What's Behind
the Major Growth
in the Minor Leagues

Close your eyes and take a deep breath. Forget about meetings, phone calls, e-mail and traffic jams. Clear your head of the weekday 9-to-5 hassles and dream of a happy place filled with the smells of green grass, hot dogs and history. You’re daydreaming about a minor league ballpark, and because you live in North Carolina, chances are there’s one within driving distance. Leave right now and you might not miss a pitch.

In a state that sticks out its chest when it comes to NASCAR, ACC basketball and barbecue, the grand history and current robust health of minor league baseball are seldom talked about. Maybe it’s because baseball seems to have always been with us that we think of it as an historic legacy rather than a modern day fact. After all, baseball has been played professionally in North Carolina since the 1901 debut of the soon-to-become Charlotte Hornets, later the Charlotte O’s and now the Charlotte Knights.

Today, North Carolina is the only state in the country where all five classifications of minor league baseball are played: Triple A, Double A, Class A Advanced, Class A and Rookie League. This season, about 750 games will be played in 11 ballparks spanning Asheville to Wilmington. The sport has a long and distinguished history. See Tar Heel Baseball Trivia.

Hundreds of thousands of fans will enjoy these games because they’re great family entertainment and they’re relatively cheap. With the goofy mascots, greasy food and the occasional great play, the games are part athletic event and part circus sideshow.

But minor league baseball is big business in North Carolina and getting bigger as the teams sharpen their focus on the bottom line. Many have new stadiums complete with the same amenities — albeit on a smaller scale — as in the big leagues: luxury boxes, premium seats and between-innings entertainment.

The teams are doing relatively well financially because they know what business they’re in. And it isn’t sports. Baseball first and foremost is a service business. “The best things minor league teams do is cater to their customers,” says Will Lingo, the managing editor of Baseball America, a magazine that’s considered the top source of information on minor league baseball. “They go to any length to get people to the park, and once they’re there they work to keep them and bring them back.”

Go to a game and during the course of nine innings you’ll see the team’s mascot race and lose to a 5-year-old. You’ll see T-shirt tosses, home run contests off a batting tee and fireworks after the game. After Sunday games, your kids may get to run the bases. And if you scout out the schedule in advance for a giveaway night you might get a free cap.

“Every half-inning has some kind of promotion,” says Lingo, “and a lot of the games have giveaways. The bottom line is, when you go to a minor league game, you see a company that knows its customers well, knows what they want and knows how to deliver it.”

How the Business Works  
All the minor league teams in North Carolina are farm clubs of major league teams. In this financial partnership, the parent club pays the players’ salaries and their expenses and the minor league team is responsible for its own employees, stadium lease and appropriate expenses.

Players, often still teenagers, start in Rookie League, the lowest rank of professional baseball, and work their way up to Triple A ball (represented in the state by the Charlotte Knights and the Durham Bulls of the International League), which is the level closest to the major leagues. The ultimate goal is to be called up by the parent team to play Major League Baseball. That’s where players earn average salaries approaching $2 million a year, stay in four-star hotels and travel on chartered jets.

That lifestyle is unheard of in minor league ball, where most salaries are lower than you’d expect and players and coaches travel by bus from town to town while feasting on the manager’s special at McDonald’s.

“A lot of fans don’t realize how difficult this life is for the players and everyone else involved,” says 31-year-old Patrick Kinas, for the past three seasons the radio voice of the Carolina Mudcats, the Double A affiliate of the Colorado Rockies. “But I look at it like it beats working for a living.”

Last year the Hickory Crawdads of the South Atlantic League, the Class A affiliate of the Pittsburgh Pirates, drew 187,222 fans to L.P. Frans Stadium. Based on an average ticket price of $5 and a conservative average concession sales of $4 per person, the team had revenue of $1.68 million. And remember that the parent Pittsburgh Pirates paid the player salaries.

Expenses and the bottom line are generally a mystery, however. Just as it’s not public knowledge what Duke University, a private institution, pays men’s basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, it’s not public knowledge what any of the state’s 11 minor league teams profit. All are privately owned.

There are a few exceptions across the country. The Columbus Clippers of the International League, the Triple A affiliate of the New York Yankees, are one. According to a story in the Columbus Dispatch, the team turned a profit of $681,000 in the 1998 season. The lower a team’s classification, the lower its value and thus usually its profitability.      

