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With the SWB Yankees playing most of their games in New York State, and none of them here, and changing their name to the Empire State Yankees while PNC stadium is refurbished a lot of fans are worried that the Yankees never liked it here and this season will give them a spike out the door and they will never make it safely home again.
The AAA Yankees are playing 37 of their “home” games in Rochester, 10 in Syracuse and six in Buffalo.
Maybe those fans are right. Minor League agreements with Major League franchises are usually two or four years and they expire in even years. Syracuse’s agreement with Washington is signed through 2014. But Rochester’s agreement with the Twins and Buffalo’s agreement with the Mets both expire after this season.
And if the Yankees and their partner Mandalay buy the AAA Yankees they could move the team after this season. So it’s possible in theory that the AAA Yankees could not comeback to SWB. But if that happens SWB is guaranteed an AAA franchise. So if the Yankees moved, say, to Rochester then we could get the displaced Rochester team or some other team if teams are shuffled around.
Maybe, but I suspect the Yankees will come back. But in my opinion, for purposes of attendance, it doesn’t matter if they do and furthermore, though everyone involved seems fixated on having a AAA team, for purposes of attendance that doesn’t matter either.
Last season the SWB Yankees averaged 4,500 per game placing them 54th in average attendance per game among all affiliated minor league teams. They were 27th among the 30 AAA teams and 13th of 14 in International League teams.
The number one minor league team in attendance last year was the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs, the Phillies AAA team, remember them?, with an average of 9,248 well over double what our Yankees did. Even the Phillies AA team, Reading outdrew the SWB Yankees by 2,000 a game.
Among the 53 teams ahead of the SWB Yankees were 12 AA teams and 11 A teams, from such baseball hotbeds as Springdale, Arkansas and Manchester, New Hampshire. Dayton, Ohio, with an A team was fifth overall, in minor league attendance.
Granted Scranton-Wilkes-Barre is the third smallest market in the International League and even smaller than some of the A and AA teams that outranked SWB in attendance last season, but that hardly explains the precipitous decline in attendance here which has fallen by half since the Yankees came here in 2007.
There are a lot of dynamics involved. Changing the name from Red Barons to Yankees, raising prices, eliminating the downstairs bleacher sections, limiting giveaways and downplaying personal appearances didn’t help. You didn’t see the SWB Yankee players reading to kids at libraries as Shane Victorino did in West Pittston when he was with the Red Barons.
The Yankees come with a certain air of aloofness that diminishes the feeling that they are a local team. But that can’t account for what happened to attendance here.
Minor league GMs will say attendance doesn’t have much to do with the team’s affiliation or the level of play. The three biggest drivers are good weather on home weekends, fireworks and the ballpark.
When Lackawanna Multi-Purpose Stadium opened in 1989 it was already on its way to obsolescence, as that was the year ground was broken on Camden Yards marking the beginning of the end for cookie-cutter, fake-grass, monstrosities and ushering the era of baseball only, real grass, retro-look, fan-friendly, open-concourse, in-town ballparks.
So what do the Lehigh Valley; Manchester, New Hampshire and Dayton minor league franchises have that the SWB Yankees don’t have? Downtown retro, single-level, open-concourse ballparks which opened in the last five years.
We can’t move PNC Field, but just imagine one of those retro fields in downtown W-B on the boulevard across from Stegmaier. For 72 nights a year the town would rock.
So they are doing the next best thing salvaging a real ballpark from the ruins of the old Stadium. I’ll argue that it costs too much, $40 million, and I’ll argue that the taxpayers shouldn’t be paying to build a park for a team that pays a DH more than that, but I’ll also argue it’s the right thing to do, and our only hope.