The enduring legacy of nostalgia

Tony Dobrowolski Commentary

PITTSFIELD — Baseball season has already begun. But to me, it doesn’t seem as if the season is officially underway until the first summer collegiate baseball game has been played at Wahconah Park.

This year, that milestone occurs May 24 when the Pittsfield Suns open their 2023 Futures League season at home against the Nashua Silver Knights. With that said, we’re going to bypass writing about local business in this space this month to focus on Berkshire nostalgia.

Spectators at Suns games won’t be able to sit in the venerable old park’s wooden grandstand for the second straight year this summer. The city closed the grandstand before last season because it was deemed to be unsafe.

But the good news is there’s finally a plan to do something about it. In March, the Wahconah Park Restoration Committee voted to unanimously recommend the city of Pittsfield hire a Braintree-based company that has designed various stadiums in Florida, Maryland and New York to either restore or renovate the aging 3,100 seat grandstand, which was erected in 1950. The proposal has yet to receive final approval from the Park Commission, but unless something goes terribly wrong at the last minute I believe that it will.

Work on the ball park wouldn’t begin until the end of the 2024 Futures League season, so the temporary seating will have to do for now. But for me, renovating or restoring the site where baseball has been played in Pittsfield since 1892 is the right thing to do.

As my colleague, Howard Herman, wrote last year, Wahconah Park is quirky, but it’s our quirky. It has sun delays. It’s one of the few remaining ballparks in the country that still sports a wooden grandstand. It’s one of the two remaining ballparks in the United States that faces west (the other is in Bakersfield, Calif.). All of these oddities have helped make Wahconah Park part of the summer experience in the Berkshires, like a trip to Tanglewood, or Hancock

Shaker Village, or even the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Mass MoCA is also Berkshires-quirky, by virtue of its existence in the former Sprague Electric Co. factory complex. Placing an art museum in a former industrial complex was a creative way to re-use and continue to showcase a once vital property that had outlived its original purpose. It also combines the old Berkshires with the new. A nod to the past with a look to the future.

The reconstruction or renovation of Wahconah Park should be that way, too. The ballpark should be upgraded to current standards, but in a manner that retains what made it special in the first place. Taking the charm out of what makes Wahconah Park what it is would be a bad idea, in my opinion. Especially in Pittsfield, which still contains the oldest reference to the sport of baseball in North America, a fact that noted baseball historian John Thorn and the late Jim Bouton uncovered way back in 2004. Baseball doesn’t really cut it as a business here. If it did, either of the two independent league baseball teams that gave the city a try after Pittsfield’s New York Penn League franchise left for Troy,

N.Y. after the 2000 season would probably still be playing here. But baseball does work in Pittsfield as a fun, summer diversion, something to relax and enjoy in person after work or on the weekends in June and July during those steamy Berkshire days and nights. A quirky, slightly updated Wahconah Park would provide the perfect atmosphere for that experience.

Professional baseball has a long history in Pittsfield, but summer collegiate baseball is the perfect fit for what Wahconah Park is now. The city’s team deserves a slightly upgraded place to play, and its fans deserve a better, safer grandstand to watch them from. Congressman Richard E. Neal secured a $3 million earmark to fix the grandstand, so funding for this project this time around won’t be a problem.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this project progresses. I hope you are, too.

• If you’re someone who grew up watching baseball in old ballparks, you’re probably familiar with Tupperware. Remember those quirky plastic containers that held all manner of food items, the ones that burped when you sealed them? Well, it might not be long before the only place you can find them is at tag sales or in museums. Tupperware Brands is flirting with going out of business.

The company, founded in 1946, is struggling financially. In a regulatory filing filed in early April, Tupperware Brands stated there was “substantial doubt” about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern, and the the firm has already begun seeking financing to keep going. On April 10, shares of the company fell 50 percent after the firm issued dire warnings about its ability to survive.

In early April, the New York Stock Exchange said Tupperware’s stock could be de-listed because the company hadn’t filed its annual report for 2022. The company responded by saying it planned to file a report within the next 30 days, but couldn’t provide assurance that it would be delivered on time.

According to MarketWatch, the company’s stock fell 98 percent in the 12 month period that ended in April. Net sales in 2022 were $1.3 billion, which is a good sign, but that represented an 18 percent drop from the year before.

Tupperware is struggling with several issues, according to CNN Business. They include a “sharp decline in the number of sellers, a consumer pullback on home products, and a brand that still does not fully connect with younger consumers,” according to Neil Saunders, retail analyst and managing director at GlobalData Retail.

“The company used to be a hotbed of innovation with problem-solving kitchen gadgets,” Saunders said, “but it has really lost its edge.”

Ouch.

Tupperware Brands is trying to reinvent itself by going into Target, one of the country’s leading discount retail chains. It’s also working on growing the business through multiple retail channels because it wants to get its products in front of consumers who aren’t old enough to remember Tupperware parties.

I’ve got an idea. Let the Pittsfield Suns hold a Tupperware Night at Wahconah Park this summer.

That obviously won’t be enough to save the entire company, so let’s hope Tupperware’s larger strategy works. I’d hate to see it go.