Baseball’s Bad Hops
The golden age of minor league baseball came right after World War II in 1949 when there were 59 leagues nationwide. Eight of those leagues had teams in North Carolina. That year an almost unbelievable 49 minor league teams were playing in the state, one for almost every town with two or more stoplights.

In essence, teams were not much more than traveling boarding houses for players hoping to get noticed by the big leagues. Some communities embraced their teams; others didn’t. By 1959, interest had waned to the point there were just 21 leagues. The majors were gaining more of a presence, the economy had tightened and television had begun stealing the audiences.

“There were just too many teams to be sustained,” says Baseball America’s Lingo. “Some say it was because of air conditioning — people wanted to stay in out of the heat. Some say television had a lot to do with it.”

For years the major leagues kept their farm clubs afloat, and it wasn’t easy. Teams would move from city to city whenever they could get a better deal on a ballpark. In the 1970s, it was a given that a farm club would lose money. A successful season was one that generated enough gate revenue to pay the bills. As for franchise value, there was practically none.

By 1979 there wasn’t even a franchise in Durham, arguably one of the nation’s best-known minor league baseball towns. The Bulls were born in 1902 and were a charter member of the Carolina League when it formed in 1945. By 1968 lackluster attendance led the club to merge with a team from Raleigh to become the Raleigh-Durham Mets. Four years later, the still punchless Raleigh-Durham Triangles folded.

Thanks to Miles Wolff, a born-and-bred baseball fanatic, the Bulls returned to Durham in 1980. Wolff was granted a Carolina League franchise for $2,666 — one-sixth of the $16,000 that was in the struggling league’s treasury. He signed a development contract with the Atlanta Braves and convinced the city of Durham to spend $80,000 to overhaul the Durham Athletic Park.

Wolff was both good and lucky, because minor league baseball was about to turn the corner. He also had a successful model to emulate: Columbus, Ohio, had lost its International League franchise after the 1970 season. But seven years and a $6.5 million stadium renovation later, the team was back and drew 457,251 fans, an unheard of figure at the time.

The Bulls, too, were an immediate hit. Wolff promoted the club as inexpensive entertainment and fans bought into it. Similar success stories occurred in Nashville, El Paso and Louisville. In each case the turnaround was credited to clever marketing coupled with ballpark upgrades. What made the Bulls’ success so remarkable was that it didn’t include a new or renovated stadium. It would come later.

The minors’ rebirth didn’t go national, however, until 1988 when Buffalo decided it wanted a major league team. The city announced plans to build $45 million Pilot Field, a 21,050-seat facility in the heart of downtown to replace aging War Memorial Stadium (where “The Natural” was filmed). It would be home to the Triple-A Bisons for a couple of years, then be expanded when the big leagues came calling.

But the big leagues never called and the city has never looked back. The franchise drew more than 1 million fans for six consecutive seasons and became the model for minor league teams that wanted to act major. Today the Bisons still average nearly 10,000 fans per game — more on some nights than the Expos of the National League and the Devil Rays of the American League. The franchise is worth an estimated $12 million.

As for the Bulls, they’re still doing just fine. Wolff sold the club to Jim Goodmon, president of Capital Broadcasting of Raleigh, in 1990 for undisclosed millions. The Durham Bulls Athletic Park, which opened to rave reviews in 1995, seats 10,000 and routinely sells out on Friday and Saturday nights. The franchise’s value today approaches $10 million, a long way from $2,666.

Now Everyone Knows the Game
Those keys to success in minor league ball — modern ballparks with  nice amenities, supported by aggressive marketing and promotion — have been used, to varying degrees of success, by almost all the teams in North Carolina. New ballparks were built in the 1990s in Charlotte (actually Fort Mill, S.C.), Hickory, Kannapolis and Zebulon, plus there was a major renovation to the park in Asheville. Right, a Charlotte Knights player signs an autograph.

You don’t even have to copy the formula exactly to be a success, as demonstrated by Kinston, which, with 20,000 residents, is among the smallest towns in the country boasting a full-season minor league team. North Johnson, the general manager and part-owner of the Indians of the Carolina League, has overseen a remarkable transformation.

The Indians were a horror story until the late 1980s. Grainger Stadium was old and cold. “It was like a lot of stadiums built in the 1940s,” says Johnson, “in that it was tucked away in a neighborhood that had gradually run down. No one wanted to come.”

