The minor leagues is where old ballplayers — washed-up ex-major leaguers — come to die. The fan typically fights the tarnished portrait, but is inevitably left with the sickening sight of an athlete who stayed too long.
It’s a sign of the times for the Calgary Cannons, an old warhorse with joints rustier than the bullpen gate at Burns Stadium.
As the once-proud Pacific Coast League franchise prepares to play out the string 16 years after its baptism at old Foothills Stadium, perhaps it too has stayed too long.
The portrait is not unlike that of Erik Hanson, the ex-Toronto Blue Jay pitcher who a couple of years back played out the string as a Cannon in agonizing fashion, his once million-dollar arm cheerless and lifeless as a Calgary baseball fan. Ironically, when Hanson showcased a live arm in his first tour in the late 1980s, the joint was jumpin’. Now it’s a hot prospect for the obit writers.
Cannons owner Russ Parker has signed a letter of intent to sell the franchise to Chicago investment broker Mike Koldyke, who will relocate it to Albuquerque, N.M., for the 2002 season. The Albuquerque Journal says Koldyke paid more than $10 million US. The deal is conditional on voters giving the nod to the City of Albuquerque in a referendum to use tax dollars to fund the lion’s share of a $30-million stadium or renovation of an existing stadium. Even if the deal were nixed, an unlikely scenario, it would only prolong the agony of a battle-scarred club that has long been ready for pasture.
To Parker, it is a game and a cash register — but, in the end, isn’t it always the cash register that wins? The surprise here is that Parker, who for years has lamented dwindling attendance and operating losses, has taken this long to cash out.
The death watch began last season with a funereal atmosphere at Burns, where some nights the cellar nine couldn’t catch a cold. Average paid attendance was a sorry 4,101, the lowest in history and down about 40 per cent from the glory years of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Parker, who sounded the death knell prior to last season when he almost sold the franchise to a group in Portland, Ore., before nixing the deal, watched from his front-row box seat with a heavy heart. Calgary’s Mr. Baseball cares dearly about the team and, although an enigma in the eyes of many fans, he was always revered for royal treatment of the players.
In recent years, as the shine wore off what was once was a model Triple-A franchise, everyone — cabbies, bartenders, the owner — had a theory about why baseball had become a hard sell, even with the cheapest pro ticket in town ($6.50 for rush seats, $12 for lower box seats).
They blamed the ump, the weather, the sad-sack farmboys sent north by the major-league parent club, Florida Marlins.
They blamed the city for not building a state-of-the-art downtown stadium (so the team could have MORE empty seats) and the hard, backless seats (while fans flocked to the hard, backless seats of McMahon Stadium to watch the Calgary Stampeders football club).
And they blamed faceless minor leaguers while doing little to trumpet the likes of visiting player Ryan Radmanovich, a local hero who had become the first Calgary product to crack the majors. But the club’s failure had much more to do with failing to stay abreast of a vastly changing marketplace. While the sports market, the town and lifestyles changed, the Cannons had their spikes mired in quicksand when they should have been hustling like hell or Pete Rose.
When the Cannons took Calgary by storm in 1985, they were the cool game in town — in the midst of a ripe sports market. Then, kids, the lifeblood of minor-league baseball, didn’t have Playstation video games and skateboards.
Adults weren’t surfing the World Wide Web.
Yet, when it was obvious that only a dynamic and extravagant marketing strategy would revive the team, fans were paralysed by cheap and corny game promotions.
The club hit singles when it needed an imagination and a home run to win the marketing game.
Somewhere along the way, even the players changed — many refused to sign autographs or associate with the riff-raff in the stands.
When the team needed charisma and imagination, Parker, the former owner of Calgary Copier, fired charisma — namely, ex-general manager Tom Valcke, who had become an instant hit with fans in his one season. While General Electric had Jack Welch at the helm for 20 years, the Cannons had musical GMs.
Perhaps the Cannons still wouldn’t have survived, even if they had been more receptive to changing with the times. Yet, watching this ex-star play out the longest season, some fans will shrug and say: “It’s just not a baseball town.”
Others will ask the tough question: “What if Parker and the Cannons had given it their best shot?”
