Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Sports Catfish Hunter: The Mayor Was Just Joking About MLB's Rays Coming to Nashville [Updated]
Posted by Steve Haruch on Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 9:51 AM
Yeah, so Mayor Dean was just kicking up a little dirt with his bring-the-Rays-to-Nashville-and-rename-them-the-Catfish comment on 102.5-FM. But ESPN's Buster Olney — Vandy grad and former Sounds beat reporter — still thinks we're "a sleeper for an MLB team." (He said as much to me when I interviewed him about baseball's winter meetings back in 2007.)
The fact that the Preds seem to have finally caught on is certainly a positive indicator, but just because the wind is blowing out doesn't mean you're going yard. It seems to me that most serious baseball fans in Nashville have either grown up following the Braves, inexplicably hitched their wagons to the cavalcade of futility that is the Cubs or brought their team loyalties with them from back home (like me).
So even though (as Olney notes in a later tweet) Nashville "occupies an interesting part of the Southern real estate — a map gap neatly in between Reds, Cards, Braves," I just don't see Nashville as a Major League city. I'd gladly be wrong, though.
UPDATE: J.R. Lind sent along this helpful breakdown of the whole kerfuffle.
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