Scranton Area Is Seeking Triple A Baseball Team

Baseball fans in northeast Pennsylvania are so hungry for a minor league baseball club that in just three months, more than 2,000 season tickets have been sold for a non-existent team.

The stadium for this non-team has not been built yet. It hasn’t even been designed.

“That’s just mind-boggling,” said Detroit Tigers first-base coach Dick Tracewski. “Let’s put this into perspective. The triple A minor league club in Syracuse has been around since the 1900s and you know how many season tickets they sell a year? About 400.

“I think this shows how much people in northeastern Pennsylvania want to have a baseball team,” he said.

A triple A club is one step away from the major leagues. Efforts to secure a franchise have been made largely through the efforts of John McGee, president of Northeastern Baseball Inc., a non-profit, non-paying organization designed solely to bring the national pastime to the region.

McGee, 34, is a devout baseball fan, an ex-high school player with a passion to bring the sport to the Scranton-Wilkes-Barre area. His nine-year-old dream is nearing a reality. When major-league baseball expands, probably within the next two years, the AAA International League also will expand.

“The (major league) clubs will be beating the door down to get their minor league team into northeasten Pennsylvania,” said Tracewski, a native Pennsylvanian and honorary chairman of Northeast Baseball. “Once the stadium is built, there won’t be a problem at all.”

Getting a commitment from the Lackawanna County government to built a stadium was not an easy task. But last October the county commissioners adopted a resolution to construct a multi-purpose stadium between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre if 2,000 season tickets were sold by Jan. 1, 1985. Cost: $238 per seat.

McGee knew it wasn’t going to be easy. It wasn’t easy raising $20,000 in 1979 for a firm to study the feasibility of baseball in the region. Raffles, concerts and contributions raised the money.

But a three-month effort to raise nearly $500,000 for a 1987 nameless team without a stadium was another story.

Falling short of the 2,000 season tickets would probably have ended McGee’s dream. All of the trips to minor league baseball cities around the country would have been wasted, as would the phone calls to minor league commissioners, the hours persuading government officials to take a chance.

His dream was in the bottom of the ninth. Was he worried?

“Sure, I had doubts,” he said. “If you don’t have doubts, you’re naive.”

Businesses in the area responded. Slick brochures were designed and printed for free. A hotel suite was donated as an office; so was the office furniture that was moved in.

A bus company even donated a trip to Syracuse and Rochester.