'A glorious failure'
MARYSVILLE (2/10/03) -- The City Council has agreed to hand over the Yuba-Sutter Gold Sox to private operators for $59,500, officials said Monday.
Thus ended one local government's experiment in owning and operating its own professional baseball.
"It was a glorious failure. Too bad it didn't work out better," City Administrator Steve Casey said, wistfully.
The council approved transferring the Gold Sox to Yuba-Sutter Community Baseball on a 3-0-2 vote Friday. Two council members were absent, Casey said.
The agreement calls for Yuba-Sutter Community Baseball, Inc. to tender a one-time payment of $12,500 for the team's uniforms, equipment and marketable souvenirs.
"That's about 50-cents on the dollar for what was originally paid for it (gear), but it's a lot more than (YSCB) wanted to pay," Casey said.
The agreement also calls for YSCB to lease Bryant Field for $40,000 per season and give the city an annual sponsorship package valued at $7,000.
The $40,000 represents the "hard costs" of operating the stadium facility. The city will have to pick up the tab for an additional $40,000 to $45,000 in annual maintenance costs, Casey said.
"But we would have to do that, anyway," Casey said.
The city could also receive an additional $39,000 yearly in indirect sales tax revenues earned from game visitors, according to a study conducted by Christopher M. Redo, professor of Sports Marketing at the University of San Diego.
YSCB is a partnership is a joint venture involving Don McCullough, owner of the Don McCullough Dodge dealership in Marysville and Bob Bavasi, an Everett, Wash. sports mogul with family ties to major league baseball.
The agreement ends the city's $1.6 million three-year romance with professional baseball.
It began in 2000 when the city financially backed a bid to bring the Western Baseball League's former Reno, Nev. Blackjacks to Yuba-Sutter and establish a pro ball club here.
But the Feather River Mudcats went bankrupt at the end of its first season, leaving the city a roster of unhappy vendors, disappointed fans and unsalable franchise in troubled league.
"I sent WBL a notice we wouldn't be playing with them this year. I haven't heard from them in three months," Casey said.
The lease agreement allows YSCB to use the team name, Gold Sox, and the team mascot and logo -- a perky green and gold gecko with a baseball cap on its lizard head and fielder's mitt strapped to its tail.
Marysville fans will get a full 44-game season in 2003, but it will not be pro ball. It instead will be a hybrid of amateur collegiate wooden-bat baseball run under a new business plan, according to McCullough and Bavasi.
"This is a baseball club, a league and a tournament combined into a single operation," Redo explained in the business study.
Marysville's against-all-odds escapade of running a ball team for profit -- or not -- was inspiring, said Casey, who has drafted a magazine article recapping the epic sports tale.
Casey's brief and touching memoir -- tentatively entitled "A Glorious Failure" -- reaches one main conclusion: some defeats are so rewarding they can't be distinguished from victory.