Johnson had come aboard in 1987 and by 1991 the franchise had its back to the wall. The big leagues had approved regulations that forced minor league teams to upgrade their facilities and when the Indians and town officials got together, they were looking for answers.

They found one. The club slapped “historic” in front of every reference to Grainger Stadium and constantly mentioned the names of players who had played in Kinston before reaching the majors. Plus, the town committed to spending $1.5 million in repairs and construction. Unsightly homes were torn down and replaced by a freshly striped parking lot. A marquee outside the stadium and a new scoreboard inside the stadium were among the expenditures.

It didn’t hurt that the parent Cleveland Indians, long the laughingstock of the American League, were in the midst of a resurgence. Just like that, historic Grainger Stadium was home to the best entertainment in town. The fever crested in 1997 when 151,952 fans waded through the turnstiles.

“The success has been a combination of a lot of factors,” says Johnson. “The biggest one is that we realized the team had not been marketed outside the county lines. We had to make this a regional draw. We got more aggressive with our media advertising, and Cleveland’s turnaround helped.”

Among the cleverest of marketing strategies has been to incorporate new team nicknames and logos that simply look appealing on a cap. The craze began with the 1988 release of “Bull Durham,” the baseball movie starring Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins.

Pete Bock, a front office assistant with the Bulls at the time (he also played the minister in the movie), says the film’s popularity paid dividends outside Durham. “Our attendance had been on the increase every year anyway,” he says, “but novelty sales went out the roof. I think that was the big explosion of the marketing tool in minor league baseball. Teams looked at it like, ‘If the Bulls have their caps in the Lids store somewhere in California, why can’t we?’ ”

Without the hook of a movie to interest fans, teams took to jazzy nicknames and logos. Some of the most successful have been the Crawdads, the Mudcats and the Winston-Salem Warthogs. This year, the Piedmont Boll Weevils changed their name to the Kannapolis Intimidators after the late Dale Earnhardt purchased the club. “Sales are going well,” says Todd Parnell, the team’s general manager. “There’s definite interest in the new name.”

Take Me Out to a Better Park
North Carolina seems perfect for minor league baseball. The closest big league teams — the Atlanta Braves and the Baltimore Orioles — are hundreds of miles away. Hickory businessman Don Beaver, who owns the Knights, Crawdads and Winston-Salem Warthogs,  has been refuted in his efforts to bring the majors to the state, in part because there is no single city big enough to generate support for 81 home games a season.

“(Our) cities are separate with their separate identities,” Wolff said in a 1997 interview. “So you’re not used to going to one. If you live in Greensboro, you go there for sports and entertainment, if you go to Winston, you go there for basketball, Wake Forest. Everybody has a minor league team in their community and they don’t need to drive to see major league sports.”

But teams with outdated facilities still don’t fare as well, no matter how cool the logo. An example is the Greensboro Bats, whose home, War Memorial Stadium, was built in 1926 and is the oldest minor league park still in use. Just prior to the South Atlantic League team’s home opener in April, the Guilford County Health Department closed all but one concession stand due to food preparation and handling complications.

The Bats are looking for city financing to help build a new ballpark downtown. They also have an offer from Greensboro business man Don Linder to construct a $14 million stadium northeast of the city.

Fayetteville didn’t get a new ballpark and thus lost its team, the Cape Fear Crocs, at the end of last season. Fans and advertisers refused to support a so-so team that played basically out in the middle of nowhere.

“Fayetteville was sort of a holdover from the 1960s and ’70s era that never really caught up,” says Lingo. “They changed their name, but they never seemed to generate a lot of excitement.”

There is excitement in Wilmington, home to the first-year Waves, a South Atlantic League affiliate of the Dodgers. The city last had minor league baseball in 1996, but the Port City Roosters were viewed as visitors. “Port City was a Southern League team that was kicked out of Charlotte when the Knights went to Triple A,” says Lingo. “The area really didn’t have time to sell it, and fans probably viewed it as something that wouldn’t last.”

Not now. The Waves’ arrival was announced last fall and the team averaged more than 2,000 fans per home game in its first 15 dates — and that before the school year had finished. Wilmington’s success is especially encouraging given that the club’s present home is Brooks Field on the UNC Wilmington campus, where alcohol sales aren’t allowed. “Getting a new ballpark (and one is planned) obviously will be a big factor,” says Lingo. “People see the stadium situation as a temporary thing.”

