Youth baseball a boon to other locales
While, in Uniontown, Bailey Park bakes indifferently in the summer heat, other ballparks, in other towns, serve as veritable cash registers for their communities.
Youth baseball, as crass and as improbable as it sounds, can help fill coffers, and then some.
I mentioned Bridgeport, W.Va., in a column a few weeks ago. Hovering between Fairmont and Clarksburg along I-79, Bridgeport has been transformed from a sleepy little burg to a bustling micro-city in recent years.
Thanks to the growing presence of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which located its fingerprinting and terrorism alert centers in Bridgeport, the town has taken flight, and don’t look now, but are those baseball bats for wings?
Wow, yes, there goes another Louisville Slugger.
According to the Bridgeport city clerk, Andrea Kerr, the $8 million the city sunk into baseball diamonds has been well worth the expense. A half decade or so ago, Bridgeport’s six-field spectacular was farmland grazed over by assorted beefalo.
Today, in addition to serving the needs of youth as a place to play, the Bridgeport Recreation Complex (its formal name) serves as a kind of cash cow.
“It’s been a huge economic driver,” Kerr told me of the ballfield complex.
“The city manager and council carefully thought the whole thing out.” It was not a surprise.
Kerr said as a result of the baseball tournaments staged on the fields, Bridgeport’s hotels are booming. In the past two years or so, Bridgeport has grown eight new hotels/motels. Occupancy rates are high, especially during the spring and summer, she said.
The city gets a cut of the hotel/motel action — so Kerr knows just how well they are doing. It’s harder to gauge the restaurant trade, but she presumes that too is getting a major boost.
Kerr couldn’t quantify the overall financial impact on the community of the tournaments, though she did say the city wishes now it had built two additional fields.
To the city of Bridgeport and similarly positioned locales, more diamonds translate into more bucks to help fuel the local economy.
Kerr said Bridgeport officials realized the city was missing out on substantial paydays when they woke up to the fact that summer weekends, local boys and girls (softball players) and their parents were hitting the road on trips two or three hours from home.
Let us call this the Great Youth Baseball Weekend Exodus. It happens in most communities, apparently. If you’re not a parent of a young ballplayer, you’re not likely to know of these migratory routines.
I spoke to one parent in the know from Allegheny County who told me it’s not at all unusual to drop $400 to $500 a weekend on food and board on a trip, say, to a Akron, Ohio, for a tournament. That’s one player with a parent or two in tow. Travel teams consist of 12 players or so. Add two or three coaches.
Let’s see, $450 times 15 equals $6,750.
And that’s the minimum. There are always incidentals, like tournament Tshirts, to buy. Pop on another $400 per. That’s better than $7,000 a team.
Consider: There might be as many as 30 or 40 or 80 teams on tournament weekends, once all the different age category teams are accounted for.
Even a small tournament of 30 teams easily brings in around $210,000, according to my back-of-the-envelope calculation. Better than half a million looks good for a large-scale tournament.
And this doesn’t include entry fees the teams pay up front (frequently none refundable, even in the event of foul weather).
To paraphrase old Ev Dirksen, a hundred thousand here, a hundred thousand there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.
The parent I spoke to said it was a sight to behold: a hotel lobby busting at the seams with lads in baseball knickers and tops, bags of bats and balls and gloves on shoulders or being carried by parents, the lobby abuzz with anxious, excited chatter.
Ladies and gentlemen, the National Pastime.
Buddy Marta coaches the Laurel Highland JV team and helps run a summer travel team for 15-year-olds by the name of Hopwood Heat. The Heat will soon visit Boardman, Ohio, for a weekend tournament.
There are no tournaments played locally attracting out-of-town teams, Marra told me. The Heat are a road-only franchise.
As a business model, youth baseball needs lots of study. It’s a lot of hard work, a lot of organizing. Things could go wrong.
Bottom line, it requires baseball fields. In the Uniontown area, there’s Hutchinson and Oliver, both with more than one field each. But still probably not enough diamonds to fit in a good size gathering. Let’s see now. Oh, there’s Bailey Park. But you know about Bailey Park. Poor, forlorn Bailey Park. It’s mid-summer and it’s quiet there.
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Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.