What do a Gay Street fire and the decline of a profound baseball tradition have in common? Maybe nothing.

by Jack Neely

When he described his concept of synchronicity, Carl Jung never insisted that coincidences make any sense. Maybe this isn't really even a proper coincidence, but I couldn't help making a connection Friday when I heard about the Knoxville Smokies' infidelities in Lexington and a news story about a fire on Gay Street.

That fire happened late at night in one of the oldest buildings downtown, a three-story building between Church and Cumberland. No one knows how old it is; historians are pretty sure it was there before the Civil War. The fire blackened the stairway, broke some windows, damaged the vacant upper floors; workers are already repairing it.

Three storefronts all together, this melancholy building looks every bit of 150 years old. Its red brick roof line sags. Gothic scrollwork adorns some of the windows in the middle section. It's not a building of any great architectural distinction. It was rarely a glamorous place over the years: a laundry, a lodge hall, a plumber's shop, a cigar store, a barbers' supply store, the modest newsrooms of the Knoxville Independent. Whether anything truly historic ever happened in that building, I don't know. But I took a long look at it several months ago when I was trying to nail down Knoxville's role in the early history of Southern baseball.

Samuel B. Dow and 60 prospective players met in 1865 for an organizational meeting that introduced baseball to Knoxville and, according to one contemporary source, the entire southeast. The meeting took place in a pool hall called Star Billiards. Addresses in those days were vague; City directories reveal only that Star Billiards was on the east side of Gay Street, between Church and Cumberland. It's possible that southeastern baseball was born in this building.

For several decades after 1865, baseball was Knoxville's game, long before football was. After UT football's arrival in the 1890s, pro baseball in Knoxville long remained the more popular spectator sport.

Last week a fire broke out in that old building on Gay Street, just as news was breaking that professional baseball might be leaving the Knoxville area.

The Smokies management has insisted repeatedly that they'll have to leave Bill Meyer Stadium due to "deteriorating conditions, lack of parking, and distance from major thoroughfares." But it's interesting to compare Bill Meyer Stadium, in each of these respects, to the home of the triumphant sport, Neyland Stadium.

Bill Meyer Stadium's interstate access could be improved, but it's already closer to I-40 exits than Neyland Stadium is. Bill Meyer could use a nice parking garage, but parking there is now, at worst, much less of a problem than it is at Neyland Stadium—it's always free, for one thing, and you never, ever have to park half a mile away to see a baseball game, or wait an hour in a traffic jam, as I did on campus last Saturday.

As far as the stadium's condition, I don't know what the locker rooms or the offices look like, but having seen games at both Bill Meyer and Neyland Stadiums in the last two months, I can say that, purely as a place to watch a ball game, Bill Meyer Stadium is a hell of a lot nicer than Neyland Stadium. Not only are the seats much roomier than at Neyland, where my comfort during the game is entirely determined by the relative wideness of the stranger sitting next to me—but at Bill Meyer, the seats actually have backs and armrests. These built-in stadium seats are so comfortable they're illegal at Neyland Stadium.

Bill Meyer has also been described as antiquated. I'll grant there's a lot about "minor-league standards" that I don't understand. I've heard the place has some electrical shortcomings that have prevented televising some events there. I'm sure Fenway Park (1912) once had similar deficiencies.

But it's tough to make the "antiquated" complaint stick for a building built in 1953. Several other ballparks still well used by thriving minor-league teams around the region are much older than Bill Meyer Stadium is. Greensboro's eccentric War Memorial Stadium dates to 1926. Little Rock's Winder Field went up in 1932. Asheville's McCormick Field was built in 1924, undergoing a thorough renovation/reconstruction in 1992. Chattanooga's Joe Engel Stadium was built in 1930; a $2 million renovation in 1990 preserved the city's right to advertise it as "HISTORIC ENGEL STADIUM." Never a pretty place, even in 1953, Bill Meyer could stand a major facelift, maybe along the lines of Asheville's or Chattanooga's.

I'm a baseball fan. As an event to enjoy with my squirrelly kids, or with old friends who have interesting things on their minds, a baseball game is far more relaxing than the single-minded crush of a football game.

It's tough to say this, but I suspect the Smokies' biggest problem is that Knoxville has a problem with baseball itself, and maybe also with the word Knoxvillea. We've forgotten the rules of one, and we're deeply suspicious of the other. If the Tennessee Vols were to play football at Bill Meyer Stadium, I suspect the only big complaint would be that the place needs about 15 times as many seats.

Maybe it's not too late to conjure the spirit of Samuel B. Dow and those 60 shadowy veterans who met in a Gay Street pool hall to bring baseball to Knoxville 132 years ago. Maybe it was Captain Dow in that scorched stairway last week, trying to make his way back.