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Minor League Baseball and Local Economic Development
By Chad Gramling | January 23, 2007
I am reading this book right now. It’s a scholorly look at the political process that communities face when investing in ballparks for minor league baseball teams. Very well done and insightful to say the least. Arthur Johnson draws his conclusions from several case studies; one of them involving a late 1980’s effort to bring baseball to Fort Wayne, Indiana prior to the Wizards’ arrival.
As the case study points out, the effort did not result in bringing minor league baseball to the city (at least not on that try). The author concludes that local officials and team ownership (which had local roots) all did the right things, the decision to not bring the team in was the right decision at that time.
However, I feel very compelled to quote two paragraphs that are included in the summary of the study regarding baseball in Fort Wayne. It seems rather pertinent in light of the Harrison Square developments:
Like other cities, Fort Wayne is striving to keep its downtown center vibrant. Developing a facility for a team in the downtown area could have meant that more than a quarter of a million people would have come to that part of the city each year. This would have represented very real growth for that part of Fort Wayne. As a result, Fort Wayne could have had an economic stake in bringing a team to downtown Fort Wayne.
Locating the team downtown could have enhanced the image of that part of the city and convinced other businesses to locate in the area or stay in downtown Fort Wayne. Locating the team in the downtown area could have concentrated benefits sufficiently to galvanize support for the team and its needs.
Keep in mind that this was written over a decade ago in 1995 - two years after the Wizards joined our city sportscape (yes, I think I just made up that word) and a few years following the failed effort to bring a different club to the city (which I beleive ultimately ended up in Kane County).
[tags]minor league baseball, economic development[/tags]
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