Southern Illinois is Mining No More
One of the things that fans of baseball no matter the level or affiliation can agree on is that it is gut-wrenching when your team leaves you. Whether this is from a team going bankrupt, relocating somewhere else, being eliminated by a higher power, or the league itself disbanding the reason does not matter. What matters is that for the fans who have formed a relationship with that team it has now lost that fandom and more than likely has nowhere in the area to turn to for a replacement, as if fandom can even be replaced that easily.
Following the conclusion of the 2021 Frontier League season baseball fans in Marion, Illinois find themselves in this exact situation. Last week the owners of the Southern Illinois Miners, Jayne and Josh Simmons, announced via a press release shared on the Miners’ various social media outlets that they were retiring from baseball and from the sounds of it taking the team with them. I say from the sounds of it because the press release was quite vague and there are questions left unanswered about the Simmons’ sudden departure from professional baseball.
First and foremost is the obvious question of, why? The Miners were a successful franchise, posting winning seasons in 13 of their 14 seasons in operation. They won a Frontier League title in 2012 and were contenders year in and year out. When it comes to winning baseball there isn’t a better model in all of unaffiliated, or independent, baseball than the Miners. There’s little doubt that they would have continued winning because the Simmons’ demonstrated on a regular basis that they wanted a winning product on their ballfield.
Said ballfield is another reason to ask why the Miners folded now. Rent One Park was built at the same time as the founding of the team and is regarded by all who have visited as one of the best ballparks in the United States unaffiliated baseball scene. It’s a multi-use stadium that was a source of revenue for the Simmons’ and the city of Marion. Rent One Park is neither dilapidated nor rundown as the Simmons’ kept it in good shape and unlike some other owners made the necessary updates that the stadium needed to keep its place as a desirable location to both play and watch baseball.
The Minders didn’t have a fan problem either. While it is true that attendance had been in a downward trend for some years they still brought more than enough fans to the ballpark. This would be less of a question had the team maintained its initial 200,000+ attendance average or even if it had maintained its 2011-2017 150,000+ average. The last few years saw the numbers drop to around the 100,000+ mark and while not good is not enough of a loss to justify folding the team.
The big question coming out of the Simmons’ announcement is what will happen to Rent One Park now? The press release laid bare that the Miners are no more nor would there be any future professional baseball played at the Miners’ former field. The sudden nature of the announcement coupled with the vague ways in which the sale of the team to another ownership body were addressed has led to plenty of speculation. First and foremost is that the Simmons’ saw the declining attendance and decided the only way to move forward was to transition from a professional ballclub to a college summer league. Perhaps that is what is going on, but hopefully, it isn’t because that would be a very rotten move by the Simmons’.
Maybe at the end of the day, the Simmons’ really did just want to retire and couldn’t find a buyer for the Miners. That still leaves a sour taste in the mouths of Miners fans but it is preferable to a scenario where the Simmons’ simply decided to be cheap. One thing is for certain, the community of Marion is reeling. They have lost their baseball team, their fandom, and one of the larger sources of revenue, jobs, and entertainment in the city. There’s never a good outcome when a successful baseball franchise vacates its home town and the residents of Marion likely have a long road ahead of them as they try to recover from the loss.
