fan who was almost always there was, believe it or not, named Jim Turner. And it wasn’t this Jim Turner. He was Jim “The Milkman” Turner, a Nashvillian who had pitched for the Boston Bees, Yankees and Reds in the thirties and forties. He was to the Ruth and DiMaggio Yankees what Whitey Ford was to the Mantle-Maris-Berra-Kubek Yankees of the fifties and sixties. He died in 1996 at age 95.
The Milkman had a seat behind home plate with his name engraved on it. When I helped chaperone Clay’s eighth grade class at Adairville Middle School on a trip to Nashville that included a game at Greer, his classmates were impressed that I had a reserved seat with my name on it. I’m not sure if I told them differently, but Clay is so honest he probably did.
The player for the opposing team who may have drawn the most attention from Nashville fans was a part-time baseball player. Basketball great Michael Jordan played right field at Greer Stadium while he was on a hiatus from the NBA’s Chicago Bulls. He was a member of the Class AA Birmingham Barons of the Southern League. The Sounds were a AAA team, but for two seasons there was a second team playing at Greer Stadium, known as the Nashville Express. So our family would sit in right field those days and got to enjoy Michael’s magnetic smile.
In the summer of 2000, Clay pitched for the Nashville Pride baseball team, upon the recommendation of Farrell Owens. His home games were at Rose Park on a hill overlooking Greer Stadium. Sometimes after his game, our younger son Trey and I would head down to Greer to catch a few innings. I haven’t been back much since. By then, he was big enough to get press passes, too.
The Sounds started out as a farm club of the Cincinnati Reds and returned to the Reds organization a few years later. So we got to see some of the best prospects the team had on the way to their last World Series championship. A few were position players like Chris Sabo and Paul O’Neal, but most were pitchers, including Tom Browning, Chris Hammond, Jack Armstrong and Bronson Arroyo.
Over the years, the Sounds have been part of the Detroit Tigers, Pittsburgh Pirates, Chicago White Sox and currently Milwaukee Brewers organizations. The Yankees and the Reds days were my happiest at Greer.
Greer Stadium cost $1.1 million to build. The new First Tennessee Park is expected to come in at $65 million next year. I know Greer was worth the money. I hope this one will be as valuable to the community.
Tonight’s game has been billed as the Last Cheer at Greer. I won’t be there, but I’ll tip my (baseball) cap to that great old park and what it has meant to me and my family.