Hi, I’m down from New York to tell you folks how much I appreciate your southern hospitality. You let me have the exclusive use of Joe Davis Stadium for the whole year. And the part I really like is that I only have to pay you folks $143.00 for every game my team plays in ‘The Joe.’ I can pull in $800-1,200 a night just with the parking concession you gave me. The ticket sales used to be much better, so the team is a financial drain and I’d really like you to build a new stadium so that it would attract more fans and I could make some more money with my little hobby of being a minor league baseball team owner. Of course, if you don’t do that then maybe I’ll have to look around, but I’d really like to stay here, really.

Hi, I’m the city. We have this crazy uncle, Uncle Joe we call him. He was born on the cheap, $559 per seat. He weighed in with pretty big size, and is big boned. But we do not feed him much so he wouldn’t get a big appetite for people. We’ve tried to keep him out of the public’s sight so we’ve let some trees grow big in front of him so no passer-bys on the parkway would know that he was there and accidently go see him. There is a sign announcing his existence, but it no longer has a message so it does not catch the attention of any drive-by friends. We kind of like it that way. He is really an orphan because nobody in his family leadership cares a hoot about him. Maybe if we keep ignoring him he will just crumble back to dust. One of these days a group of folks will come down from Minor League Baseball and declare him a lost cause because he is giving a bad name to his cousins in other cities. At that point we will probably have to call in the hospice folks to ease the pain during his declining days. Perhaps if there was an Uncle Joe Advocacy Group with a champion for him, the pain might be eased and ways found to continue his survival.

Quality can only be defined by the customer!

The City of Huntsville and the Stars’ ownership are locked in a downward economic spiral to see who can reach the bottom first and cry “Uncle.” The customers have not found much quality the last ten years, from 2002 through 2011, so they have voted with their feet. But Uncle Joe does not just belong to Huntsville, he is a part of the Huntsville metropolitan statistical area (MSA), and so the residents of Madison City and Madison County benefit by his presence.

Remember the comedian Henny Youngman’s famous line, “Well, take my wife…….Please.”