Sky Chief Simone

CLEARWATER, FLA.—On Friday September 6, 2013 the Syracuse Post Standard ran an article that the Syracuse Chiefs Executive VP Tex Simone was resigning from the ball club.

    That may not seem like much to the average Joe but in Syracuse it stirred up a hornets nest of negative thoughts and comments.

    Tex was blamed for just about everything wrong except the sinking of the Titanic, probably only because he wasn’t old enough to have been there.  Though he does have to take at least half the blame for his son John the Chiefs GM.

     Being a stock holder since 1966 then having covered the team for the Associated Press (1993-1996),  WZZZ AM 1300 (1991-1996) along with numerous Canadian news outlets I did get to know a positive thing or two about the inner workings of the club.

    One thing that bothers me is why people are asking about why the stadium wasn’t put in the downtown area.  They dumped all over the north side site where it presently is.

    Well fans all these supposedly knowing fans forgot one thing, cost.  To put the stadium downtown would have added an additional $3.5-$4 million more to the construction cost for the land alone.  Heck where it is now was then and still is county property.

    A bit of a funny note here as where the stadium is now you could have a blue light special about where second base is.  You see the fill for what was originally a swamp then a parking lot came from the burned out K-Kart just up the road in Mattydale.  I have always wondered if any ammunition was buried there so you could get more bang for your buck at the games.

    A second humorous note here was that a car has five wheels, i.e. four tires and a steering wheel.  Well local law enforcement in the early ninety’s use to joke about the fact that if the stadium had been built downtown the only wheel on your car when you left the game would be the steering wheel.  That is of course if you locked the car and that still was no guarantee in that neighborhood.

    Now just one more and you Yankee fans aren’t going to like this one.

    A special note here of the three men at this meeting I will only mention Tex.

    If you-all remember around September of 1977  the Chiefs dumped their affiliation with the Yankees to be the Toronto Blue Jays first Triple-A team.  The Chiefs still had the 1978 season to go with the Yankees under the agreement in place at the time but by bailing out a year early which Tex decided to do, they got hooked up with the Jays and not hung out to dry by the Yankees.

    As a note here the meeting was attended by Tex, a director of the Chiefs and a Jays higher up in the old visiting radio booth at “Big Mac.”

    You see George Steinbrenner had already decided he was moving the Triple-A team to Columbus, Ohio as a new stadium was being built for him there to open the 1979 International League season.  So the Chiefs dumped the Yanks who spend the 1978 season in Portland, if I remember correctly.  Then the Chiefs and Jays marriage lived on for about 30-years during which the Jays did what they could to please the fans.  That was done on the field and in the bank book.

    Now I will close this written offering to you the educated fan and leave you to your own conclusions here and in the Post Standard.

    So until then…

Note; For your further reading Google the AP Award Winning Article written on  April 2, 2006 by Matt Michael titled “Scrimping SkyChiefs.”