All Fun and Games

For 70 nights a year, surrounded by a desert of Joshua trees and sagebrush, Matt Ellis is ringmaster to a manic mix of baseball and vaudeville.

Part owner and general manager of the Lancaster JetHawks, a minor league baseball team, Ellis doesn’t want to just amuse the spectators. He wants to put on a show, a show that will knock ‘em dead and have fans dancing in the aisles.

And he’s succeeding too. He’s got them doing the Macarena and the chicken dance and shimmying on his team’s dugout when it’s only 38 degrees and the chill desert wind is howling through his sparkling new $14-million stadium.

He has batters and he has dancing girls and comedians. There are pitchers and there are rock bands. Bleacher seats? OK, but how about watching from a team hot tub? Catch pop flies? Well, yes, and then catch the Dynamite Lady, blowing herself up for laughs.

Ever since the team migrated from Riverside last year, after one dismal season where it wasn’t unusual to have only 200 people in the stands, just putting on baseball games isn’t enough for the 28-year-old Ellis.

Backed up by the Hawkettes, his dancing female ushers, and KaBoom--the team’s half-jet, half-hawk mascot--the JetHawks have become the biggest thing to land in the Antelope Valley since the space shuttle.

“JetHawks games have become the place to be,” said Vicky Vogel of Lancaster, an elementary school teacher who attends a home game once a week with her family. “We had friends in from Germany, and when we picked them up from the airport, this was the first place we brought them. I told them, ‘Out here . . . this is the biggest thing going.’ ”

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The JetHawks, a Class-A affiliate of the Seattle Mariners, drew more than 300,000 fans last year to The Hangar, the stadium that the city of Lancaster built for them. They averaged 4,523 spectators a game--23 more than the park has seats for. They sold tickets to two picnic areas just outside the foul lines to accommodate the extra demand.

In the nine games so far this season, attendance has dropped to 3,900 a game, but most of those were played on nights when frigid desert winds were ripping through the stadium. It was amazing that anyone showed up, Ellis said.

But they do. The JetHawk faithful are out there in 38-degree weather, running the bases with KaBoom, or dancing with the Hawkettes. And if they aren’t dancing, Ellis gets nervous.

If the show’s not moving fast enough, doesn’t have the proper amount of energy, Ellis will change “the script” and move up a promotion or act to get things going again.

He is serious when he boasts that last season was a good year because “we had the highest percentage of people anywhere in the country doing the Macarena.”

Baseball teams, including major league teams, have always tried to attract audiences with promotions and giveaways. But Ellis was voted the 1996 Executive of the Year in the 10-team California League because he is doing it with such flair.

He was the talk of last year’s minor league executive winter meetings in Boston.

“The other team executives were slapping us on the back for creating the dancing ushers,” said Melinda Mayne, JetHawks public relations officer. “It was nice to be recognized for what we’ve tried to do here.”

Ellis says he has to give the fans a little extra because he can’t depend on the players to draw audiences on their own. The Mariners dictate all personnel moves, including who manages the team, so it is the Seattle office that sets up the action on the field. Seattle can move a JetHawk star player to another affiliate or move him up to the big leagues whenever they choose.

The Mariners promoted the popular Jose Cruz Jr. to a Class-AA team in the middle of the season last year.

“We have to make sure that even on nights when the team loses 16-0, or it’s cold, that our fans have a good time,” Ellis said. “This is a tough sell. . . . My fans don’t know minor league players. . . . Still, we’re getting good reviews.”

The good reviews are coming less for the baseball team, which has a 9-12 record this season, and more for the off-the-field antics, such as the Mascot Race, in which KaBoom races a young fan around the bases between innings and the Hawkettes do high kicking dances in their red-and-white jogging suits.

Last year, lucky fans could get a haircut or lounge in a hot tub next to the field while watching the team play.

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Ellis wants to rid his game of the inevitable down time that comes in baseball. Organ music? Sometimes, but more often the thumping recorded beat of rock groups Pearl Jam or the Stray Cats is heard. During the seventh-inning stretch, a Jerry Lewis impersonator might do the Macarena with a couple of the ballplayers.

The sixth inning is usually the Peanut Inning. If the home team scores in the sixth, a case of peanuts is pitched out to the fans.

“My husband was chosen for the dance contest,” Vogel said. “I put his name in the raffle and he didn’t know it and he really didn’t want to, but he had to dance on the dugout with the Hawkettes.

“It was hilarious.”

This plucky desire to entertain, to try anything to please, goes a long way with the fans, especially on nights when something goes wrong.

Like when someone stole KaBoom’s costume, jet pack and all. Stalking the stadium on a recent night, barking orders to his staff through a walkie-talkie, Ellis recalled assembling the staff in a panic to discuss what could be done to replace the Mascot Race.

“We had to come up with an idea fast, and somebody came up with Stealth Man,” Ellis said. “With the stealth fighter being built over here, we thought it was a natural.”

The idea was to race Stealth Man, an invisible hero, against a small child in place of the kidnapped KaBoom. So while the little girl chosen for the evening’s race scurried around the bases, arms pumping and pigtails flying behind her, the public address announcer, the only one who presumably could see Stealth Man, alerted fans to where the invisible mascot was on the field.

The little girl won the race, as far as anyone could see, but the fans were left scratching their heads, trying to figure out what the point of the promo was.

“You have to know how to think on your feet in this business,” Mayne said. “Sure, sometimes the acts don’t work out, but many times the fans don’t even know you’re ad-libbing.”

Another act that didn’t play well in The Hangar was the Dynamite Lady, Allison Bly. Last year, Ellis hired Bly to appear at a game in the first half of the season. The Dynamite Lady’s act was simple, according to Ellis. She sat in a plastic foam box and blew it up with explosives, he said, emerging unscathed.

“They didn’t get it. The fans just sat there slack-jawed staring at each other,” Ellis said, laughing. “Hey, they loved her on ‘The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,’ and she killed them in other minor league parks. . . . Here, nothing.

“I turned around and asked my staff, ‘Did that act die as badly as I think it did?’ Nobody said a thing.”

Anybody afraid to try new acts, different promotions, is not going to last in this business, Ellis said. In his nine years in minor league baseball, Ellis said the only period he didn’t enjoy was 1995, when the JetHawks were the Riverside Pilots and sold only 56,601 tickets all season--an average of barely 800 per game.

Ellis said Riverside taught him to doubt the old baseball saying that there was no such thing as a bad baseball town. “I guess bad circumstances can turn any town into a bad baseball town. A bad stadium or a stadium located in an area that’s perceived to be unsafe and there is nothing you can do. We did the same type of entertainment as now. I guess our brand of shows is better when people are in the stands.”

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Ellis developed his showmanship from waiting on tables at Disneyland when he was in high school and his love for baseball from his father, Mike Ellis, president of the JetHawks, who also runs a minor league team in Canada.

Matt Ellis began as director of operations for the minor league Phoenix Firebirds.

“People ask me all the time, ‘When are you moving to the major league level?’ ” Ellis said. “I got nothing against the major leagues, but I love it here, putting on this kind of attraction, dealing with the people. I don’t think the major leagues can beat this.”