|
1917-18 Winter Meetings
Tempe owners were seeing major dollar signs ($$$$) following the Sun Devils league championship this past season. So they spared no expense when hosting this year's Winter Meetings, putting extravagance on every street corner during the week's festivities.
Tempe also during the week unveiled a major stadium project — Diablo Stadium — that would put a new park in the heart of town, seating more than any other in the Arizona League. Owners figured with Babe Ruth, only 22 now, playing right field and smacking balls all over the place for the next 10-15 years, there was a lot of money to be made with baseball in Tempe — and hopefully more championships to be won. So, they seized on the opportunity while the iron was hot.
Secretly, some wondered if Tempe leaders were going a little too overboard. Some hefty money would have to be spent to pull everything off, and owners were dipping into a lot of others' pocketbooks to get the process started. Tempe's chief owner kept telling everyone not to worry. He'd done the math and foresaw great economic times ahead. He had a plan to pay everyone back. Of course that put a lot of weight on his team to win and keep fans in the seats.
• Meanwhile, the folks in Sedona were having the opposite problem. Owner Hans Larsen reported during the Winter Meetings that his franchise was in desperate need of new facilities but he didn't have the cash to pay for it. He brought the matter up before the Sedona town government back last spring but was virtually laughed out of town hall.
Larsen had major egg on his face this past season when Sedona leaders effectively kicked the team out of its stadium for a week to hold an arts festival, featuring vendors from all over the country and world. The team, which handn't been made aware for the festival until about two weeks prior, had to play home games at its Double A facility at West Fork, which was about a quarter of the size of the big club's stadium. Another home set had to be move to Flagstaff, turning that into a home series for the Lumberjacks.
Sedona was 69-93 this past year and prospects for the near future don't look that promising. Clyde Cooley, who has been searching for a franchise for his town of Show Low for years now, offered to "take the poor, pitiful Scorpions" off Larsen's hands. But that only made Larsen even more mad. Larsen had lost some big bucks to Cooley during the owners and friends' yearly poker game the past few years (ie "The Game" as many called it). There was no way he was going to give him the satisfaction of taking his baseball team, too.
"We'll find a way to make it work in Sedona," Larsen said.
• Baseball's popularity remains high in most AZL cities, even Kayenta, which has been showing signs of life the past few years. Carefree remains a baseball town on the rise, and the Blues fell just short of getting to play for the Cactus Champions Cup this season. The franchise has been exploring the possibility of a nickname change after outcries by some fans that "Carefree Blues" is too much of a downer. One person suggested Carefree Cardinals, but commissioner Doc Victory didn't like that. "No professional franchise in Arizona should ever be nicknamed Cardinals," he said.
• The Nevada-Utah Baseball Association has plans for a short-season summer schedule this year. The league is undergoing an overhaul in leadership, with plans to restart things on a small scale and build from there... We'll see what happens...
• The commissioner's grandson, "Lil Doc" Victory has said if he doesn't get drafted by the AZL this season, he'll play in the Nevada-Utah league in 1918. Not that they want him either...
|