Oceanside May Be in On-Deck Circle for Minor League Baseball

It has the makings of a smash hit: There’s this handsome movie star, and he has this vision. A vision of baseball. A vision of creating his own team and his own ball field from scratch.

An empty cornfield would come in handy about now.

But no. The best the city of Oceanside can come up with on short notice is an old city dump, and that just isn’t going to cut it, as far as romantic notions go.

The dream of minor league baseball in Oceanside will not die easily, however, despite the lack of a suitable site for a stadium. A group of minor league baseball owners, led by Encinitas attorney Barry Axelrod and actor Mark Harmon, has embarked on a quest to make that dream a reality.

“Mark and I would like to do it again somewhere, and I’d love it to be in Oceanside, because it’s basically home for me,” said Axelrod, who, besides being an attorney, is also an agent for professional athletes, including baseball players. His old college chum is Harmon, voted “The Sexiest Man Alive” by the readers of People magazine two years ago.

Axelrod said that, 10 years ago, he and Harmon played softball and basketball together at UCLA. “We always said we’d love to own a minor league ball team,” Axelrod said Wednesday.

Broke 40-Year Attendance Record

The pair made it happen in 1987 when they, along with other investors, purchased the franchise for the Ventura Gulls and moved the team to San Bernardino. There the new San Bernardino Spirit has met with phenomenal success--in its first year the team broke a 40-year-old California League attendance record by drawing more than 161,000 fans.

Buoyed by their success, Axelrod, Harmon and the other investors began considering acquiring another team. While the California League now consists of 10 teams, most of those have traditionally been clustered in the Central Valley and Northern California. “We think there’s room for one or two other teams down here in Southern California,” Axelrod said.

San Bernardino, Riverside and Palm Springs are the only Southern California cities with minor league teams. Santa Barbara, Ontario, Upland, Hesperia and Long Beach are among those under consideration by Axelrod and his co-investors, he said.

“But, when we looked at Oceanside, we felt that the demographics, the size, the population were very similar to what had worked for us in San Bernardino,” he said. San Diego County also seemed the ideal location because no other minor league team exists here, not since the Padres went big-league in 1969.

Axelrod said the investors are not worried that the proximity of the Padres would siphon off baseball fans, since the residents of North County tend to have a separate identity from the city of San Diego. In fact, six of the 10 ballparks in the California League are within 90 miles of a major league club, and it hasn’t hurt them any, he said.

Besides, the minor leagues are a whole different ballgame. “It costs a fraction of what it costs to go see a major league team, and there’s a real camaraderie, a sense of civic pride in the team,” Axelrod said. “It’s just a whole different way of enjoying baseball.”

Explosion in Asking Price

A recent explosion in the asking price of minor league franchises has put the cost for both would-be owners and host cities in a whole different ballpark as well. Three years ago, the average Class A franchise could be acquired for less than $250,000, according to a study done by Oceanside’s recreation department. Now owners are paying upward of $600,000, the study found.

Recreation director Patrick Sanchez attributed the boom to celebrities such as Harmon getting into the act and driving up the price.

“Apparently, minor league baseball is becoming quite the thing among Hollywood types,” Sanchez said.

“I’d like to think it’s partly because of the success we’ve had in San Bernardino,” Axelrod said. “We got into it because it was fun; now it’s economically viable. A lot of people are saying this is the investment of the ‘80s.”

But the investment goes only so far, as Oceanside is learning.

“When we’re looking at putting between $600,000 and a million into the franchise, I don’t think we can also be expected to build the ballpark,” Axelrod said.

The city’s study bore out its worst fears: Most minor league teams play in stadiums that were purchased, built or renovated by their host cities. Although the terms of the agreement vary from city to city, the franchise generally leases the stadium from the city, the study found.

Great If You Like Methane

The obvious location in Oceanside would be Recreation Park on Maxson Street, where the city’s Little League team plays. The City Council, inspired by the proposal by Harmon’s group of investors in May, asked the city’s recreation director to look into the feasibility of it all.

Unfortunately, Sanchez found that the park, built on top of an old city dump, has some possibly insurmountable problems.

For one thing, the ground has a way of settling a few inches each year--up to a foot or more in especially rainy years. Also, there’s the matter of the methane gas produced underground by the decaying garbage.

City officials feel that the gas problem has been solved with a system of wells that extract and pump it to a collection tank, but those features would have to be incorporated into the stadium. Also, the site is probably not large enough to accommodate the minimum of 3,500 seats and 1,200 parking spaces required by the California League, the recreation department study found.

Renovation of Recreation Park to minor league standards would cost in the neighborhood of $1.5 million to $3 million, the study concluded.

The City Council, without comment, accepted the findings of Sanchez’s study Wednesday, and chose to move forward with only the improvements necessary to keep the current ballpark up to par, including irrigation and a new scoreboard.

Other Possible Sites

“The cost of renovation is prohibitive,” Sanchez acknowledged after the council meeting. In fact, for $3 million, the city could build a brand-new facility that could be used for minor league baseball and many other things as well, he said.

And yes, he said, there are other possible sites for a new stadium within the city limits, including a 26-acre chunk of undeveloped open space known as Sherbourne Park, in the city’s eastern reaches.

Sanchez said he thinks that the city will continue to be interested in hosting a minor league team, but that the shocking reality of the required financial investment may keep things on the back burner for a while.

Not that Harmon and company are in any hurry. “There are no teams for sale in the California League right now anyway,” Axelrod said. “Besides, there are a lot of elements that have to come together first. . . . We’ve gotten a lot of credit for putting on a real first-class show in San Bernardino, and I don’t think we’d want to do it any other way.”