The Pros and Cons of Boyd Sports Running the Elizabethton Twins
They’ll draw more fans. But at what cost, ultimately?
Today the Elizabethton City Council is expected to approve a contract with Boyd Sports to operate the Elizabethton Twins.
For the past 44 years the Twins have contributed to the “Mom and Pop” feel of the Appalachian League by being run by the City’s Parks and Recreation Department. Which meant that, say, if you wanted to call the Twins’ front office for advance tickets or if you could bring a cooler or sign to Joe O’Brien Field you’d often have to leave a message on an answering machine at the Parks and Recreation Department that was never returned.
It’s 2019 and a Parks and Recreation Department should not be running a professional sports franchise.
The question is if Boyd Sports should be running the Twins. Of the five professional sports franchises north of Knoxville in east Tennessee, only the Kingsport Mets will not be run by this group.
In some ways this is a positive. Incredibly, for 44 years, the Twins never had a marketing department. That’s a necessary item for a professional sports franchise.
Boyd Sports will presumably provide that, and the Twins, who drew just 15,329 fans last season, will likely bring more people through the turnstiles, just as the Johnson City Cardinals did when Boyd took over their operations.
How many people? In 2001 the Cardinals, with Rick Ankiel on their roster in rehab as a drawing card, drew less than half (31,000) the seasonal amount of what Johnson City did last year (65,631).
What does it say about baseball in the 21st Century or the Tri-Cities that more people care to buy tickets for “Star Wars Night” than to see a player that finished second in the Rookie of the Year Award balloting the season before?
It’s a comment on the importance of marketing, the area as a sports town, and the influence of Boyd Sports.
But if Boyd is running all the ball clubs around here but one, where’s the competition? Ticket prices and promotions figure to be uniform. So does media relations and trying to shape the public view.
It’s as if nobody around here knows how to run a pro sports franchise, so they just call up Boyd and ask them to do it.
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Which is probably the case.
Boyd Sports will be interested in Boyd. They’re currently exploring making the Tennessee Smokies the Knoxville Smokies again, which would be good for Knoxville and Boyd but not so good for Sevierville, where the Smokies have played since 2000.
They’ll either have an empty ballpark or another Appalachian League franchise, and therefore the Tri-Cities stays what Sevierville professional baseball would become; small.
No baseball in spring; just the summer. No real knowledge of who the players will be prior to the season. A handful of quality players passing through without publicity, rather than the focus of who will be playing for the neighboring big club in a short period of time for a season or two. And too many teams for the media to effectively cover, all fighting for the same fans.
There are four professional baseball teams in New York City (New York Yankees, New York Mets, Brooklyn Cyclones, Staten Island Yankees), population 8,623,000. There are five in the Tri-Cities (Bristol Pirates, Elizabethton Twins, Greeneville Reds, Johnson City Cardinals, and Kingsport Mets), population 480,000.
Can this area with 1/18 the population actually support more professional baseball teams than a baseball mecca like New York City? Does it?
Rooting for minor league baseball in the Tri-Cities continues to be an act that instead of bringing the region together, like rooting for ETSU or the Tennessee Volunteers does, provides instead an insular type of rooting for local town against local town like a high school rivalry, which divides the Tri-Cities rather than unites them.
If a Knoxville downtown park is built for the Smokies, as was discussed yesterday by Knoxville city officials, with so many teams run by Boyd Sports Smokies Stadium in Sevierville can become something of a bargaining chip held over the Tri-Cities based teams.
If you were upset that money was taken from budgets allocated for the police station and youth athletic fields in Elizabethton for the O’Brien Field renovations, just imagine what will have to be done for it to stay compliant with Smokies Stadium if that becomes the standard for the Appalachian League.
In the long run, doesn’t it seem more cost-effective to build one new ballpark or renovate an existing one to AA standards than to maintain multiple ballparks for Rookie League standards, let alone likely build a new one in Bristol and/or Kingsport as has been discussed?
Unfortunately, for the Tri-Cities to move up the minor league baseball ladder, the community would have to be drafted by an organization wishing to place a team here; likely by a club that might want to have a neighboring farm club they could call players up from.
Could a major league franchise in Nashville or Charlotte provide such a desire?
It may be the only hope to break away from the same old same old.
Marky Billson is a Tri-Cities based sports talk show host. Watch his show live from 12–2 p.m. ET weekdays or archived here.
