Mississippi Today
Magnolia State’s high school baseball has come long, long way
PEARL — So much about the Mississippi sports landscape has changed in my more than half century of chronicling all things athletic in the Magnolia State. Little, if any, has changed more – or for the better – than high school baseball.
That vast improvement has been on regal display for the past five days in the MHSAA State Championships at Trustmark Park, where the baseball was crisply played and often by superbly trained athletes, many of whom you will be watching and reading about for years.
There are several reasons why Mississippi’s college baseball teams are so successful year after year. Chief among them: The talent pool supplied by Mississippi high schools keeps producing top shelf talent.
Think about it: Mississippi State and Ole Miss have won national championships in the past three years. Southern Miss will play in its eighth straight NCAA Regional next week and leads the nation in both consecutive 30-win and 40-win seasons. Delta State is a perennial Division II national power. William Carey is currently playing in the NAIA World Series. Four – count them, four – Mississippi junior colleges rank in the nation’s top 20.
Baseball talent abounds in Mississippi, where the coaching, the facilities and the community support have all improved dramatically. Gone are the days when assistant football coaches who didn’t even understand the infield fly rule were forced to coach baseball and were more than happy to play only a dozen or so games a season.
Sumrall’s 44-year-old coach Andy Davis, whose Bobcats defeated Ripley 2-0 Saturday morning for the Bobcats seventh state championship over the past 16 years, has witnessed first-hand the sea change in Mississippi high school baseball. “It’s unreal how much better it’s gotten,” Davis said. “I’m talking about the skill level, the technology, the coaching, the support, the facilities, the emphasis on baseball.”
Davis’ baseball life has come full circle. Twenty-seven years ago, Andy Davis pitched Taylorsville to a state championship victory over Nettleton. This week, his 15-year-old, ninth grade son, Drew, helped pitch and hit Sumrall to a championship in a thoroughly entertaining and ultra competitive best-of-three series with Ripley.
Get this: Ripley’s Ty Long struck out 27 batters, allowed four hits and zero runs in 13 innings of a three-game state championship series – and he lost. Said Andy Davis, “I’ve been coaching baseball for 24 years and he’s the best pitcher any of my teams has ever faced.”
But this state tournament has been a showcase of remarkable talent. No telling how many games and championships Drew Davis will win before his high school career ends in May of 2027. He was Sumrall’s best pitcher as an eighth-grader, which is saying something when you realize the Bobcats’ No. 2 starter Leo Odom, a junior, already has committed to play at Ole Miss. Drew Davis, 13-0 for Sumrall as an eighth-grader, played and pitched for Team USA (under-15) in international competition last season.
Sumrall’s No. 3 pitcher Landon Hawkins, a junior who is also Sumrall’s football quarterback, pitched a four-hit shutout Saturday. “Landon’s our leader and he has played everything but catcher for us,” Andy Davis said. “I’d go to battle every day with him. He was a legend out there today.”
Future college and junior college stars were all over the Trustmark Park diamond throughout the week. Brandon lefty Walker Hooks, an Ole Miss signee, helped pitch the Bulldogs to the Class 7A championship, besting Hernando, which was led by Mississippi State signee Topher Jones and another Ole Miss signee, Thomas Mitchell. Junior center fielder Jaumaurion Jones, a Southern Miss commitment, scored the only run in Brandon’s 1-0 championship victory. St. Andrews won the Class 2A title, despite expert pitching from Mississippi State commitment Landon Harmon of East Union. There were so many more stars shining brightly this week, but that gives you an idea.
None shined more brightly than Ripley’s pitcher-shortstop Long, who has signed to play his college ball at Southern Miss. Ripley coach Joel Gafford called Long “the kind of player you are lucky if you get to coach one like him once in your career.”
Andy Davis, the Sumrall coach, embraced Long post-game and later told about their brief conversation. “I told him he’s a stud and that I can’t wait to watch him when he’s at USM. If they cloned him nine times, it’d be one heck of a baseball team because he pitches, he competes, he defends and he’s a tough out. You just have to tip your cap to that kid.”
And you can tip it to Mississippi high school baseball while you’re at it.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
A Mississippi town moves a Confederate monument that became a shrouded eyesore
GRENADA (AP) — A Mississippi town has taken down a Confederate monument that stood on the courthouse square since 1910 — a figure that was tightly wrapped in tarps the past four years, symbolizing the community’s enduring division over how to commemorate the past.
Grenada’s first Black mayor in two decades seems determined to follow through on the city’s plans to relocate the monument to other public land. A concrete slab has already been poured behind a fire station about 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers) from the square.
But a new fight might be developing. A Republican lawmaker from another part of Mississippi wrote to Grenada officials saying she believes the city is violating a state law that restricts the relocation of war memorials or monuments.
The Grenada City Council voted to move the monument in 2020, weeks after police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis. The vote seemed timely: Mississippi legislators had just retired the last state flag in the U.S. that prominently featured the Confederate battle emblem.
The tarps went up soon after the vote, shrouding the Confederate soldier and the pedestal he stood on. But even as people complained about the eyesore, the move was delayed by tight budgets, state bureaucracy or political foot-dragging. Explanations vary, depending on who’s asked.
A new mayor and city council took office in May, prepared to take action. On Sept. 11, with little advance notice, police blocked traffic and a work crew disassembled and removed the 20-foot (6.1-meter) stone structure.
