By Todd Golden
TERRE HAUTE — For the first time since 1956, the crack of the wooden bat will be heard again in Terre Haute.
Organized baseball will return to the Wabash Valley next summer as Terre Haute has been approved for a franchise in the collegiate baseball Prospect League starting in the 2010 season.
The team will be named the Terre Haute Rex, part of a corporate partnership with Clabber Girl Corp. and its Rex Brand Coffee. Team colors are expected to be black (for the Rex brand) and blue (ISU’s team colors).
The franchise will be owned by Sycamore Foundation Holdings, a nonprofit subsidiary of the Indiana State University Foundation. Ownership is planning to hire a general manager and marketing director before the end of December. A logo, mascot and uniforms will be unveiled in January.
“The real excitement is what this will mean for ISU, baseball and athletics in general. For our students, we’re creating a new educational opportunity, and then to the extent of what this means to the Wabash Valley to have baseball back as a summer activity,” ISU Foundation President Gene Crume said.
The team will play at Bob Warn Field, which is undergoing a $2.5 million renovation. Renovations are expected to be completed in time for ISU’s season opening game March 2 against Indiana.
Prospect League interim commissioner Bryan Wickline said the work the ISU Foundation did to get a suitable stadium built and to provide ownership and corporate sponsorship finally made it happen.
“Without the work of the ISU Foundation, this would not have happened. Many organizations have tried to get baseball in Terre Haute, but couldn’t get the facility to get it done. They did,” Wickline said. “Because of their work, this has been on a fast-track. This is a solid ownership group and it’s unique to have the foundation having ownership.”
Wickline said the Terre Haute franchise was approved in mid-October.
A Terre Haute baseball franchise has been bandied about for many years without anything getting off the ground. The foundation began to seriously consider the idea a year ago.
“When you look at the history of this idea, it starts with the community’s passion for baseball. As far as ISU is concerned, for at least the last six years, alumni like Brian Dorsett have talked about it. We have an athletic director like Ron Prettyman who comes from the background of having a sports franchise. We had a class at ISU who did a research project on it. The foundation’s role is to facilitate it,” Crume said.
Part of the challenge of bringing organized baseball back to Terre Haute was the lack of a suitable baseball facility. Memorial Stadium, where Terre Haute’s teams played from 1925-56, was converted to football usage in the 1960s. Pre-renovated Sycamore Field was not deemed suitable for an organized team and several proposals over the years to make it suitable for organized baseball did not come to fruition.
“When we studied various minor and collegiate league franchises, it became very clear that the stadium is the vital piece of the business model. If Memorial Stadium still had the baseball component today, that would have been a natural, but it wasn’t relevant as a good fit,” Crume said. “So then you look at the university baseball field. The old field probably could have worked, but you have to look at it honestly and say it wasn’t a very inspiring place to watch a game.”
Renovations were approved for newly named Bob Warn Field last February. A public groundbreaking occurred in May and construction began in October. Capacity for the new stadium will be 878.
Capacity is down from a proposal that would have had at least 2,000 seats, but it can be expanded.
“We didn’t want to underbuild or overbuild, but we wanted to build a facility that can be enhanced. It came down to dollars, what could we afford and what could get donors excited about in the future,” Crume said.
Wickline didn’t express any reservations about the decreased capacity at Bob Warn Field.
“That’s right at where everyone else is. If you can draw 750 to 1,000 a night on the business side of things, that’s what you want. I think they can do better than that. [Stadium size] is not really going to be an issue and if things go well, they can expand,” Wickline said.
The next challenge in making a franchise a reality was finding a corporate partner to make it a viable entity.
“It’s been a process and that process was based upon ensuring that the right partners were at the table when it finally came down to saying this was good for all of us. For about a year, we’ve been actively engaged in bringing a team to fruition. How do we find the right partners and investors and partners to make it happen? The foundation was the right owner for the project, putting the other partners in place made it a good fit,” Crume said.
The foundation approached Clabber Girl and its Rex Coffee Brand was thought to be a good fit.
“We formally approached Clabber Girl. Gary [Morris, Clabber Girl Corp. president and chief operating officer] serves on the foundation board, and going through the process, he supported the idea,” Crume said. “When you look at the names of the teams of the Terre Haute teams over the years, there’s some clever names and this one fits. We wanted someone with brand-identity, with brand-quality, but also, a partner who would capture people’s sense of ‘that makes sense.’”
Morris was pleased to make the Rex brand part of the Terre Haute baseball revival.
“We are invested in celebrating history and in offering the people in this community these kinds of great opportunities and experiences,” Morris said in a press release. “We are proud to be a part of bringing this historic tradition back to Terre Haute. This premier baseball league just felt like a good fit for our premium Rex Brand Coffee.”
Season tickets are already on sale via the foundation. The number for tickets is (812) 240-4323.
The Prospect League, one of 10 collegiate leagues affiliated with the National Association of Summer Collegiate Baseball, begins play in early June and has a June-to-August schedule. The league plays a 54-game schedule, 27 home and 27 away.
It is a collegiate summer league, meaning that players are not professionals, but rather college players who play during the summer after their collegiate seasons are completed. Eligible players have one year of college eligibility completed and must have remaining college eligibility. Players are not paid. Typically, franchises find sponsor homes for the players to stay in when they’re with the team.
The 14-team league stretches from Missouri to West Virginia. The Rex will be part of an eight-team Western Division.
“The kids show up every night and play hard. That’s the difference between the collegiate level and pro level. They play hard and they want to get to that next level. We are minor league baseball at a collegiate level. We want to give them the bus trips, the nice facilities, the fans, the promotions, and make them understand what playing at the next level is all about. All of the things you see in minor league baseball are what you see in collegiate baseball,” Wickline said.
Wickline said the marketing of the Rex is what’s going to determine whether the franchise is a success.
“The market is there, the population is there. They’re looking to hire a GM, that’s going to be key too, someone to run the day-to-day operations,” said Wickline, who is also the vice president and general manager of the Chillicothe Paints. “It’s more marketing and sales than it is baseball. The players, I don’t want to say its easy, but it’s not as hard as getting the franchise marketed correctly and to make fans want to come back to games. We know it’s a solid ownership group and we know it’s going to be ran professionally.”
Terre Haute has not had an organized baseball team since the Terre Haute Huts franchise played its final season in the defunct Three-I League in 1956. The Huts disbanded on July 3, 1956, before completing their last season.
Terre Haute had a franchise in the Class B Three-I League from 1919-56 under various iterations, including the Terre Haute Phillies, Terre Haute Tots and the Terre Haute Browns.
From 1903-16, Terre Haute had a franchise in the defunct Central League, going by the moniker of Hottentots, Stags, Miners, Terre-iers and Highlanders during its time in that Class B league.
Prior to 1903, Terre Haute had teams in 11 different leagues, including moving in and out of the Three-I and Central leagues. The earliest known organized Terre Haute team was the 1886 Interstate League Terre Haute Hoosiers.
