Baseball’s Back
There’s a new stadium in Louisville, a new team coming to Lexington and the reverberations of Ken Griffey Jr.’s arrival in Cincinnati have been felt well beyond the Ohio River

TIME was when hockey followed baseball’s lead, but in some places that pattern has reversed itself. The Kentucky Thoroughblades AHL hockey team has now called Lexington home for several years. Yet professional baseball has not existed there since the one-season lifespan of the Lexington Colts in 1954. A strange conundrum for a city of its size in a Southern state.

"It was just a matter of this community deciding that we could support professional sports, and it took somebody from outside our community to prove it," says Alan Stein, president of the Lexington Professional Baseball Company. "Ron DeGregorio and Walter Bush of the Thoroughblades saw what a wonderful opportunity demographically Lexington was for professional sports and have proven it many times over now with their success."

For years, efforts to foster a public-private partnership to bring minor league ball to town fizzled, done in by lack of government funds, it was thought. Then one day Stein’s nine-year-old son Scooter (named after Yankee great Phil Rizzuto) sparked a bright idea.

"Why don’t you just pay for it yourself, Dad?" he queried.

Today, Stein and a band of investors stand on the brink of their dream. Lexington will join Montgomery, Alabama in welcoming a South Atlantic League, A-level ballclub for the 2001 season, bringing the league to 16 teams. While the company has not yet sold the naming rights to the team – part of the $17-18 million necessary to fund the operation – it is expected to be a Houston Astros affiliate. Ground was broken in February for the stadium project on Lexington’s oft-ignored north side.

"There’s a lot of love for baseball here in the city of Lexington and it’s going to be something to see," said former Los Angeles Dodger John Shelby, after a heartwarming speech recalling his youth in north Lexington.

The Bluegrass State is seeing a renaissance of interest in baseball, the likes of which it hasn’t witnessed since the turn of the previous century. Last fall, the Louisville RiverBats – long known as a St. Louis Cardinal affiliate, then a short-lived partner of the Milwaukee Brewers – announced a five-year affiliation with the resurgent Cincinnati Reds. The club is opening $35 million Slugger Field this month, where seats sold out for the home opener in two hours.

The excitement that generated those record sales might be caused by more than the riverfront stadium’s distinctive architecture. After the parent club Reds came up one game short of the playoffs last summer with 96 exciting wins, General Manager Jim Bowden got busy. Now another native son, Ken Griffey Jr., has returned home to play. The resounding boom created by the February 10 deal caused fans to rush to ticket windows that very afternoon. Add the punch of slugger Dante Bichette, the possible return of the flamboyant Deion Sanders to baseball, and the inclusion of the Reds in the same division as McGwire’s Cardinals and Sosa’s Cubs, and you have a recipe for high-caliber baseball and major league ticket and merchandise sales. Ticket sales at the team’s spring training site in Sarasota were already up 40 percent in early March.

The fever doesn’t stop there. Even though favorite son Pete Rose’s tribulations with major league baseball continue, equally beloved figures Sparky Anderson, Tony Perez and broadcaster Marty Brennaman are all slated to enter the Baseball Hall of Fame this summer. On top of all that, the Ohio city is building a new $280 million stadium just beyond the confines of the team’s present home at Cinergy Field The new stadium is slated to be ready in time for the home opener in 2003.

Meanwhile, Northern Kentucky waterfront enterprises, which already do a healthy business on game days, will probably see more fans than ever choosing to park in Kentucky and take the scenic walk across the Roebling Bridge to a game. Sporting goods apparel manufacturers and dealers, upon learning what number Junior would be wearing, have made room for as many number 30s as they can.

Some might fear that such excitement up north would naturally detract from the minor league efforts nearby, but in baseball circles, an abundance mentality prevails.

"Junior coming to Cincinnati has helped us tremendously," says Lexington’s Alan Stein. "When all they’re talking about is baseball even during the SEC basketball tournament, that’s a good sign for our product. We set a tremendous record in selling season tickets, and the teams in Dayton, Louisville and Knoxville are all breaking their records. The synergy that translates into the baseball buzz helps us all."

Getting back in the line-up

After so many years of being among a handful of the largest communities not to have any pro ball, the locals in Lexington are ready to see some action.

It was April 1867 when the Lexington Observer and Reporter first noted that "Lexington’s young men have organized a baseball team." The team played at Woodland Park and other teams sprang up in the area until 1891, when rowdy behavior caused city officials to declare "no more Sunday games." As a result, the team disbanded. The Bluegrass League – with teams from Lexington, Richmond, Frankfort and Nashville – reorganized in 1898 only to be outlawed by the National Association of Baseball Leagues in 1913. While pro ball went on hiatus again, that era did see legends Earl Combs and Happy Chandler play together on an amateur city team called the Reos.

In 1954, pro ball returned to Lexington with the arrival of the Colts, part of the Mountain States League. Fans were treated to the play of Slick Lou Johnson and future city councilman Bobby Flynn. But the team only lasted that one season.

