Further Adventures in Sporting News
My Long, Dark Night
Caged by Sarge Bright
by Jamie Jobb
All it took was one quick YouTube clip, posted by Detroit baseball fans James and David Stinson who acted on impulse to drive by the corner of Cochrane and Michigan Avenue one last time before demolition of their beloved Tiger Stadium – the Field That Dreamed fabled hall-of-famers Cobb, Kaline, Newhouser, Greenberg. As the Stinson brother’s video scanned that famous jewel-box ballpark facade, I was suddenly jolted by my own high-voltage baseball flashback to the long, dark August 1966 night when I got locked inside a Miami press box.
Pausing the YouTube clip at a point (screenshot above) when it revealed the press elevator shaft, I knew instantly what I was seeing. That same architectural “design” graced our fabled minor league ballpark simply known as Miami Stadium. Of course, this lofty penthouse was restricted access, only those with passes could enter the elevator and cross the gangway into the exclusive roost of the sporting press. Like The Crows Nest high above fabled Forbes Field in Pittsburgh.
In the 20th Century, urban ballparks were bare-bones hastily-constructed blue-collar amusements that bore scant resemblance to today’s bejeweled major and minor league bandboxes which make not only gobs of money but also promote loud architectural pronouncements. My first “big league ballpark” was Birmingham’s historic Rickwood Field where I snuck in to see the Class AA Barons who now play in nifty downtown Regions Field. Itself fashioned after Forbes Field, Rickwood is now preserved as a “working museum” and mecca for baseball tourists.
Old Miami Stadium was where springtime vagabonds like Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Brooks Robinson and Sandy Koufax shared their infield with entertainers like the Eagles, Jimmy Buffett, Fleetwood Mac, James Brown and his “Famous Flames”. High school graduations and other civic events were held there too. I perched in that press box covering Miami Marlins home games, Baltimore Orioles spring training exhibitions and occasional youth league events.
The O’s trained there 31 straight springs – far beyond my time in Miami. The Brooklyn Dodgers preceded them, using the venue in the 1950s before moving to Los Angeles. Several Miami minor league teams – the Sun Sox, the Amigos, the Miami Orioles, the Gold Coast Suns, the Class D and Class AAA Marlins – occupied the old ball-yard during summer months from 1949 to 1990.
Nobody would deny the beloved stadium in the middle of town had a rocky history. In a 2017 Herald commemorative article, Howard Cohen wrote “For thousands of kids who grew up in Miami, going to the old Miami Stadium in the Allapattah neighborhood was a part of coming of age.”
Two Class B Florida International League (FIL) teams – Havana’s invincible Cubans and Miami’s Sun Sox – christened the ballpark on August 31, 1949. The stadium builder/owner was a wealthy Cuban cattle baron who died shortly after opening day, and his 17-year old son inherited the stadium along with the Sun Sox. Those proved to be difficult burdens for the wealthy and impressionable young man with few friends who later heavily invested in the Cuban Revolution, only to then become estranged from Castro when he turned to communism.
Miami Stadium’s gracefully arched cantilevered roof covered the main grandstand, shielding Miami fans from the Sunshine State’s notorious heat and sudden rains while leaving no seat obstructed by supporting columns, like those at Detroit’s double-decked Tiger Stadium. However, the FIL was short-lived, existing only a Felliniesque eight-and-a-half years before folding after the 1952 season, right at the start of the Revolution.
Few baseball fans who comfortably sat in Miami Stadium at that time had any awareness of the stadium's owner permitting Castro's rebel guns and munitions to be stored under the stands. And nobody foresaw the Cuban Missile Crisis or Kennedy Assassination ten years later. When the still-new stadium sat vacant in 1954, some folks thought it should be torn down – after all, it was in the wrong part of town. But two more years passed, the Marlins joined the International League to bring summer ball back after the Dodgers and Orioles had established the viability of spring training in Miami Stadium.
The remarkably futuristic facility -- which was originally designed with eventual major-league expansion in mind -- still had its critics and in 1967, Mayor Robert King High urged the City to sell the place and built a new ballpark in “a more suitable location”. When the Marlins finally evolved into an MLB expansion franchise in 1993, the team chose suburban behemoth Joe Robbie Stadium over their former home field which only sat 9,000 fans. That major-league move triggered Miami Stadium’s eventual demise.
