Just before twilight on a summer evening bordering on perfect, three men are standing in North Chicago’s leafy Foss Park listening for the crack of a bat, the friendly hum and chatter of a crowd cheering on the hometown baseball team, vendors hawking hot dogs and popcorn. They can hear it all, even though the scene is purely imaginary.
“Yeah, baseball. That would be real good in here. People would come back in here for that,” says Kingston Neal, a 31-year-old contractor who has lived all his life in North Chicago, the small lakefront suburb between Waukegan and the Great Lakes Naval Training Center. “This used to be a park where you could come hang, but don’t nobody come in here now.”
“I’ve got a 4-year-old. She’d love to come in here with Daddy and watch a game and eat a hot dog,” says Herman Rainey, a 29-year-old teacher’s aide who lives in neighboring Waukegan.
“You’ve got Great Lakes next door,” offers Ricardo Crawford, another 31-year-old North Chicagoan. “All those recruits will want to go watch the games, and they’ll be spending money while they’re here.”
All that excitement is at least two years away, if it ever materializes. For now, on a night so inviting that anybody who can be outside is, the three men have Foss Park’s 32 acres of lawn, trees and lakefront bluffs nearly to themselves. Set apart from the rest of town by a half-mile road that winds past the back end of Abbott Laboratories and a Great Lakes firing range, the park seems remote–not a plus in a town that struggles with a high crime rate and economic decline.
Foss Park is where North Chicago Mayor Jerry Johnson envisions building a baseball stadium, at a cost of $12 million to $20 million, to snare a franchise in the Great Lakes League, a nascent group of minor-league teams unaffiliated with the majors. North Chicago is one of several small Midwestern cities hoping to cash in on minor-league baseball’s growing popularity and both boost their local economies and build a sense of community identity around a family-friendly entertainment venue.
“We’re going to revitalize that part of North Chicago one way or another,” Johnson says, “but if we start it with a baseball stadium, we get some economic benefits: We get more foot traffic in what now passes for our downtown, more commerce and people bringing in baseball spinoffs like restaurants, and at the same time we can bring this town closer together and raise the spirit by our identification with a sports team.”
Johnson sounds just like his counterparts in Joliet, Gary and Waukegan who have seen what the Kane County Cougars, the Lansing Lugnuts and other minor-league teams have done for their communities. The Cougars, a Class A affiliate of the Florida Marlins, are drawing an average of 6,400 people this summer to their games in west suburban Geneva. That’s up 800 from last year’s average and way up from the 1991 opening-season average of 3,640. The Lugnuts, a Chicago Cubs Class A team, have averaged 7,000 fans per game during the past four years.
“The fans spend about $7 on concessions inside the stadium, but then lots of these folks are also spending money on dinner and other things in the neighborhood before and after the game,” says Lansing’s finance director, Bob Swanson. Small ball has attracted such big crowds in Lansing, says Mayor Bob Hollister, that the $13 million in public money used to build the stadium will almost certainly be paid off early. “The way the funding was structured, we break even for the season with 300,000 attendance,” he says. “But for the first five years the average attendance is 485,000, so we’re paying ahead on our 15-year note.”
North Chicago and other applicants have until December to line up funding, stadium sites and other details if they want to land one of the first round of four teams that will begin play in 2002. Johnson says he’s pretty sure he can’t make the December deadline, but hopes to land a slot in the second round, with the first games in 2003. League owners won’t say how many towns are in the running, but they include Joliet, Gary, Waukegan, North Chicago and Flint, Mich.
Gary and Joliet are riding a second wave of entertainment-based redevelopment; both towns have profited from the casino trend of the 1990s. Joliet’s share of the take from its two casinos is about $22 million a year, says City Manager John Mezera, and Gary’s gaming revenue is more than $25 million. But even after nearly a decade of operation, casinos can’t entirely shake their sleazy image. Baseball, on the other hand, can lend a town its wholesome image as the great American pastime–made even greater when the players aren’t aloof millionaires and when there’s a picnic area just past the outfield wall.
“Riverboat gambling is something we went after as a revenue and tourism generator,” Mezera says. “And it’s worked out well for us. But a baseball stadium is different. It’s more a quality-of-life thing for the people in town. It has to pay for itself, but after that we’re more interested in the way it can change the image of the area by telling people there’s something fun to do here.”
