The risk/reward for independent minor league baseball can be very high. Absorb all the costs, but keep all the profits with a product that can be fun, innovative and even a little but more edgy than affiliated minor league teams in North America. Grab a player or two with some name value, find some coaches or a manager with local MLB ties, and off you go running your own P and L. If it works you are a hometown hero. If it doesn’t depending on who owns the facility; usually it is the municipality where you are going to play, there is an eyesore that is hard to recover from. Then again, the town does have the ability to use the stadium for other events, from tractor pulls and graduations to high school and college sports and concerts, to continue to recoup throughout the year. However during the summer, baseball is king.
As spring is upon the Northeast, the State of New Jersey, a longtime petri dish for Indy minor league teams, with successes like the New Jersey Jackals, the Somerset Patriots and the nearby Rockland Boulders, now faces three facilities that have had teams go belly-up, two of which were centered around urban renewal and great fanfare in some of the most downtrodden locations. This week, one of the three; Bears-Eagles Stadium in Newark, finally got its death sentence, with a developer taking on the vacant stadium and turning the prime location near highways and public transportation into housing. It is a sad ending for baseball in Newark, which has had somewhat of a checkered history throughout the years, and is something that the state’s other two vacant stadiums hope will not befall them.
In Camden, the former home of the Atlantic League Riversharks remains adrift in a sea of half-filled parking lots the team that called Campbell’s Field home for 15 seasons and 3.5 million fans, went under after last season. In Atlantic City, a city again awash in financial troubles despite the casino industry’s reorganization, Surf Stadium’s fate continues to be a question mark as that former Atlantic League team also went belly up several years ago. All three venues, without MLB affiliated teams to lift the burden on the bottom line, were seen as key hubs for jibs and ancillary income in areas that were, and in many ways still are, suffering financially. And while the stadia and their teams were a great source of short-term income and did generate untold amounts of jobs, and careers, for young people interested in working in baseball, the bonanza of dollars, combined with the ever-present tax and real estate burden, are a cautionary tale still for cities thinking that minor league baseball and a gleaming new facility can be a catch all for a turnaround. Can it be a well-funded, and well-orchestrated spoke to a bigger wheel? Probably. But as the center hub without the dollars, and even the name recognition, of a parent club that casual fans know, it can still be a tough and dangerous sell unfortunately.
Of the three, Campbell’s Field, in the shadow of Philadelphia’s Ben Franklin Bridge, appears to have the best chance at future resurrection for baseball. With the Philadelphia 76ers moving their practice facility close by, the continued growth of the New Jersey Aquarium and a busy amphitheater nearby, there seems to be interest in having Indy ball return (The Phillies Double A team remains a thriving business in Lakewood, New Jersey, so hope of an affiliated team ending up there is probably not possible). For Atlantic City and Newark though, baseball appears to be a fading memory and a difficult tale to follow. Every spring brings new hope for clubs big and small across the country, and with that hope comes the great opportunity for those interested in the business of sports to get a foothold on a career, with probably no sport offering more ways in than baseball does. For three urban areas in The Garden State this spring, those chances and that hope will go unfulfilled. Sometimes the risk catches up to the reward in the business of the minors.
