Those Stars...

If I were Reggie Bush, I would play with the number "256" drawn underneath my eyes in white paint on a black background. Why? Because I'm from Huntsville, Alabama, and in Huntsville the area code is "256." As a Huntsvillian, I'm of course a major fan of the Huntsville Stars.

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That's right, that's Jose Canseco, OUR hometown hero back in 1985 before he knocked his way into the majors and stole his way into our hearts as the first member of baseball's 40/40 club. Although Jose was only on the team for a short while, his brother Ozzie was a regular in the Stars' lineup for a long time, boosting ticket sales as "the next big thing" even though he never really became one:

I'm pretty sure that Ozzie is actually striking out in that picture. Here's a look at his lifetime stats, for anyone who is interested in more than his impersonation of Jose on an episode of the Surreal Life.

But Huntsville had more than just those two Identical "Bash Brothers." In the 80s, our lineup included men like Walt Weiss, Terry Steinbeck, and the indominible Mark McGwire (look at how much more attractive he was before he got really big and grew facial hair to cover his acne):



As a kid, being a fan of the Stars was always fun because the Stars were a farm team of the Oakland Athletics, one of the best teams around. A lot of hotshot young stars buzzed through our town in those days, all with something to prove on the diamond. It made for a very entertaining minor league experience! And even when the Stars moved on, they still came back every once in a while to enchant us - Jose, I remember, showed up a few times as a first base coach when he was injured in the early 90s. The A's also came through Huntsville once a year for an exhibition game in which they'd play the Stars (always losing, gracefully). I got to go once, and I got to watch a little kid race with Rickey Henderson around the bases (Rickey didn't lose gracefully, though, either because he was told to act mean when the kid beat him or because Rickey is just like that)! That was the year that I got autographs from shifty Tony LaRussa, who was managing the A's at the time, and Goose Gossage, who was ending his career with them.

The last big star I remember playing for Huntsville was Todd van Poppel, aka "the Next Nolan Ryan," who was 11-3 with a 0.97 ERA and 170 strikeouts as a senior at Martin High School in Arlington, Texas. I think I got his autograph on about fifteen different things, including a Stars Hat that had a big white Dr. Pepper logo stamped on the bill. Van Poppel didn't really work out that well, though, and the name "Stars" started to seem like a bit of a joke as the A's drifted away from their once-lofty position on top of the AL. The most excited that I can remember anyone getting about the Stars after the early 90s came as a result of something that didn't really have anything to do with the Stars: Michael Jordan was playing baseball for the Birmingham Barons and they were stopping through town:

Do you remember the baseball scene in Space Jam? Seeing that movie made me very proud to be a Stars fan, because MJ was playing against none other than the Stars themselves!

Unfortunately, the last decade or so hasn't yielded many proud moments... in 1998, the team switched affiliation from the A's to the Brewers, a move that ownership claims was because Milwaukee is a NL team, which means that Stars fans could watch more televised games featuring their former heroes (thanks to the ubiquity of Atlanta Braves broadcast in the North Alabama region). No one really believed that explanation, though. Moving from an A's franchise to a Brewers franchise was a significant blow to our town's baseball self-esteem, and it was unquestionably a demotion for the poor Stars. As the years marched on, the Stars began to draw fewer and fewer fans... Sure, a few genuinely talented kids came through (well, Prince Fielder did), but it was nothing like the glory days - when Canseco and McGwire were on the same Stars team! When I was a child I used to play the "guess the attendance" game every time I went to the stadium, and I remember that the numbers were always around 5 or 6,000. Last September, however, I went to the Southern League North Division Championship game (the one before the "Southern League World Series"), and was surrounded by no more than 300 people. The Stars won the game, but the victory seemed hollow.

This season, the Stars decided that the way to solve their attendance woes was to radically redesign their logo, which had remained essentially the same since my childhood. Unfortunately, I've just found out that the new logo looks like this:


Major bummer, dudes.

At least they have a sense of humor, though.