INDY'S WEEKLY ALTERNATIVE NEWSPAPER HIGHLIGHTING ARTS, ENTERTAINMENT AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

Selling the sunshine

The Indianapolis Indians realize that Triple-A baseball is the oddest of sports beasts and perhaps the hardest to market. Close enough to the major leagues that a team can have a world-class stadium and exist in towns bigger than Moose Jaw, Quad Cities or Round Rock, but just far enough away that anyone but the most ardent fan won"t be able to name more than one or two players. Even then, the catch-22 of the minors is that as soon as a player gets good, he gets gone. While some fans fondly remember Razor Shines spending the better part of a decade in old Bush Stadium - he"ll even have his own bobblehead doll this season - those days are long past. The Indians find themselves in a dilemma: There"s apparently nothing their parent club, the Milwaukee Brewers, can do for its "top level" minor league team. Barren of good players in its minor league system, the Brewers have chosen to take what few they have and concentrate them a level down, at Double-A Huntsville. This means that going into the 2003 season, following two years of finishing under .500, the Indians won"t have anyone on the Brewers" top 10 prospect list. There are also hardly any names fans who went to the ballpark last year will recognize. Team MVP Jim Rushford was unceremoniously cut by the Brewers after the former pizza deliveryman made a The Rookie-type jump to the majors. Local resident Ryan Thompson was released after an injury. In all, only six players return from last year"s squad, which says more than many of us would like about the Brewers" hapless state of affairs and why their front office was fired after another dismal season. What, then, are the Indians left with? In the minor leagues, there are three ways to market a team. These are called the "Three P"s": prospects, promotions and pocketbooks. Some teams will have the young, up-and-coming players on their teams. Others will rely on bobbleheads and appearances by The Famous Chicken. The Indians will have this and more, including the first "floppy hat day" in recent memory. All teams will sell a cheap day in the ballpark where parents and kids alike will have a good time. The Indians can do this in spades, with cheap lawn seats overlooking the perfectly manicured outfield. The challenge for the Indians marketing staff, headed by Assistant General Manager Bill Fulton, is not only getting people to the ballpark, but getting them to come back. The park will be full when The Chicken makes his annual appearance and for one of the fireworks nights, but how does a team like the Indians bring those fans back for a game when the only thing they have to sell is the sunshine? According to experts on baseball economics, including Andrew Zimbalist and Doug Pappas, one thing brings fans to the park more than anything else. No, not quarter beer night. Winning. Baseball is a sport that is generational. Ask any regular fan, the one who goes out to the park and keeps a scorecard the whole game, the one who can name the backup catcher and the guy at the end of the bullpen, how he or she came to love the game and I can almost tell you how it starts: "My dad took me to the park when I was 5 and Ö" Coming off two losing seasons and faced with a roster filled with more rejects than prospects, sportswriters are confronted with baseball"s version of a smokescreen. Returning shortstop Bill Hall wants to talk about team unity and not his inability to hit. New Manager Cecil Cooper wants to discuss team speed rather than a projected inability to reach base. I don"t fault either man for trying to distract us from the negatives and raising what hopes there are around town. After all, it"s spring. But in the absence of a clear organizational plan from Milwaukee, the Indians are left to piece together what they can this year. Discovering that a team run by baseball"s commissioner, Bud Selig, is rudderless is like noticing that the sun comes up each morning. Can a team be plagued by every kind of adversity and still succeed? There is a clear model for this type of organization: the Oakland A"s, darlings of baseball insiders and performance analysts everywhere. Can another team follow this model of finding discarded but valuable players? Ladies and gentlemen, your 2003 Indianapolis Indians. The Indians have the perfect example of this type of player in Brooks Kieschnick. A former first round pick by the Cubs, Kieschnick was a great hitter and pitcher in college. The Cubs decided they needed a power-hitting outfielder more than a pitcher and Kieschnick was put in one position. He"s had a couple cups of coffee in the big leagues, but somewhere along the way, Kieschnick was saddled with a tag that"s very tough to shake in the eyes of old-school baseball scouts: "career minor leaguer." The Reds - one of the more progressive organizations in baseball - allowed him to experiment with pitching again last year and now so are the Indians. In essence, Kieschnick becomes two players taking up one roster and salary spot. As a curiosity, he could help the moribund Brewers some, but as a flexible solution to multiple positions, he could be everything the Indians need. The last time the Indians won a Triple-A championship, players like Joey Eischen and Giovanni Carrara, two relievers that were tagged as "career minor leaguers" or "too old to be prospects," led them. Both players are now in the major leagues, so the tags were false. This season Jamey Wright, a former Brewers ace pitcher still struggling to overcome arm problems, will lead them. They"ll add Ruben Quevedo, listed as 6-foot-1 257, but if he"s 257, they forgot to weigh the other half of him. Despite his portly profile, Quevedo has a major league arm. Include Pascual Coco, cut from a team due to legal issues and not lack of talent, and the Indians may just be on to something. The Indians have, by far, the best ballpark in all of baseball, but at some point, they will need to sell more than sunshine and focus on another light: that one at the end of the tunnel. On a sunny day, a family can sit on the lawn, soaking up good baseball and the warm air for less than the cost of a bad movie. If the Indians can catch a few breaks, kids that come to Victory Field this year might some day tell kids of their own stories that start, "I remember when the Indians won a championship Ö" For information and ticket prices about the Indians" season, log on to www.indyindians.com. To order tickets by phone call Ticketmaster at (317) 239-5151; groups of 25 or more call the Indians at (317) 269-3545.