While some hopefuls are a little more starry-eyed than others about the spillover effect on local business–some of them talk as if little Wrigleyvilles will spring up around every new stadium–they all share the idea of baseball as a double play–a mix of financial and lifestyle benefits.
That’s a good thing, says University of Chicago sports economist Alan Sanderson, because anyone expecting minor-league baseball alone to rescue their economy will be disappointed.
“Whether it’s minor-league or major-league baseball, or whether it’s auto racing or basketball or anything else, none of them wind up being horribly big in terms of economic growth,” Sanderson says. “The jobs they create employ people for three hours a night for maybe 30 nights a year, so these are going to be moonlighters, not full-time jobs. And most of the money people spend is replacing what they would have spent elsewhere.”
That’s understood by most officials in the towns waiting for their time at bat. Mezera describes a stadium as “something we can give to the people of Joliet and say, `Here’s something nice that is a product of our investment in casinos. Now you can see a professional baseball game without driving all the way into Chicago and spending a lot of money.’ ” In Waukegan, economic development leader and mayoral candidate Jack Potter sees a baseball stadium as a symbol of a revitalized Waukegan, paired with the revival of two classic downtown theaters. Gary’s mayor, Scott King, wants a baseball stadium to complement the basketball franchise that’s coming to town next year.
The collar cities don’t have to worry about putting up big, speculative stadiums and then losing out in the bidding for a franchise. None of the stadiums breaks ground unless it has the promise of a team to put in it. And the teams won’t be handed out by some monolithic panel of pampered and limousined team owners. This is the minor leagues. Decisions about the future of professional baseball in these small cities will be made by Tom Dickson and Sherrie Myers, a Wilmette couple whose house doubles as league headquarters. Both 41, the pair have been minor-league team owners since 1993, when they made a leap of faith and bought a 90-year-old Iowa team, the Waterloo Diamonds, for $1.8 million they didn’t have.
Dickson was in advertising, working for Leo Burnett in Chicago, and Myers was a magazine startup executive. Dickson’s hobby was minor-league ball; he studied it for a year trying to figure out how to get in on it, then crossed the line one summer day seven years ago when a friend mentioned that the Diamonds were for sale. Dickson called the owner that night.
” `How much do you want?’ I asked him,” Dickson recalls. “He said $2 million, and I said, `No problem.’ He didn’t know I couldn’t even afford to pay $50,000.” Nevertheless, Dickson lined up investors among friends of friends and friends of friends of friends to pay half the cost and got a bank loan for the other half.
That purchase turned out amazingly well. After moving the Diamonds to a temporary home in Springfield, Ill., the couple struck a deal with Lansing, Mich., which put up a new stadium for the team, eventually renamed the Lansing Lugnuts. Since it began play in Michigan’s capital city in 1996, the team has filled the stadium beyond its 10,000 capacity most nights. Lugnuts merchandise, featuring one of the silliest names at any level of baseball, consistently outsells logo gear from big-league teams even in cities hundreds of miles away–though Dickson and Myers won’t divulge specifics of the team’s financial track record.
The economic impact on Lansing has been impressive. The team has attracted new bars and restaurants to a neighborhood that had been “our adult-bookstore area we wanted to be rid of,” says Mayor David Hollister. “People in the region used to skip over Lansing and go to the college town, East Lansing, for dinner,” Hollister says. “Now they come to Lansing and line up outside the door of Rum Runners,” a piano bar a block from the stadium.
The city reports that 1,200 new full- and part-time jobs have been created since the team moved in. Last year, Lansing coffers got a boost of $750,000 from rising property values and $400,000 in stadium-related revenue such as parking fees and non-baseball events. The city-owned Oldsmobile Park (named by the automaker in return for a $1.5 million payment to the city) hosts fireworks shows, movies, concerts and a Halloween haunted house. “It brings people back downtown even when there’s no game,” Hollister says.
In building up the Lugnuts, Dickson and Myers, who now do baseball full time, figured out that there were some key ingredients they could replicate in other towns. They include a family atmosphere with low ticket prices ($5.50 to $7.50) and chances for children to play catch with players or run the bases between innings. The stadiums are small but clean and up to date.
