Promotions Are Name of the Game for JetHawks

On a hot night at “the Hangar” baseball stadium, two young men peeled off their tops, reached into coolers and pulled out two frozen T-shirts folded into hard squares.

The challenge: Crack open the icy shirts and be the first to don the garment to win a prize.

Technically, the fans are paying to see the JetHawks minor league baseball team. But the fans themselves seem to provide much of the entertainment. The goofy diversions range from a Twister game in front of the dugout between innings to a contest throwing tennis balls ($1 a pop) through colored Hula-Hoops after the game.

“We want people to walk out of the ballpark and say, ‘Wasn’t that a lot of fun?’ Not, ‘What a bummer, we lost the game,’ ” says Matt Ellis, the JetHawks’ 31-year-old chief operating officer and part of the ownership group--Clutch Play Baseball--headed by Chicago businessman Horn Chen.

The JetHawks, a Class A California League affiliate of the Seattle Mariners, has been supplying the Antelope Valley with affordable, folksy entertainment for five years.

With its 4,500 seats, the Hangar never will be mistaken for Dodger Stadium. But there’s nothing second-rate about the sleek, well-scrubbed stadium at 45116 Valley Central Way, with amenities that include a dozen 15- to 20-seat sky boxes.

Lancaster city officials--who backed construction of the $12-million facility in the mid-’90s with public money to help recruit the team--haven’t done an analysis on the dollars the team generates for the region. But they believe the team, which plays 70 home games a year, is a magnet for economic development and more.

“It creates a lot of hometown pride,” says state Assemblyman George Runner (R-Lancaster), a former city mayor.

The JetHawks front office thinks so too, but management’s attention is on other matters--mainly maintaining and building attendance. At about 2,500 a game, average attendance is down slightly from last year.

It’s a constant challenge. Major league teams build marketing efforts around star players. Minor league ballclubs can’t--there are no real stars.

The payroll for the JetHawks is $195,000, slightly less than the minimum $200,000 salary for a major league player.

Or, for yet another comparison: At $15 million a season and figuring 32 starts a year, Dodger pitcher Kevin Brown makes more in a single start--$467,000--than the entire JetHawks team makes all year.

Because the players are employed by the Mariners, JetHawks management has no say in who’s on the team and how they’re used. And by its nature, a minor league club is a revolving door for talent. Standouts move on, in their quest to make it to “the show,” as the players call the major leagues.

So, the JetHawks front office scrambles to dream up stunts to keep fans tickled and buying tickets, regardless of who plays and how well.

“Coming up with the next frozen T-shirt contest, it may sound silly, but if you don’t, you lose fans,” team official Ellis says.

Making a buck in minor league baseball isn’t easy, or a certainty, but most teams, as of the late 1990s are profitable, according to Arthur T. Johnson, author of “Minor League Baseball and Local Economic Development.”

It wasn’t always so. Minor league ball’s nadir was in the 1970s when annual attendance fell to between 10 million and 15 million. That was a precipitous drop from its post-World War II heyday when 39 million Americans in 1949 passed through the turnstiles of minor league parks.

But by the late 1980s, interest in the minors perked up. Thank the producers of the 1988 Kevin Costner film, “Bull Durham,” which put a romantic haze on the minors. Also, in an era of rising ticket prices and betting and drug scandals, many baseball fans yearned for simpler, purer sports. Minor league ball fit the bill.

In recent years, many farm teams replaced dilapidated stadiums with new ones and introduced entertainment, such as children’s play areas and carousels, to attract families. “The owners have learned how to market their product,” Johnson says.

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Last year, minor league attendance was 35.2 million--its fifth highest total in 50 years--with 176 teams playing in 15 leagues, according to the National Assn. of Professional Baseball Leagues based in St. Petersburg, Fla. There are 10 minor league clubs in California; only one, the JetHawks, in Los Angeles County.

The JetHawks have had their fiscal ups and downs since Lancaster approached the team in 1995 to lift up stakes in Riverside.

The team, then known as the Riverside Pilots, was losing money, and the future didn’t look bright to Ellis and his father, Mike Ellis, president of the club. The club wasn’t allowed to sell beer in the stadium, a much-needed revenue source, plus the surrounding area had crime problems.

In Lancaster, it’s had some financially winning seasons. But at present, “the jury’s out,” on whether it will complete year 2000 in the black, Mike Ellis said.

The JetHawks make money on multiple sources, and “we need all of them,” Matt Ellis says. “If one falters, the whole operation falters.”

