The Owls (3-3) had lost two straight before beating the Tigers 6-2 in the first game played at Jack M. Cronin Memorial Stadium in Imperial. The next day, Windsor hosted Festus and lost a 2-0 pitching duel between the Owls’ Connor Hartmann and Tiger hurler Charlie Pratt.
The stadium, which has an artificial turf field (even the pitching mound), was approved by the Windsor C-1 School District Board of Education last year with money from a $14.75 million bond issue passed by voters in April 2017. It will be officially dedicated to Cronin when the Owls host Pacific on May 6.
The district spent approximately $1.5 million to convert Cronin’s backyard into baseball heaven.
The builder of the new stadium is ATG Sports of Festus, the same company that installed Windsor’s turf football field and eight-lane track in 2011 and has installed many other turf football fields throughout the county.
For years, Windsor’s baseball and softball teams haven’t had a real place to call home, as they played at the Rock Memorial American Legion field, among others. Now they have a stadium that could be the envy of every other school in the county.
“It’s fantastic. Traditionally, Windsor’s had a good program going back to the late 1980s,” Windsor head coach Jeff Young said. “The last two years we struggled and it’s about time we got something on campus so we can get good crowds and high school kids to watch us play.
“Our administration and school board really threw a lot of support behind it because they wanted to do something special to make Windsor stand out.”
The first thing that stood out to me was the mound. There’s something unnatural about a pitcher not being able to groove a rut into the dirt after several innings of work. Pratt wore large spikes on his cleats. Neither Pratt nor Hartmann said they had trouble with their footing on the plastic hill.
Pratt pitched a complete-game shutout, so he’ll be happy to come back to Windsor any time.
“What a great field to pitch a great game,” he said, smiling.
Hartmann wasn’t as sharp in the early going, but found his stride and could be one of the top pitchers in the Jefferson County Activities Association this spring.
“You can’t dig in like on a dirt mound so you have to make that adjustment as far as how you’re planting, so you don’t get stuck on your backside,” Hartmann said.
Hartmann said he’s going to enjoy playing his final spring at his new baseball home and he’s thrown from an artificial mound on many occasions.
“It was awesome. For a long time, we haven’t had a lot of people in the stands so it was cool to have people show up and then getting a win for them,” he said.
I didn’t know anything about Cronin until I covered the Owls and Tigers last week. I found out he served in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II and died in 1998 at the age of 76. His service gained my respect for him instantly.
I dug a little deeper into the Leader archives by reading a column about Cronin by my predecessor, Warren Hayes. Hayes, a sports legend like many of the people he wrote about, penned that Cronin was Rock Memorial American Legion Post 283’s “longtime general manager and biggest fan.”
Hayes remembered Cronin in his column in the Sept. 17, 1998, Arnold-Imperial Leader by writing, “He always kept a low profile. That’s exactly the way he wanted it. Other people did most of the public yakking about the program. But Cronin, serving as a liaison for the Legion post and its athletes, always saw to it the baseball teams were well provided for.”
John Horn and Ed Sabourin have kept Rock Memorial afloat with their dedication to the program that Cronin was such a big part of. But Post 283 has fallen on hard times the last two years, not winning many games and playing at the outdated field in Imperial. Rumors swirled two years ago that Rock had played its last game as a part of District 13.
Fielding a team of mostly underclassmen last summer, Post 283 was respectable. Many of those players stood in the dugout of the new stadium as members of the Owls.
There’s no doubt Windsor’s new stadium will only help Rock’s recruitment efforts.
I talked with Sabourin while eating lunch in Hillsboro last month. He said he’s still going to manage Rock Memorial this summer.