Lexington Blowfish baseball team gets the call: Play ball, with fans
The Lexington County Blowfish baseball team will open its doors to fans Wednesday, thanks to support from the Lexington County Council.
The council voted unanimously Tuesday to categorize the Blowfish as an amateur youth sports activity and to support the team playing in front of spectators.
The Blowfish, a collegiate summer baseball team belonging to the Coastal Plain League, had planned to allow a limited capacity of spectators when the league’s season opened on July 1. However, the team was forced to scrap those plans after Gov. Henry McMaster stated two hours before first pitch that spectator sports remained banned during the coronavirus pandemic. The Blowfish have played four additional home games, without fans, since then.
On Tuesday, Blowfish co-owners Bill and Vicki Shanahan presented a case for why the team should be allowed to accept spectators, with the Shanahans arguing that McMaster mislabeled the Blowfish as a spectator sport instead of an amateur youth sports team.
“Unfortunately we have been put in dire straits,” Bill Shanahan told the council. “The future of the Blowfish are at risk and might not exist anymore. Opening night, July 1, we were taken by surprise two hours before opening our doors when word came out that we were mislabeled.
“When the governor was asked a question at his press conference, he did not have the facts about the Blowfish. We are an amateur youth baseball club playing at a Lexington County Recreation and Aging Commission-owned facility.”
In Tuesday’s resolution, the Lexington County Council cited McMaster’s Executive Order No. 2020-37 and AccelerateSC guidelines that went into effect June 15, stating, “Youth sports organizers and recreation departments may begin holding games or similar competitions, with or without spectators. The discretion to re-open athletic fields and allow youth sports activities lies solely with the recreation department or local government having jurisdiction of the field and its facilities.”
Bill Shanahan said the team plans to open the doors of Lexington County Baseball Stadium to fans Wednesday, when it hosts the Lake Murray Purple Martins at 7:05 p.m. As was planned on opening night, the team will only allow a maximum of 800 fans into a facility that has a capacity of 2,400. Every Blowfish employee will be wearing a facemask, and there are multiple hand-sanitizing stations, sneeze guards, and signage about mask-wearing and social distancing placed throughout the stadium.
“We’re very grateful and we’re humbled that we have the support of the community and that we’re doing what we believe is right,” Bill Shanahan said. “We just felt like it wasn’t a level playing field. It wasn’t apples and apples.
“The Lexington County Council, they voted unanimously on who we are. We are a youth amateur sports team playing at a Lexington County Recreation-owned facility. And according to the governor’s executive order … that’s where we fit. So they are totally supportive of who we are, and we’re going to open the doors.”
The Blowfish’s Coastal Plain League opponents for 2020 — the Savannah Bananas and the Macon Bacon — have both hosted games in their Georgia stadiums with fans in the stands. The Blowfish are working with an abbreviated 40-game schedule because of the pandemic.
In addition to playing the Savannah and Macon clubs, the Blowfish have also scheduled games against the Bomb Island Bombers and the Lake Murray Purple Martins, teams run by former Blowfish head coach Jonathan Johnson. Now the head coach for the Columbia International University baseball team, Johnson pulled players from his summer collegiate baseball developmental camp to fill both rosters. The CPL regular season runs through Aug. 15.
This story was originally published July 14, 2020 at 6:35 PM.
