Measuring Success The old Chicks are outdrawing the new Redbirds, if you count fans in the stands. by Mark Bialek worked as the public-address announcer for the Memphis Chicks from 1994 through 1997, so I’m surprised it took until July 10th before I went to see them play in their new Jackson, Tennessee, home. And now I’m disappointed it took so long. The West Tennessee Diamond Jaxx and the city of Jackson have got it going on! They did it right. A 6,500-seat ballpark adjacent to I-40 at the Christmasville exit on the eastern side of Jackson. A quaint, fan-friendly ballpark with a lively atmosphere. The people of Jackson and the surrounding West Tennessee counties appear to be having a love affair with, of all people, David Hersh. His name is still uttered with disgust in Memphis, but he’s a happy man in Jackson. “It’s been terrific,” Hersh says. “This is what minor-league baseball is all about. This community put its heart and soul into getting a franchise. It wasn’t just lip service, it was commitment. We have the best $8 million stadium in baseball.” There are no bad seats, and all concession stands and bathrooms are above the stands with a perfect view of the field. And the hamburgers are big and good. I can’t wait until the next homestand. It begins August 4th. Pringles Park won’t leave you in awe. It’s not cavernous. It doesn’t have big buildings behind it. It doesn’t really have any unique features, other than automatic paper-towel dispensers. It just works. It’s a pleasant environment in a good location, and the people are responding. At the end of the last homestand, West Tennessee and Birmingham were neck-and-neck at the top of the Southern League in attendance. What else are you going to do in the West Tennessee boondocks? Go bowling? Through their first 58 dates, paid attendance for Diamond Jaxx games is 255,611, and they’ve actually put 174,418 butts in the seats. That’s an average paid attendance of about 4,400 per game with a turnstile average of about 3,000. “We’ve had six sellouts,” Hersh says. “That is a statement of accomplishment.” Hersh gives a boastful example: “On a Tuesday night in July, at the end of a stretch of 23 home games in 26 days, with a heat index of 100, Kerry Wood facing Greg Maddux on TV, and with the ballclub playing well under .500, we had a paid attendance of 5,700.” The population of Jackson is approximately 80,000. Considering the surrounding counties, Hersh estimates his potential fan base to be about 455,000. With a city one-eighth the population of Memphis and a fan base less than half the size of the Redbirds, the Double-A Diamond Jaxx put more fans in the stands nightly than the Triple-A Redbirds do. You knew we had to bring Memphis into the equation, didn’t you? Well, the Redbirds are pluggin’ along. Their paid attendance numbers look impressive at 5,200 per game. That’s middle of the pack in the Pacific Coast League. But it’s amazing how many of those fans come as blue seats. It’s no-show city at Timmy Mac. The Redbirds sold 3,750 season tickets, but are only averaging about 2,500 fans per game. Memphis Redbirds president and general manager Allie Prescott admits that no-shows are a concern. “We’d like to get more of these people who are buying tickets to come to these games,” he says. “People can’t come to 72 baseball games. This is a problem throughout major league and Triple-A baseball, but we want to do what we can to get people to use their tickets.” The Redbirds draw 48 percent of the attendance that they announce, while 68 percent of the announced crowds at Diamond Jaxx games are actually at the game. Why aren’t Redbirds’ ticket-holders coming? “We had way too many home games in April and May before school was out,” Prescott explains. “We’ve also had incredible heat and turned right around and passed the baton to unbelievable rain in Memphis in the summer.” Okay. Maybe. But I sure see warning signs. Assuming the downtown stadium construction begins before the end of summer, the Redbirds will have a 14,000-seat ballpark ready for opening day 2000. That’s a big stadium, a really big stadium. It’s also in downtown Memphis, where virtually nobody lives. Is it going to be a really big empty stadium? I worry that it might. If you put a typical Tim McCarver crowd in AutoZone Park, you’ve got a cave with a really bad echo. Even if you put the current Redbirds average paid attendance into AutoZone Park, you’ll still have 8,800 empty seats. That’s almost the capacity at the old stadium. Both Hersh and I are skeptical. You can understand why Hersh would be. He’s bitter. He’s convinced he wasn’t given a fair shot in this good ol’ boy city. But behind the bitterness, there might be some substance. “Any time you have more empty seats than full ones, you’ve got a problem because you don’t feel like you’re at an event,” Hersh says. “Memphis has its own ownership group now. They’ve got the St. Louis Cardinals – the team everybody wanted – and they’re not drawing any better