Minor league teams risk losing place to play
EUGENE, Ore. — Ed Willson has a jar filled with dirt sitting on his desk.
For more than 40 years, Willson has been a fan of the minor league baseball team in Eugene, Ore., the Emeralds, and a season-ticket holder for 22 seasons. He was crushed when Civic Stadium, the longtime home of the team, burned to the ground in 2015. “It was a serious heartbreak,” Willson said.
After the fire, Willson made a pilgrimage to the scorched diamond, where he filled a plastic bag with dirt from the pitcher’s mound that he considered sacred. He planned to give it to the team when it began construction on its new stadium.
Nine years later, the dirt is still on Willson’s desk. The Emeralds are still without a permanent home. And there’s a risk that the team, after 69 seasons, may leave town altogether.
Although the Emeralds (also known for their Sasquatch mascot, Sluggo) have survived wildfires, losing seasons, recessions, MLB’S 2020 reorganization of the minor leagues and COVID, they are a team without a ballpark.
And the debate about the Emeralds’ fate — in the birthplace of Nike, no less — is a testament to the struggle for affordable, in-person sports to survive in the current Gilded Age.
Nor are the Emeralds the only minor league baseball team that has reached a crisis point as a result of a ballpark problem. In 2020, MLB imposed new guidelines for its minor league stadiums. They include LED lighting, changing rooms for women, new fencing, expanded training facilities and a larger clubhouse. Those fixes are pricey.
In California, the Visalia Rawhide are fighting for stadium improvement funds, an earshot away from a childhood home of Hollywood baseball star Kevin Costner. (If you build it, they will come?) Up north on Interstate 5 in Oregon, the Hillsboro Hops find themselves in a similar predicament as the Emeralds, and are also lobbying lawmakers for funding for a new park, as are the Everett Aquasox in Washington.
Even North Carolina’s Durham Bulls, of “Bull Durham” fame, were gobsmacked by their renovation price tag and reached out for $9.1 million in city funding. The Lancaster Jethawks in California shut down in 2021 in part because of the city’s lack of interest in maintaining the team’s ballpark.
“I hate to think about the team leaving,” Willson said of the Emeralds. “It would be one more resource that the community has lost.”
In recent years, the Emeralds have played their games at PK Park, the University of Oregon’s baseball stadium, and fans have consistently filled the newer, less wood-splintered stands. Before 2020, when the team had a shorter, 76-game season (half of them at home), it averaged more than 20 sellouts of more than 3,600 tickets.
In a restricted return during COVID in 2021, the team sold 84,000 tickets, the first time it had dipped below 100,000 in generations. Last year, in 58 games at PK Park, the team sold 150,000 tickets, roughly the population of Eugene.
In their temporary home, the Emeralds, a San Francisco Giants affiliate, ended their 2021 season in first place after being promoted to the high-a class, the third-highest level in the minors (below Triple-a and Double-a but above Single-a), and have had their league’s best record in two of the past three seasons. Casey Schmitt, an infielder who made his major-league debut with the Giants last year, was an Emerald in 2022.
But the team’s PK Park lease ends in 2030, and the league has also imposed fundraising deadlines that the Emeralds are not meeting. The team is more than $50 million short of the estimated $90 million it will take to build a permanent home.
“We really love the Ems,” Eugene Mayor Lucy Vinis said. “We’d love to keep them. We also don’t have the money. It’s a very painful conflict.”
Searching for funds
The proposed stadium has no greater advocate than Benavides, going into his 15th season as the Emeralds’ general manager.
A Los Angeles-bred Dodgers fan (who now roots for the Giants, much to his mother’s dismay), he has spent years lobbying lawmakers, petitioning fans and writing opinion essays about the team’s “existential crisis.”
Advocates for the team announced a proposal that would build a stadium at the Lane County Fairgrounds, seating 4,350 for baseball and up to 10,000 for concerts. The price tag: $90 million. In addition to baseball games and concerts, the stadium would host youth sports, MMA and boxing events, and high school graduations, as well as have potential for disaster relief, Benavides said.
He talks through his funding map like the coaching staff running through the roster and players’ statistics. As of now, the Emeralds are counting on $35 million from a county lodging tax. County commissioners need to give final clearance for revenue from the hotel tax, which was passed in 2022, to go toward the stadium. The team also needs $15 million from a city bond issue, which voters will decide May 21.
Thanks in part to an appearance by Sluggo at the Statehouse in Salem, the Emeralds have received $15 million from a state appropriation. They also have $1.5 million in federal funds and $23.5 million committed by the Emeralds organization in their coffers.
So, $50 million of it is in flux. To make his case, Benavides points to a 2023 analysis from Econorthwest, a public policy firm, that estimated the stadium’s construction would stimulate $127.8 million in economic output and $47.9 million in labor income.
In minor-league baseball, the parent club (the Giants) pays for players but typically does not finance ballparks, which are generally owned and operated independently of their parent teams. It’s a dynamic that can leave a privately or taxpayer-funded stadium in the lurch.
The Emeralds’ owner, the Elmore Sports Group, a Bloomington, Ind., conglomerate of several minor-league teams, would not own the stadium; Lane County would. Thus, Elmore Sports holds the option to move the team.
“As owners, we see ourselves as the caretakers, stewards of the teams,” said D.G. Elmore, the group’s chair, whose father, Dave, bought the team in the mid-1980s and died last year.
“We don’t see it, the possibility of moving teams. I desperately hope we don’t have to do it.”
Red tape at the fairgrounds
The fairgrounds complex, where the proposed stadium would be erected, sits in the Jefferson Westside part of Eugene, walking distance from downtown, which has struggled with a recent increase in homelessness and drug use.
The neighborhood surrounding the site is filled with lawn signs for and against the stadium. “No! Stadium at the fairgrounds” may live next door to an image of Sluggo’s outstretched green, fuzzy arms and “Play ball at the fairgrounds!”
The board of the Jefferson Westside Neighbors, the area that encompasses the fairgrounds and surrounding residences, voted in favor of the stadium.
“I’m not sporty, and I don’t follow baseball,” said Ted Coopman, the board’s chair. The fairgrounds have a large indoor space used for a holiday market and conferences year round, wide parking lots where carnival rides bloom in the summer, and barns for livestock vying for blue ribbons, “but their dairy barns are from the turn of the century, and not the most recent one,” Coopman added. “It really needs some help, and it seems like a good way to modernize it and bring more people into the neighborhood.”
Chief among the critics is Taxpayers for Transparency, a group of stadium opponents largely led by the city’s hoteliers. They argue that the public shouldn’t pay for the stadium and that Elmore Sports, a for-profit, out-of-state entity, should not occupy land owned by the county. They have also raised concern about the long-term costs and the lack of guarantees that a new ballpark would keep the Emeralds in town.
As a season of red tape looms, Benavides will be strategizing in the front office. While he dreams of Shohei Ohtani’s sneezing up some of his $700 million contract with the Dodgers, he’s not relying on it.
He needs the city bonds to pass May 21, the lodging tax revenue and then the county commissioners’ approval on everything.
As for Willson, he’ll continue to lobby his lawmakers, with his jar of pitcher’s mound dirt looking back at him.
“It’s starting to feel like we need a miracle to get the funding,” he said. “Fortunately, this is baseball. So miracles happen all the time. I’m hopeful.”