In the mid 1990s, Miami City Hall considered replacing the abandoned ballpark with a Guess? Jeans factory, but that deal fell through when the corporation chose to remain in Los Angeles. So – just like old privately-owned Tiger Stadium – the publicly-owned land Miami Stadium sat on stayed vacant for years. Wild tropical trees and shrubs started growing all over the field, while the stadium's storied baseball history collected dust. The structure met its eventual demolition in 2001when it was razed to make way for affordable housing now paradoxically known as “Miami Stadium Apartments”. And the Marlins now play home games in a strange crate of a building on the site of the old Orange Bowl.
* * *
Elevator and catwalk (top left) leading to Miami Stadium press box
I was working in the press box for The Miami Herald that summer night in 1966. I’d been assigned to cover a local American Legion baseball playoff game, involving a north Florida team versus the local Hialeah squad with their all-star Ted Hendricks, and a crack young future knuckleballer Charlie Hough who’d ride that slow pitch to a fabled big league career with 13 seasons in the National League (Dodgers, Marlins) and 13 in the America (Rangers, White Sox). Mirroring that perfectly balanced stat was his won-lost record in both leagues: 216-216. Hough was a huge hometown hero everybody knew would make The Bigs. Hendricks was already Hialeah’s four-sport legend destined to The Oakland Raiders, the NFL Hall of Fame, and his name embossed on Hialeah High’s athletic facilities.
Sarge Bright, Miami Stadium’s custodian, was an instantly recognizable South Florida character with his big coke-bottle eye-glasses and his constant squint, approaching his world slightly askance. At night games he seemed to float above the lights or slink into the shadows. I recall Sarge was rather short, with rough edges – an odd thick-and-thin man. And he possessed a quite nasty disposition, which could spill out at any moment. The years have dimmed my memory of Sarge Bright, and I can’t recall his face fully. But I can certainly recall his actions.
Local lore claimed Sarge liked to clamber around lost reaches of Miami Stadium’s highly arched overhang, like some local Hunchback of Notre Dame. A few of us wondered if he had a cape, or his own “bat cave” hidden deep inside the stadium. He was so suddenly present, yet so suddenly invisible.
Miami Times sports writer Harry Spear, wrote in 1968 that Bright “straddles on top of the stadium and gets all the (foul) baseballs hit up there. Sarge is 65 years old, not bad for a man his age.” (Although I could find no obituary for him, we can assume Bright is no longer alive – he’d have to be 118 years old!)
So that night, and every night I sat there, I knew I was in Sarge’s perch. I had yet to turn 21 myself, so I was too young to drink and too young to vote. And tonight was late, very late; well past The Herald’s normal 2 a.m. deadline. Those huge Goss printing presses were held up, waiting for my story – most of which was already set in type and waiting for extra innings to end. With that ballgame having state-wide implications, the story needed to appear in the final edition.
Baseball writers can easily write about any game as it happens, writing between innings to describe the game’s progress. Scoring sequences don’t change and stats accumulate in my scorebook, so when the game was over I only had to hammer out the lede paragraphs to be added atop what I’d already written about previous innings.
Then I had to quickly compile the final box score, call the office, and dictate it all to the editor back at the sports desk. At this point I’m the only working writer there. Meanwhile, Sarge Bright lurks behind me as I try to finish my job.
“I need to lock up,” he says.
Buried in my portable typewriter, I kept working.
“Hurry up!”
I ignore him, needing to concentrate on my task at hand. With no socialized media or smartphones at that time, news of the game would greet people primarily in this morning’s paper. It was my job to get that news to them. I finished quickly and got ready to leave.
* * *
Long net from press box to backstop at Miami Stadium where the author’s briefcase flew
A quick glance at the architecture of Miami Stadium shows that I was stuck there in that roost with only one way out – the catwalk to the elevator. And now, it was locked.
