BRYAN — Uri Geva’s three children love the movie “The Greatest Showman,” perhaps because the film’s lead character, based on circus czar P.T. Barnum, reminds them of their enterprising father.
At the moment, Geva is Brazos County’s greatest showman. He’s also the brains behind one of the first official baseball events in the country during the novel coronavirus pandemic, the Collegiate Summer Baseball Invitational. The four-team tournament is scheduled to crank up Thursday evening at Travis Field along railroad tracks in Bryan as Geva tries to chart a path for fellow baseball brass during the pandemic.
“It’s an honor and blessing we have — and a huge responsibility,” Geva said. “Not just for each other and who’s playing in this, but for having sports back in America. If we screw this up, we screw it up for everybody. If we do it right, we can really open the door and open eyes to, ‘This is how sports can come back in a safe way in the United States.’”
The tournament, with college baseball players from across the nation arriving Sunday and Monday, is set for Thursday through June 7 before primarily a television audience (livestreaming available for a fee at csbi2020.com), with some pro scouts onsite. No fans are allowed in the ballpark, and the players will stay at the same College Station hotel.
“Someone has to be the first; someone has to help get baseball going again,” said Brett Dolan, a former Astros broadcaster who now calls college and pro games in different sports.
Dolan is teaming up with former Astros player Geoff Blum to call the contests starting at 5:30 p.m. Thursday. NCAA Tournament regionals were scheduled for this past weekend, and super regionals would have been this coming weekend, but the college baseball season was canceled in March because of the spread of COVID-19.
“This will feel like a regional, with six games in three days,” said Dolan, who typically calls Arkansas baseball games this time of year and admitted to “baseball withdrawals” in the past couple of months.
Geva’s plan for a tournament, hatched a little more than a month ago, was greeted with some skepticism because of the overall shutdown of sports at the time. Since then, however, Gov. Greg Abbott has steadily reopened the state, and Geva said he and his staff are taking every precaution to protect the players and surroundings.
“There will be lots and lots of tests (for COVID-19) and doctors involved, and then we get to have some baseball,” Geva said. “The players will check in their car keys and be shuttled back and forth from the hotel to the stadium, and nobody is using their own private transportation. We knew as long as we followed the (Dr. Anthony Fauci) playbook and communicated with our local officials, we had no doubt this was going to happen.”
Fauci is a leading immunologist and the primary medical voice for the Trump administration during the pandemic. Dallas Baptist University pitcher MacGregor Hines, whose senior season was cut short, signed up for the tournament for a couple of reasons: to make an impression on scouts before the MLB draft June 10-11 and to simply have another chance to play ball.
“I thought this would be great to be a part of, especially since nothing else is really going on,” Hines said. “I can’t wait to get on the field again. The baseball world is a small one, and I’m looking forward to being around the guys and being around the sport, and I’m especially looking forward to competing.”
Hines added he doesn’t mind being quarantined with fellow players for nearly a week, that plenty of the competitors already know each other, and he’s eager to catch up with his peers in person.
Geva, 43, was raised in Tel Aviv, Israel — “Not your typical baseball community,” he said with a chuckle — and moved to College Station as a teenager when his parents became Texas A&M professors.
Geva attended A&M and in 1988 founded Infinity Sports and Entertainment, which has developed more than 1,000 websites, according to its own site. In 2007, Geva started the Brazos Valley Bombers, part of the Texas Collegiate League and featuring college baseball players from near and far during the summer.
Bombers games at Travis Field have become a family tradition for many in Bryan-College Station, with a festival-like atmosphere surrounding the competition, a throwback to when small baseball parks were the jewel and primary social spots of some communities.
“To take an old facility like Travis Field and create a platform for nine innings of entertainment, fireworks, crazy shows (between innings), traveling acts and some great baseball from college players, it all ties in to putting on this tournament,” Geva said. “The tournament is missing one piece, the entertainment, because we put on a show around baseball with the Bombers games. But this event doesn’t need that to get people excited. The baseball itself will do that.”
brent.zwerneman@chron.com
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