Admissions, at $3.50 to $7 a game, provide a major chunk of the team’s revenue base, along with parking fees, merchandising, sky box rentals ($7,000 to $8,000 a season), and advertising--from the signs that dot the stadium to scorecards to between-inning contests.

The JetHawks also receive a percentage of food sales by park concessionaire Sodexho Marriott. “Everybody sells,” says General Manager Kevin Younkin of the club’s 10-person full-time staff.

Neither Mike nor Matt Ellis would share Clutch Play’s annual sales. The city of Lancaster says it received $592,000 in stadium revenue in 1999, most of that from the JetHawks and the rest from other groups that rent the facility for special events.

The baseball franchise has a big nut to crack. “In Lancaster, when we open the gate, we have costs of $400,000 to $500,000, and that’s just the facility, not staffing,” Matt Ellis says. (In addition to the full-time staff, the franchise employs 60 to 100 part-time ushers and ticket sellers.)

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As stadium owner, the city of Lancaster receives $1 from every ticket sold at the facility. In 1999, the JetHawks forked over $300,000 in rent and nearly $250,000 for maintenance, utilities and other expenses to the city.

“We are reported to have the toughest deal of any stadium community,” City Manager Jim Gilley says.

For Mike and Matt Ellis, who have financial interests in two other minor league ballclubs (the Missoula Osprey and Yakima Bears), finances are a constant struggle in a business they selected with their hearts, not their heads.

“If you talk to an accountant and they looked at the numbers of a [minor league] baseball team, they wouldn’t recommend you buy it,” Matt Ellis says. “We got into the business because we love what it’s about.”

Matt Ellis fell in love with minor league ball as a child. His mother, Judy Ellis, a JetHawks vice president, flipped burgers part time at the park of the now-departed Lodi Crushers in Northern California. “I would go with my mom and watch how things operated,” he recalls. “The general manager’s job seemed like the coolest in the world.”

As an adult, Matt Ellis held operating positions with clubs in Phoenix, Bellingham, Wash., and Modesto, until he and his father assembled an investment group to purchase a minor league ball team in Lethbridge, Canada (the team later moved to Missoula, Mont.).

Matt and Mike Ellis were part of another investment group that purchased the Riverside Pilots in 1994, for $2 million. As managers of the club, they soon became disenchanted. Lancaster heard of their discontent, contacted them, and the parties struck a deal.

Thus began an association that most locals say is a big plus for this community, which had long desired a minor league team.

“It’s a blast to go there,” says lifelong Antelope Valley resident Caryle Rogers, business manager of law firm R. Rex Parris & Attorneys, which rents a sky box and buys prominent in-stadium signage. “It’s a marketing tool, but it’s also community involvement,” she says.

Locals point to new development near the stadium, such as the 22-screen Cinemark movie palace and the 44,000-square-foot Wayne Gretzky’s Roller Hockey Center. Before the Hangar, locals had to go “down below,” meaning the San Fernando Valley or Los Angeles, to find entertainment, says Garrett Goebel, general manager of the hockey center.

“Valley Central Way has become the Rodeo Drive of Lancaster,” he says.

That makes Matt Ellis happy, but that warm and fuzzy feeling doesn’t appease investors when they’re staring at red ink. “We never bought the team with the mind-set that we were going to lose money,” he says. “We have partners we have to answer to.”

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An option could be to sell the franchise, since the investors would probably make a tidy profit. In the past, owners of many minor league club reaped huge sums on franchises they picked up for peanuts in the 1970s. The era of fast appreciation is over, says Bob Richmond, a broker of minor league teams. But well-managed franchises with solid cash flow and good demographics are rising in value because there’s a finite number of clubs and a throng of would-be owners.

“A lot of people buy them because they love baseball and want to be a part of it,” Richmond says.

The JetHawks recently signed a 10-year lease with the city, keeping the team at the Hangar through 2009. The Ellises say they are not in business to sell out. “Our goal is to keep it, operate it, be successful and make a living in baseball,” Matt Ellis says. “We’re still figuring out how to juggle all those balls.”

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WEB LINKS

www.jethawks.com: Home page of the Lancaster JetHawks baseball team. Ticket sales, schedule, statistics and more.

www.baseballamerica.com: Baseball America Online. Statistics on baseball from the majors to high school teams and leagues in between.

www.hot-dog.org: The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council. Facts and history of the hot dog.

www.thehotdogcart.com: Wheels of Fortune. Buy or lease a hot dog cart, facts about hot dogs, licenses and permits to sell hot dogs.

www.legion.org/flagtoc.htm: American Legion’s Flag Education & Etiquette page. Facts about the flag, proper folding, the flag code and history.

Sites subject to change.