Author's Blog

 July 31, 2010

Golden Baseball - Five and Growing


Entering into its fifth season with 10 teams in three counties, the GBL appears well positioned to grow even further.


Tuesday, March 3, 2009

The Golden Baseball League enters its fifth season with accelerated growth and big plans for the future.  Originally five California and Arizona based teams and a full time traveling team from Japan, the league is now comprised of 10 teams in three counties and three US states.  Most recently, the league added the Tijuana Potros to make in the first professional baseball league to play in Mexico, Canada, and the United States.

Recent acquisitions have focused on adding either existing teams as in the Edmonton Cracker Cats and Calgary Vipers, formerly of the Northern League, or adding teams from markets that recently lost professional baseball teams including the Tuscon Toros and Tijuana, both of which adapted names of teams historically playing within those cities.   The move works to capture at least some of the existing fan base rather than start from scratch in a new market.  Of the five teams added since the 2007 season, only Victoria enters the league without having professional baseball played in town for the preceding season.

With that in mind, the league is focusing on a number of opportunities to take the league to as many as 16 teams in the next couple of years.  The league appears to have given up on, or at least suspend plans for a Bay Area team with the dismantling of Vacaville’s stadium last summer and the time needed for a proposed stadium at Ohlone College to be realized.  The GBL is now focused on the possible move of Bakersfield Blaze and High Desert Mavericks from the Single-A Advanced California League to the Carolina League, leaving two available professional ballparks.  Also in consideration is Hawaii after Major League Baseball decided not to renew an agreement with Hawaiian Winter Baseball.

The GBL league has lost only one team since the 2006 season, the Reno Silver Sox who are leaving town after the relocation of the Arizona Diamondbacks Triple-A affiliate to a new stadium in downtown Reno.  The GBL was holding out hopes of reviving the San Diego Surf Dawgs for the 2010 season, but the team has finally been removed from the leagues website, and a team donning the moniker played in the GBL’s Arizona Winter League.  The leagues apparent waning interest in the Surf Dawgs could be because of another revision to its business plan.  While all of the original six teams, including the Surf Dawgs, were owned by the league, only franchises in Long Beach and Yuma are still owned by the league.  If ownership groups elsewhere are ready to start teams, they would likely get the nod over San Diego.

The GBL also appears to have grown in respectability.  The 2008 season had a turnstile of player contracts purchased by big league clubs, and the league is reported to have, or be close to turning a profit.  Down, but not gone, are the early gimmicks the league relied on to boost its fan base.  While the league did offer Ricky Henderson $1 million to enter the hall of fame as a Surf Dawg, his last professional baseball team, the league seems more intent on focusing on young player development than enticing players such as Jose Conseco out of retirement.  The GBL’s expansion to Mexico also promises not only attention as the only North American baseball league to play in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, but dramatically builds league awareness into a whole new segment of the population, the U.S. Hispanic community.  The Hispanic population may very well back the team from Tijuana as a matter of cultural pride.  Tijuana Brewery, a new sponsor to the GBL, is not only interested in promoting itself at GBL games played at the Potros’ home stadium, but in the U.S. as well.

The road ahead would appear to favor the long term prospects for the league.  Of the eight independent baseball leagues, only three have been in operation longer, and only one, the Frontier League, has more teams.  With a long list of challenges, only time will tell if the GBL will live to see it’s tenth season.  The ever changing nature of the economy, travel burdens associated with a league that spans 3000 miles from Calgary to Tijuana, and competition from a seemingly never ending parade of start-up leagues offer just a few of these challenges.  The defunct Western Baseball League, after all, survived eight seasons before folding.  Yet the GBL has had the benefit of learning from the WBL’s mistakes, as well as starting with teams in two of the former leagues strongest markets, Chico and Long Beach.  Recent growth would help to offset the loss of any poorer performing teams along the way.  The GBL is also the only independent league to operate most of its teams west of the Rocky Mountains (Calgary and Edmonton the exceptions).  Without independent baseball after the WBL folded and before the GBL, the West was an underserved market.  With the departure of any existing western team or, in the case of Hawaii, any league, the GBL appears ready to pounce in and fill the void with little in the way of competition.

The GBL is no longer the fledgling league it once was, and if all goes as planned, should be offering intimate, fan friendly games for years to come.

 


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