It’s time to get off our collective wallets. At some point, the people of Selma must realize that good things don’t always come for free.

The Selma Cloverleafs, along with the entire Southeastern Professional Baseball Association, are in trouble. They aren’t in trouble because they don’t have good ballplayers — they do. They aren’t in trouble because they don’t have people working for them who don’t care about pro baseball in Selma — they do. They aren’t in trouble because leaders in Selma haven’t done everything they could to help the new team — they have.

They’re in trouble because we aren’t attending ballgames. They’re in trouble because, on opening night of the Leafs’ season, more than 1,000 of us decided to show up. This past Saturday, about 100 of us decided we’d watch our team play.

We realize that supporting a brand new baseball team is hard to do. Many of us have children on recreational league ball teams, and we don’t have time to make it out to Bloch Park. Others of us, quite simply, don’t care that much about baseball and would just as soon watch our weekly sitcoms than watch the Cloverleafs.

This, however, is an appeal from the people in Selma who felt just a glimpse of hope when pro baseball was first announced in this city.

Even if you just stay for a few innings, only if you can make it in the bottom of the fifth and have to leave in the middle of the seventh, consider offering the Cloverleafs a little support.

Tickets aren’t cheap, and we know that. However, they’re much cheaper than taking a trip to Atlanta, or even watching a minor league team in Birmingham.

In 20 years, there’s a good chance the people of Selma will look back on this 2002 Cloverleafs team as just a memory. We can’t assure that the Southeastern Professional Baseball Association will make it. But at least we can try to support something that brings our community together.

The Cloverleafs are just a symbol for what Selma must work to attain in the next decade. We need, desperately, to become a city that loves the same things. What a better way to start than by finding some common ground on a playground for pro athletes.