by Pim van Nes
One month ago club president Claudio Banchi predicted that all Italian clubs would be hurt by the economic crisis, whilst his sponsor MontePaschi had neither signed nor paid for the 2009 season of Grosseto Orioles. Only Rimini, according to Banchi, might be able to remain financially unharmed thanks to its own sponsoring president Zangheri.
Now in February Grosseto is still missing MontePaschi’s green light for player deals and Rimini indeed was the first club to hit the Grosseto roster. Zangheri bought outfielder Lorenzo Avagnina last week, but yesterday the even better hit came from Cariparma. Second baseman Davide Dallospedale (picture) leaves Grosseto to join the Parma Angels, the same club his father Luciano played for in the seventies. Both players were born in northern Italy: Avagnina in Fossano and Dallospedale in Piacenza.
Monte dei Paschi is a bank originating from medieval city of Siena, which survived so many centuries but under present circumstances, has refused to extend the sponsor contract with the baseball club Grosseto Orioles. This club, the Italian champion of 2007, was still going strong during the 2008 regular season, but it went downhill in the playoffs by losing six out of nine games.
Manager Mauro Mazzotti was sacked half way through the semi-final series, but without him the team did not improve and gave way to T&A San Marino on its way to its first Italian championship ever. Banchi hired a new manager for Grosseto, but Mazzotti appealed and next week he will appear in an Olympic Committee arbitration case against the club. Grosseto has already released the new manager, but also all foreign players from last year.
Now the Orioles will also say addio to two real Italians, a delicate category of homegrown talents in a league dominated by imported players, who usually take five or six positions in the ten-man lineups. The expensive players imported from North and Latin America were, according to Banchi in a Baseball.it interview, supposed to accept lower salaries a month ago, but none of them was confirmed to the Italian federation as coming back to Grosseto last week.
Last year its club president was still first adviser for Italian federation president Riccardo Fraccari, although he had been sentenced to eight months in jail for documents fraud, when arranging Italian passports for some of those imported players. It took him until November 2008 to step down, when federal elections in Italy degraded Banchi to the back benches of the FIBS council. Now he is faced with reluctances by regional sponsors, commercially active in banking and in real estate investments.
Tomorrow at 9pm CET in Grosseto city an emergency meeting is called for all minor league baseball and softball clubs in the Grosseto region, aiming at a better collaboration among all neighboring organizations, including the major league club Orioles. The meeting is initiated and hosted, not by the Italian federation FIBS, but by the national Olympic committee CONI.
Pim van Nes
Baseball writer for
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Photo: © Ferrini, FIBS