Baseball stalled in first week due to rain
Published 12:00 am Saturday, March 3, 2001
Mother Nature has put a damper, and a dampening on Greenville's fields this week, resulting in rainouts at home.
On Thursday, the Greenville Tigers were to have hosted the Georgiana Panthers, but the game had to be canceled due to the weather's effect on the fields.
Then on Friday, a double-header was scheduled to be played with Lamp-Magnet, but at noon the decision was made to call the game.
Early in the morning on Friday, Gregg Fuller, the assistant director of Greenville Parks and Recreation felt optimistic, but apprehensive at the same time. While he and Jeff Fletcher were spreading clay on the infield of Cavanaugh Field and raking it, he said that the sun would be the determining factor.
"If we can get about three or four good hours of sunlight, the fields will be dry enough to play," Fuller said.
But that was not to be the case, as the sunlight fell behind cloud cover at around 10 a.m., prompting the Parks and Recreation and the Horticulture Department to meet with Tigers Coach Ward Thigpen, shortly after noon.
"We managed to get the ground dry from the surface down about eight inches," Fuller said. "But beneath that, the soil is just as slick as it was to start with-we just didn't get enough sunlight."
Although storms did not develop until later on Friday afternoon, it was just as well that Coach Thigpen opted to postpone the games, because they would have been rained-out before they got well underway, due to lightning in the community.
"It happens that way sometimes," Thigpen said. "We have plenty of games to go though, and I don't think this will hurt us at all."
The Tigers are scheduled to host Southside-Selma next Tuesday, and St. James on Thursday, then Wilcox on Friday.