than they drew before, not counting my last two years.” We’re not bad-mouthing the Redbirds here. They’ve done everything right. They’ve improved Tim McCarver Stadium tremendously. They’re friendly and first-class. They’ve got terrific merchandise. They’re involved in the community. They’ve advertised and promoted their product. And they’re planning to build the best darn minor-league ballpark in the history of man. Oops! There may be one little mistake – location, location, location. “If you’re trying to build the Taj Mahal, and you’re trying to build the Taj Mahal in the wrong part of town, you’re going to have another Mud Island,” Hersh says from his perch 70 miles away. “But if you put that stadium where it should be built, at half the price of the joke that’s going on today, that franchise will survive for generations to come. If you put the product where the people are, you’ve got a chance at success.” Who are the people? Hersh didn’t say it, but I will. The people are white families with disposable income. In this city, that’s who will fill a baseball stadium. It may be an unpleasant statement, but it’s true. Ninety-nine percent of white families with money in Memphis live somewhere other than downtown. I’m not sure that enough white families with money and a bad case of urban fear syndrome care enough about minor-league baseball to come downtown as consistently as it will take to make AutoZone Park a success. The Memphis Redbirds are being politically correct, but is political correctness the formula for a consistently crowded ballpark? Doubt it. Prescott disagrees, as you would expect him to. “I really believe in my heart that this community is ready to support the best of the best,” he says. “We think that we’re going to have a lot of sellouts. If this is the major-league franchise for this city, I just think we have to let ourselves think big.” I don’t see the track record for optimism, but I hope Prescott has the last laugh. Sports Commentary Did the Punishment Fit the Crime? by Dennis Freeland Give the University of Memphis credit. Dr. V. Lane Rawlins thoroughly investigated the case of telephone fraud within the athletic department and came down hard on the players, coaches, and athletic director. In the process he proved once again that the U of M is not a football school. For 16 months, 22 current and past football players used assistant coach Rusty Burns’ long-distance access code without permission. They ran up a bill of $7,500. How the players came into possession of the access code is a complicated story. We won’t go into it here. The investigation, headed up by Dr. Nicolas White, associate dean of the law school, did not find any evidence that the code was given to the players. Someone copied it and passed it around. The guilty players who are still enrolled at the university will be punished under the school’s code of student conduct. Their cases were referred to the student judicial-affairs officer, just as any non-athlete would have been. These players must make full restitution to the university before re-enrolling. They each received from one semester to two years of probation, depending on the severity of the case. They will do five to 20 hours of community service. And they will attend an ethics workshop after which they must write a personal essay about their experience. If these students were not also athletes, the punishment would have ended here. But the football players will also be suspended for the season opener at Ole Miss and lose all or some of their complimentary passes to games during the 1998 season. This is where U of M officials proved that the school is not and has little aspiration to be a football school. A real football school would have delayed the investigation until, say, the week of October 31st. Then the report would have been released just before the home game with Arkansas State. The suspended players would only miss what appears to be the only easy game on the Tigers’ 1998 schedule. The players were suspended as a gesture toward the NCAA. I understand that. But it seems like an unfair burden to place on Rip Scherer’s already troubled shoulders. One of the players suspended for the Ole Miss game is junior cornerback Mike McKenzie, the best defensive back on the team, a bona fide NFL prospect, and a player capable of making game-breaking plays. Now Scherer has to travel to Oxford (where Memphis has won just once in school history) without his star cornerback. I talked with Scherer this week and practically begged him to say something bad about the punishment (which also included reprimands for Scherer, athletic director R.C. Johnson, and others, and salary freezes and probation for Burns and administrative assistant John Flowers). Not Rip Scherer. If he feels the deal is unfair, he wouldn’t say it to me. On the record or off the record, this is what he said: “We’ll beat Ole Miss even without Mike.” Now that’s what I like about Scherer. He is a steadfast guy.