The Waves also figure to benefit from tourists, who flock to area beaches that are now being aggressively marketed, a la Myrtle Beach, S.C., which gained the Pelicans, a Braves affiliate in the Carolina League, three years ago.  “After families have been at the beach for a few days, they’re looking for different things to do at night,” says Tony Riggsbee, the sports director at WPTF radio in Raleigh.

Pulling for the Home Team
On any given night, fans’ enjoyment won’t be greatly affected by the final score. Yet in the big picture, there is a civic pride and allegiance to the home team, which hits a home run when it comes to economic impact.

“The Crawdads certainly have brought to Hickory an identity for the region,” says Paul Fogleman, the president of Inform Inc., a Hickory public relations company. “The crowds not only come from here and Catawba County, but they come from the Hickory Metro, which includes Alexander, Burke and Caldwell counties. And that pumps money into our economy.

“They’re an attraction that has galvanized the area and has energized the community to the potential economic benefits of sports. A Catawba Sports Commission has been created since the Crawdads arrived, and we’re looking at attracting more sports.”

The Mudcats, who date to 1991, were intended to be based in Raleigh, but the Bulls exercised a professional baseball territorial rights rule that said no team could be within a 35-mile radius of another. “(Owner) Steve Bryant grew up in Smithfield and always had dreamed of bringing a minor league team to Wake County,” says Kinas. “So literally as crow flies from the home plate of the Durham Bulls, he took out a map and a compass and the only space 35 miles away that was in Wake County and available was in Zebulon.”

The community of 4,046 residents is glad. “Certainly, having the Mudcats has heightened the awareness of Zebulon,” says Rick Hardin, the town manager. “They have been a wonderful corporate citizen and have been especially active in our schools.”

Tar Heel Baseball Trivia

The first records of baseball in North Carolina date to the Civil War — and the game was equally popular with both sides. In Salisbury, Union prisoners filled their Fourth of July in 1862 with speeches, races and a baseball game.

Professional baseball has been played in Winston-Salem since 1905 and this year marks the 88th season. The city also boasts the only remaining charter member of the Carolina League, which originated in 1944.

Greensboro’s War Memorial Stadium was built in 1926 in memory of Guilford County residents who died while serving in World War I, and whose names are etched on the front of the building. The ballpark today contains original seats from Yankee Stadium (circa 1920).

George Herman Ruth, still perhaps the most famous name in the history of sports, hit his first professional home run in 1914 in Fayetteville while a member of the Baltimore Orioles, an International League franchise at the time. Legend has it that day was when he was first called “Babe.”

Where were you on June 24, 1988? The Bluefield Orioles and the Burlington Indians were playing a 27-inning marathon at Burlington Athletic Stadium. The Orioles won, 3-2, in a game that lasted eight hours, 15 minutes. Played before curfew rules were instituted, it ended at 3:27 a.m.

A warehouse sits across the street from Grainger Stadium in Kinston. Only three players — future big leaguers Albert Belle, Cecil Fielder and Charlie Spikes — have ever hit home runs over the warehouse, a distance estimated at 540 feet.

Dirt from the real “Field of Dreams” in Dyersville, Iowa, was spread across the pitchers mound at Five County Stadium in Zebulon. The significance was more than ceremonial: The ballpark, which opened in 1991, was built on an old tobacco field.

The fastest game in professional baseball history — 31 minutes — was played at Oates Park in Asheville on Aug. 31, 1916. Winston-Salem won 2-1 in a game in which 15-year-old batboy and aspiring author Thomas Wolfe barely had time to break a sweat. It was the last day of the season and Winston-Salem had to catch a particular train out of town, so both teams agreed to speed things along.

Burlington Athletic Stadium, formerly located in Danville, Va., was offered to the city of Burlington for $5,000 in 1959. Local baseball and business leaders sold stock in the club to raise the necessary funds, and the stadium was broken down, numbered, moved and reassembled in time for the 1960 season opener.

Much of  “Bull Durham,” the movie starring Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, was filmed on location in 1987 at the historic Durham Athletic Park, former home of the Bulls. Scenes were shot during October and November, and if you look closely, you’ll see the breath of short-sleeved “fans.”

The old McCormick Field in Asheville was built in 1923 (a new park of the same name went up in 1992), but the city found itself without organized baseball from 1956-58. The park temporarily was converted into a dirt racetrack and became a frequent stop for drivers like Ralph Earnhardt, Ned Jarrett, Junior Johnson and Lee Petty.  

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