“I’m glad to see it move to a different location,” said Robin Whitfield, an artist with a studio just off Grenada’s historic square. “This represents that something has changed.”
Still, Whitfield, who is white, said she wishes Grenada leaders had invited the community to engage in dialogue about the symbol, to bridge the gap between those who think moving it is erasing history and those who see it as a daily reminder of white supremacy. She was among the few people watching as a crane lifted parts of the monument onto a flatbed truck.
“No one ever talked about it, other than yelling on Facebook,” Whitfield said.
Mayor Charles Latham said the monument has been “quite a divisive figure” in the town of 12,300, where about 57% of residents are Black and 40% are white.
“I understand people had family and stuff to fight and die in that war, and they should be proud of their family,” Latham said. “But you’ve got to understand that there were those who were oppressed by this, by the Confederate flag on there. There’s been a lot of hate and violence perpetrated against people of color, under the color of that flag.”
The city received permission from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to move the Confederate monument, as required. But Rep. Stacey Hobgood-Wilkes of Picayune said the fire station site is inappropriate.
“We are prepared to pursue such avenues that may be necessary to ensure that the statue is relocated to a more suitable and appropriate location,” she wrote, suggesting a Confederate cemetery closer to the courthouse square as an alternative. She said the Ladies Cemetery Association is willing to deed a parcel to the city to make it happen.
The Confederate monument in Grenada is one of hundreds in the South, most of which were dedicated during the early 20th century when groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy sought to shape the historical narrative by valorizing the Lost Cause mythology of the Civil War.
The monuments, many of them outside courthouses, came under fresh scrutiny after an avowed white supremacist who had posed with Confederate flags in photos posted online killed nine Black people inside the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
Grenada’s monument includes images of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and a Confederate battle flag. It was engraved with praise for “the noble men who marched neath the flag of the Stars and Bars” and “the noble women of the South,” who “gave their loved ones to our country to conquer or to die for truth and right.”
A half-century after it was dedicated, the monument’s symbolism figured in a voting rights march. When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders held a mass rally in downtown Grenada in June 1966, Robert Green of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference scrambled up the pedestal and planted a U.S. flag above the image of Davis.
The cemetery is a spot Latham himself had previously advocated as a new site for the monument, but he said it’s too late to change now, after the city already budgeted $60,000 for the move.
“So, who’s going to pay the city back for the $30,000 we’ve already expended to relocate this?” he said. “You should’ve showed up a year and a half ago, two years ago, before the city gets to this point.”
A few other Confederate monuments in Mississippi have been relocated. In July 2020, a Confederate soldier statue was moved from a prominent spot at the University of Mississippi to a Civil War cemetery in a secluded part of the Oxford campus. In May 2021, a Confederate monument featuring three soldiers was moved from outside the Lowndes County Courthouse in Columbus to another cemetery with Confederate soldiers.
Lori Chavis, a Grenada City Council member, said that since the monument was covered by tarps, “it’s caused nothing but more divide in our city.”
She said she supports relocating the monument but worries about a lawsuit. She acknowledged that people probably didn’t know until recently exactly where it would reappear.
“It’s tucked back in the woods, and it’s not visible from even pulling behind the fire station,” Chavis said. “And I think that’s what got some of the citizens upset.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Crooked Letter Sports Podcast
Podcast: New Orleans sports columnist and author Jeff Duncan joins the podcast to talk about his new Steve Gleason book and the new-look New Orleans Saints.
Jeff Duncan went from the Mississippi Book Festival in Jackson on Saturday to Jerry World in Dallas on Sunday where he watched and wrote about the Saints’ total dismantling of the Dallas Cowboys. We talk about both events and also about what happened in high school and college football last weekend and what’s coming up this weekend.
Stream all episodes here.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1899
Sept. 18, 1899
Scott Joplin, known as “the King of Ragtime,” copyrighted the “Maple Leaf Rag,” which became the first song to sell more than 1 million copies of sheet music. The popularity launched a sensation surrounding ragtime, which has been called America’s “first classical music.”
Born near Texarkana, Texas, Joplin grew up in a musical family. He worked on the railroad with other family members until he was able to earn money as a musician, traveling across the South. He wound up playing at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, where he met fellow musician Otis Saunders, who encouraged him to write down the songs he had been making up to entertain audiences. In all, Joplin wrote dozens of ragtime songs.
After some success, he moved to New York City, hoping he could make a living while stretching the boundaries of music. He wrote a ragtime ballet and two operas, but success in these new forms eluded him. He was buried in a pauper’s grave in New York City in 1917.
More than six decades later, his music was rediscovered, initially by Joshua Rifkin, who recorded Joplin’s songs on a record, and then Gunther Schuller of the New England Conservatory, who performed four of the ragtime songs in concert: “My faculty, many of whom had never even heard of Joplin, were saying things like, ‘My gosh, he writes melodies like Schubert!’”
Joplin’s music won over even more admirers through the 1973 movie, “The Sting,” which won an Oscar for the music. His song, “The Entertainer,” reached No. 3 on Billboard and was ranked No. 10 among “Songs of the Century” list by the Recording Industry Association of America. His opera “Treemonisha” was produced to wide acclaim, and he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his special contribution to American music.
“The ragtime craze, the faddish thing, will obviously die down, but Joplin will have his position secure in American music history,” Rifkin said. “He is a treasurable composer.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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