“There was a longstanding tradition in the minor leagues that the best way to get people to a game is to give away a ticket for free or for a dollar, then make your money selling them a hot dog and a beer,” Dickson says. “That’s a pure discounting strategy, but the more you discount something, the less it’s worth to the consumer. People had started thinking minor-league baseball was worth about a dollar. We turned that upside down. Our idea was, let’s upgrade the experience and charge something like a movie theater price.”
They also packed all kinds of diversions around the game to make it a package of entertainment. At Lugnuts games, cannons shoot hot dogs and T-shirts into the stands and the grounds crew sometimes breaks into a dance while cleaning up the field. Scott King, the mayor of Gary, was at a Lugnuts game recently where “after one inning, there’s a contest where fans stand on top of one of the dugouts and finish the lines of a song to win boxes of doughnuts. Then after the next one, some guy proposes to his girlfriend in front of everybody.”
It’s no wonder a marketing study showed that, on their way out of Lugnuts games, half the patrons say that they don’t know the final score but that they’ll come back anyway. And no surprise that King has a Great Lakes League stadium as a centerpiece of his $47 million redevelopment plan for his city.
Lansing isn’t the only role model King and the others are following. There’s also Dayton, Ohio, where Dickson and Myers first tried to clone their Lugnuts success in 1997. Because of major-league ownership red tape, the couple couldn’t own both teams, but they have watched it take off. The Dayton Dragons started playing in the Midwest League this spring, and already city officials have seen the financial scoreboard light up. For most of their 70-game home season so far, the Dragons have sold out the 8,500-seat stadium.
“We’re a typical urban center where the sidewalks have a tendency to roll up after the workforce goes home,” says Maureen Pero, president of the Downtown Dayton Partnership. “But just in the first few months with the Dragons, we’ve been seeing increased viability of our streets after working hours. We have about 30 restaurants that cater to the baseball crowd in the evening, and they’re doing great, and our music and entertainment district, the Oregon District, is getting people to stay around too.” On top of that, Pero says, builders are becoming interested in putting up new housing downtown.
Myers says Dayton solidified her and Dickson’s conviction that the Lugnuts package could be taken to other towns. “I got caught by surprise by the impact we can have on the whole community,” she says. “We’re not just bringing to Lansing a place to get cheap tickets to a baseball game. It’s providing a place for parents to come together with their kids, and it brings several thousand people downtown in the evening in a place that used to shut down at 5 o’clock. We’ve stumbled onto something that can work for any town that’s been decaying, or that can’t get anything going on in the evening. So we decided, why not run with it?”
Dickson and Myers have spent the past couple of years scouring the Midwest for suitable towns for their league. They don’t want bustling, upscale places, Myers says, because “those places aren’t seeing their downtown decay. These facilities are designed to help towns that need some economic development.” Also, towns that have been harder hit by past economic downturns are more likely to have eight acres open for development.
The couple has dropped in on several towns–outside the Chicago area they include Flint, Mich., and Eastlake, Ohio–to unfurl their vision of minor-league baseball as a development tool. By all accounts, their pitch is welcome. “Here were people who knew we’d insist on doing it downtown, where it’s needed, not put it in one of our nicer neighborhoods, like Miller,” says Gary’s King.
The Great Lakes League is laid out as a franchise operation, with each stadium and team conforming to a sharply cut set of standards. It starts with a standardized stadium that puts a sloped picnic lawn outside the outfield, a playground behind third base, and above-ground locker rooms underneath the stands to minimize excavation. That last touch “saves about a million dollars” in construction costs, Dickson says. The stadium takes up eight acres, and in most cases the intent is to have little or no parking attached. “You want the people to have to walk a few blocks and see your restaurants and stores,” says Waukegan’s Potter.
At the end of this year, Myers and Dickson will announce which four towns will inaugurate the league. To qualify, a town will have to have a stadium financing plan in place. Dickson and Myers are also working to line up investors to own teams in each town, but will own all or part of one or more teams themselves. They foresee expanding the league to a dozen teams in five years, and developing a season of 120 games a year.
Back in Foss Park, the three men envisioning a baseball game there are getting more excited about the idea as the conversation rolls on. “A minor-league team would give this community some of the warm and fuzzies it needs,” Kingston Neal says.
“People could ride their bikes over for the game. I’d do that,” Herman Rainey says. “Minor-league baseball would kick butt for North Chicago,” he added in an emphatic, if less elegant, rephrasing of the adage, If you build it, they will come.
