Editor’s Notes

By Bob Bouyea

I love baseball. I’ve come to realize this fact as I’ve grown older. I’ve always followed the game, but as a boy and young man, I was attracted to the faster-paced sports of football and basketball. Plus my enthusiasm for the game was less back then because of the fact that I wasn’t a good baseball player.

But now my most fond and vivid sports memories are of the times I spent watching baseball games, not so much of the sports I played.

I’ve come to realize that attending a baseball game is more than watching a game. It’s a place for us to go with family and friends to catch up with one another, and it’s a place to slow down our busy lives. My oldest daughter also is a baseball fan (its more than that, we are St. Louis Cardinal fans). Each year when we travel back to the Midwest to visit my parents, we always take in a baseball game.

Sure we watch the game and we talk about the game situations and the players. But more importantly, we talk just about stuff.

Baseball isn’t called our “National Pastime” for nothing. Pastime is described by Merriam Webster as something that makes time pass agreeably.

And thank goodness we have that here with the Charleston RiverDogs, a Class A team newly affiliated with the New York Yankees. Yes, it’s minor league baseball, but some of the best baseball is played at this level. And you are much closer to the action. Players here show heart, drive and desire as they strive to reach the major-league level.

While baseball is a pastime, it is also a business.

New Jersey-based GoldKlang Group owns the Riverdogs. But one of the founding members and group president, Mike Veek, makes Charleston his home. This group also owns five other minor league clubs—the Brockton (Mass.) Rox, the Fort Myers (Fla.) Miracle, Hudson Valley (N.Y.) Renegades, the Sioux Falls (S.D.) Canaries and the St. Paul (Minn.) Saints.

The group was founded in September 1989 by Chairman Marv GoldKlang, Veek and others.

The thought of owning a baseball team is a dream for many of us. Think of it: your job would be to go to the ballpark every day, grab a hotdog and a cold beverage and mingle with the fans and players. That’s the ideal job as viewed from the outside. From the inside there is much work to do, both during the season and during the off-season. You have to plan, prepare and hire staff to order and prepare concessions to feed thousands each night, to park cars, sell tickets and entertain attendees during each game.

Dave Echols, RiverDogs general manager, expects good things this year with being affiliated with the most recognized team in major league baseball. The River Dogs based their marketing campaign around it by using slogans like “The Yankees are coming.” This affiliation alone should help draw fans.

He hopes to have an average attendance of 3,600 per game, and in a couple of years reaching an attendance of more than 4,000 people per game followed by a move to AA baseball.

Drawing the Yankees is the first step in getting there. Echols says when the four-year player development deal the organization had with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays ended, the RiverDogs had 10 teams interested in coming to Charleston and joining the South Atlantic League.

The only team better than the Yankees to attract would have been an Atlanta Braves affiliation because of the following the Braves have in this area. However, there was no way that that was going to happen since the Braves already have a team in the league, with the Rome (Ga.) Braves.

“If you can’t get the Braves, then who better to have than the most recognizable team in all of baseball, in the Yankees?” Echols says.

One difference in marketing a minor league team, compared to a major league team, is they don’t market their players as much. While this year’s team has three or four of the Yankees’ top 10 prospects, they are still only prospects, says Echols.

“Baseball is a transient business. If they do well they aren’t going to be here long,” he says. “If a player is batting .300, you might say ‘why is he still here?’ But if they still need to work on things like going the opposite way then they are going to be left here. At this level it’s a learning process.”

Sound familiar? Most of us can recall our first jobs in our prospective careers. We were cutting our teeth and learning our trade, not unlike these young players. The difference is few of these prospects will go on to have a career in the major leagues.

But while they are here, let’s slow down and enjoy our national pastime.

As the late broadcaster Harry Caray used to say, “It’s a beautiful day. Let’s play two!”

Bob Bouyea is executive editor of the Business Journal. E-mail him at bbouyea@crbj.com.

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