I was furious; jailed by a janitor! I went back to the press box – the only place I could go without jumping out of the building – and called my editor, who luckily was still near the phone wrapping up for the night. He got quite a chuckle out of my unfortunate incident, as if it may have happened before to other young reporters who dared visit that precarious location with only one route out.
I was so upset while I talked on the phone that my arms flailed. I had to be at school tomorrow morning and these extra innings had ruined my sleep. As I yelled at my editor back at the paper, my arms continued to spin. Suddenly my hand hit something hard, and my satchel full of school work and notes flew out the open press box window, hit the backstop netting, and slid all the way down to the field below. I score it a “forced error” and “assisted suicide bunt”! Here in the ballpark where Satchel Page pitched.
Eventually, my editor contacted Miami Police who knew where to round up Sarge Bright, himself a City of Miami employee, and got him to free me from my deadlined detention. When we were safely at the elevator doors outside the building, I demanded the cops get Sarge to retrieve my satchel's pages from behind home plate.
Fifty years after that sorry night, I now recall this was the first time I’d ever run directly up against a person with power in a public place who had a well-rooted disdain for the press.
In retrospect, it was clear that Sarge Bright, like many people, held that unhealthy depreciation of the press like a chip on his shoulder. Maybe he just hated The Herald? Maybe he despised a certain sportswriter? Or two? Perhaps he didn’t like the out-of-town press who flocked to His Stadium in spring?
Looking further into this, I begin to feel that my brief run-in with Sarge Bright provided me with a meek understanding of the responsibility the guy must have felt as custodian of all that fragile history. I myself have spent time as a facilities custodian. It’s not an easy responsibility as so many other people from the community have a stake in the place.
Now both Sarge Bright and Miami Stadium are gone, I’m left to ponder if perhaps his disdain of the press is another reason I chose not to pursue sporting news as a career path. Recent political events in America have proved the socialized media public has few clues as to what’s News and what’s Fake. I can chase those mental monkeys around the house all day.
But every time I recall my long, dark night with Sarge half a century ago, I’m left with only one thought. I'm certain there’s a custodial ghost clamoring the upper reaches of Miami Stadium Apartments as these very words are read.
FURTHERMORE
If you've read this far, and are still intrigued by the story of this storied stadium, then you must watch this incredible PBS documentary, “White Elephant: What Is There To Save?” produced in 2007 https://vimeo.com/105767151
https://sabr.org/journal/article/the-long-forgotten-florida-international-league/
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article233583532.html
https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/rough-diamond-6361494
https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00028321/00773/28?search=sarge+bright
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_jewel_box_baseball_parks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickwood_Field
https://youtu.be/eKHnoWuCZIo (45 minutes)
https://youtu.be/TWvmZngbcd8. (12 minutes)
https://youtu.be/qrSgfO-bUNA. (four minutes)
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ReplyDeleteA former high school mate sent the note below from a friend of his who was a police officer who knew the stadium well:
ReplyDelete“One of my best Miami Stadium memories was attending a Marlins game with my partner Walt. We were in the lower stands. A foul ball hit behind us and to the right, struck a horizontal pole and darted back towards us really fast. Walt reached out behind him and caught the ball with one hand. Then he turned around nonchalantly, as if he did that all the time. I remember the grin on his face.
When I was really young, my father who was a Miami Springs sergeant was friends with a lieutenant assigned to the stadium. He had me meet him at a side entrance and got me into a Marlins game for free.
I watched Satchel Paige warm up before a game right in front of me. I remember he had giant feet. His fastball was amazing as he was in his fifties by then. I was at the Orange Bowl when the Marlins played there for a record crowd. Satchel pitched that game and got a hit at bat. I believe the year was 1956.
My dad was so upset when they tore the stadium down. It was like our childhood and the old Miami we loved was gone. The same for the Orange Bowl. I wish he was still here to see “White Elephant”. He had a passion for the place.
Our Police Academy class in 1964 was housed in the press box of the stadium. I loved going there to class and sitting in the stands during lunch. It was another attachment to a place that seemed a part of me.
When I was on light duty in 1969, I would leave the stadium and take a dinner break at the stadium, watch the Marlins and eat a Hygrades hot dog for dinner, Then I’d stay a couple of innings, and go back to work. It was a special place for sure.”