In 1982, minor league ball returned to Louisville at the Triple-A level with the arrival of the St. Louis Cardinals affiliate, while Lexington stood out as the fifth-largest city in the country without a pro team. Efforts to extract stadium money from the city and state never quite reached pay dirt, prompting Stein to take the bull by the horns and attempt to raise it all privately, though he didn’t necessarily want to.

"It turned into an investment vehicle, but I had no intention of it being that way," he explains. "I advocated for 14 of the past 16 years that this should be a public project – and I still believe that. I’m glad to be the beneficiary, and so are my investors, but this was not a business deal. It was a quality of life deal."

"What really makes this project unique is the way it’s been funded with private dollars," says Matt Perry, president of National Sports Services, a consulting firm retained by the Lexington investors. "There is a great corporate and population base here."

"The most important lesson from this," Stein says, "is not to pre-judge whether something can work or not until you analyze it all the way through. We had assumed all along that privately financing the stadium would make the whole project infeasible. But what we found was we had to look at it differently. We went to single-A from double-A, and that lowered the number by six or seven million dollars. All of a sudden it went from being a very risky investment vehicle to a can’t miss.

"You can’t pre-judge what a community wants either. A number of people advised us that Lexington wouldn’t support single-A baseball. As of today, we’ve sold 2,100 season tickets, which is 500 more than what we need in the ballpark to break even – we’re pre-sold into profit already."

Home base

Wait around a minute in the company’s office, and you’ll get a virtual reality tour of the coming facility, even the "Budweiser stables" party area adjacent to the right field bullpen. Among the proposed stadium amenities is a hot tub outside the right field fence.

The stadium, designed by Toronto-based Stadium Consultants Inc., will feature 6,000 seats, corporate boxes, directed lighting and sound (to minimize potential nuisance to residential neighbors), and a distinctive architecture echoing the region’s thoroughbred farm traditions.

Part of the attraction of the facility will be its multi-use nature. In fact, Stein’s organization is working to demonstrate that capability by inviting none other than Jimmy Buffett to town next spring.

"We also intend to be a venue for the circus, for blues festivals and concerts, for philharmonic events, corporate picnic outings. Everything is a possibility – except wrestling," laughs Stein, a promoter with limits.

But the facility’s real purpose will be to house major league prospects for the Astros juggernaut.

"We feel like we’re affiliated with some of the finest minor league affiliates in baseball," says Tim Purpura, the Astros’ assistant general manager and director of player development. That family of teams includes operations and new stadiums in New Orleans, Louisiana and Round Rock, Texas (owned by Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan), as well as teams in Kissimmee, Florida; Battle Creek, Michigan; Auburn, New York; and Martinsville, Virginia. In the past two years, that minor league system has produced four champions, as well as serving as proving ground for the consistently playoff-bound parent club.

"I can say without any doubt that the type of organization that Alan is putting together here will live up to our standards," Purpura told the crowd in February. "We’re very much invested in this project and this community. I think this is a real winner. You have to have someone with a passion to pull this off. You have to have a love for the game to get you through those long homestands, those sixteen-hour bus rides. You have someone like Alan Stein who can pull that off for you."

Community involvement

It came as no surprise when the local chapter of the Public Relations Society of America recently selected Stein as 2000 Communicator of the Year. A self-described "preacher" for the project, he exudes a steady stream of authentic enthusiasm, fortified in large part by his longstanding devotion to community ideals. He demands that same sense of personal investment from his staff.

"Everybody who’s hired here has to be involved in the community in some fashion, some charitable or civic organization. Everybody here is required to do that and they do it on company time. My dad says, ‘You’re one of those hippie, touchy-feely companies. You’d better get yourself a time clock,’" Stein says with a smile. "But we’re a family. We don’t pay that much. Every single one of these people is more talented than what they’re getting paid."

Sometimes today’s sports fan feels the opposite is true with today’s high-priced pro athletes. That’s why real community involvement by those players – not just photo ops – is as crucial to a minor league team’s long-term success as all the zany promotions put together.

"When you have a ballclub in the city, the club needs to send its players out into the community, so they can get a firsthand experience and see the guys out of uniform," says John Shelby. "You have to participate so that the fans feel like they really know you. They keep track of you, and when you go through the minor leagues, people follow and keep up with you. That keeps the interest."

Keeping interest doesn’t seem to be a problem for baseball in Kentucky these days.

As for the years and false starts it has taken to finally get a team back in Lexington, once again a story about Stein’s son Scooter proves emblematic.

"Scooter got to have dinner with Mr. Rizzuto two years ago at Yankee Stadium," Stein relates. "The conversation went on into the first and second innings. Scooter was obediently standing there, and we’re all still asking Rizzuto questions about Mantle and DiMaggio and all the old Yankee teams. In the bottom of the second, my son asked me, ‘Dad, is it okay if I go watch the game?’ And Phil Rizzuto said, ‘The boy is right. We’re wasting time when we could be watching a baseball game.’"

Adam Bruns is editorial director of The Lane Report.

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