They brought down the curtain on this curious, fortunate and historic 81st AAABA Tournament on a steamy Saturday night at Point Stadium, with Mainline Pharmacy emerging as an historic repeat champion representing Johnstown.
Considering the threatening weather forecasts as the tournament began, and the general difficulty of achieving repeat titles, one would be inclined to say things went much better than could have been expected.
And, after the game was over, the tournament hardware had been handed out, and the various speeches had been made, I stopped to say goodbye to a person who’s been working around this tournament for parts of six decades.
“Did you ever,” I began, “think you’d see Johnstown win this thing back-to-back.”
Replied the guy: “No, but I didn’t expect the tournament to become this weak, either.”
He wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t know. Remember, I covered a lot of these events during my time in sports at what now is the Johnstown Woke Gazette. I am very much aware that the quality of teams and players is nowhere near what it once was.
But, to hear someone so closely aligned with the event make note of this as his first reaction to back-to-back titles was a bit surprising.
Mainline Pharmacy claimed the championship, dispatching New Orleans by a 5-2 score. It was an entertaining, yet stressful game, as walks and a misplay or two in the field kept giving a largely impotent New Orleans lineup chances to mount comebacks as it had in previous games vs. Johnstown Martella’s and later, Maryland State.
But, where those teams had succumbed in the clutch, Mainline’s players prevailed and I cheered their success, no matter that the quality of the event is not what it once was.
This just in, Johnstown writ large is not what it once was. The steel mills and mines that provided relatively good paying jobs to the blue-collar class are memories, sort of like the past Johnstown AAABA tournament teams that, at times, had numerous future major leaguers on the roster. I’m fairly certain no Mainline player is headed to the Majors.
Our population is not what it once was. Our economy is not what it once was. The Johnstown Collegiate League is not what its predecessor Junior League once was.
Society is not what it once was.
Another AAABA veteran was lamenting the attendance at the previous night’s game vs. Buffalo. Along that line, the friend I sat with Saturday night kept scanning the stands and complaining that it was nowhere near a full house.
I have no official figures, but my estimate was there easily were 3,000 or so people in the stands. Yes, if Johnstown had been playing for consecutive titles back in the 1970s, that figure easily would have been doubled, even tripled.
But oldsters such as me tend to forget that was more than 50 years ago and things were very much different.
With Mainline nursing a 5-1 lead, I told this guy I would love to see a few more runs put up, just in case. If it took errors by New Orleans and the like to provide the insurance runs, no problem.
He argued that he wanted to see a well-played game. I shot back that I wanted the home guys to win and I wasn’t worried about style points.
It strikes me that this is the way Johnstown fans should view the AAABA Tournament. It is not what it once was, but it’s better to have this than to have nothing at all to jump-start each August.
Johnstown is competitive these days and that’s a whole lot more interesting than when the tournament play was better, but Johnstown teams could only dream of winning the whole thing.
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