Buffalo Is Building a Baseball Park

A glistening new baseball stadium is taking shape amid downtown buildings and rising along with the concrete and steel are hopes the city may one day be home to a major league team.

Workmen toiling daily through an unusually mild winter are two months ahead of schedule on some construction phases of Pilot Field, a $42 million, 19,500-seat facility that will serve as home to the Triple-A Buffalo Bisons of the American Association when it opens next spring.

And already civic cheerleaders are lobbying to bring big league baseball to town -- and are convinced the effort is more than a pipe dream.

“The new stadium is just a great thing for the city and the entire community,” says Mayor James Griffin, a major force behind the stadium project. “What we’ll have is a great minor league stadium.”

Griffin and other officials lobbied long and hard to get New York State to provide $25.5 million for the stadium, which sits on a parcel of land a block away from the city’s 6.4 mile light rail rapid transit line and within view of the state Thruway.

“The stadium will play a key role in our efforts to revitalize this city and help bring people back downtown,” the mayor added.

First proposed as a $90 million, 40,000-seat domed stadium, financial realities and the lack of a commitment for a major league franchise forced officials to scale down the project.

Stadium proponents are quick to point out the facility can be expanded to 40,000 seats in a construction period of seven to eight months for about $15 million--but there is one hitch attached.

“I believe we would have to get some sign from the commissioner and the major leagues to say they’re going to expand,” Griffin observed.

Buffalo is among about a dozen cities that have shown an active interest in playing home to a new major league team, with Washington, D.C., Denver, Indianapolis, New Orleans and Miami among the group.

Rich Levin, director of news for baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth’s office, said the interested cities were given criteria for obtaining an expansion team--ownership, management, stadium, state and local government support and location.

“Right now we’re basically where we’ve been for the last year and a half,” Levin said. “The interested cities have been told there is no timetable for expansion.”

The Bisons, a successful operation owned by Rich Products Corp., and headed by the energetic Robert Rich Jr., currently play in 50-year-old War Memorial Stadium, a concrete fortress built as a WPA project mainly for football games and automobile races.

When the NFL Buffalo Bills left the facility after the 1972 season, a baseball field was carved out of War Memorial, first to house a Double-A Eastern League team from 1979 through 1984. Rich purchased the Wichita franchise in 1984 and moved it to Buffalo for the 1985 season.

With the use of several slick promotional tools, the Bisons said they attracted a city record 425,113 fans to their games last season, though some dispute whether that many fans actually passed through the turnstiles.

While the attendance record may have turned the heads of the major league bigwigs, the city has had problems shaking its bad weather reputation.

A major promotion by the Bisons this spring, an American League exhibition game between the Cleveland Indians, the Bisons parent club, and the Toronto Blue Jays, almost didn’t take place.

Seven inches of snow fell four days before the scheduled April 4 game. Stadium and city crews worked feverishly to plow and haul the snow off the field, but snow, rain and cold forced the game to be postponed for a day. The contest was played April 5 before an announced crowd of 16,620.

“Really, the longer they (the major leagues) wait on the expansion question, it’s better for us,” said Mike Billoni, Bisons vice president-general manager. “We’ve proven we can draw people out to the ballpark, and it will be magnified much more when we move into the new stadium.”

The Bisons continue their effort to be included in any future major league expansion, with the new stadium the backbone of the charge.

“We’re following the framework of the expansion committee, and doing everything they’re set up as a prerequisite of getting an expansion team,” Billoni added. “One advantage we have is that we have an existing franchise.”

Billoni also will not put a time framework on when fans can expect the major leagues to shuffle into Buffalo, and scoffs at detractors who criticize the city for building a new stadium without assurances of a future big league team.

“We’re making all the behind the scenes efforts,” he said. “I wouldn’t bet against Bob Rich in anything.”