I heard some talk about the Times not covering the Tuscon Padres AAA baseball team results so I thought I would go look for myself.
League attendance
| Team | Yesterday | Total | Openings | Average |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tucson Padres | 4,139 | 67,921 | 28 | 2,426 |
| Tacoma Rainiers | 0 | 86,911 | 24 | 3,621 |
| Reno Aces | 0 | 119,692 | 27 | 4,433 |
| Omaha Storm Chasers | 0 | 96,627 | 21 | 4,601 |
| Nashville Sounds | 8,161 | 138,325 | 30 | 4,611 |
| Colorado Springs Sky Sox | 5,505 | 112,299 | 24 | 4,679 |
| New Orleans Zephyrs | 6,898 | 132,061 | 27 | 4,891 |
| Iowa Cubs | 0 | 116,330 | 22 | 5,288 |
| Salt Lake Bees | 0 | 143,788 | 27 | 5,325 |
| Oklahoma City RedHawks | 0 | 136,248 | 25 | 5,450 |
| Las Vegas 51s | 8,015 | 152,754 | 28 | 5,456 |
| Memphis Redbirds | 6,274 | 174,547 | 26 | 6,713 |
| Fresno Grizzlies | 0 | 194,848 | 28 | 6,959 |
| Albuquerque Isotopes | 0 | 188,001 | 27 | 6,963 |
| Round Rock Express | 0 | 205,510 | 28 | 7,340 |
| Sacramento River Cats | 10,167 | 236,270 | 31 | 7,622 |
The team is moving to El Paso next year. I guess the good news is that there is a lot of room for improvement.
By contrast the AA San Antonio Missions trail the Texas league with an average attendance of 4,002. A 2012 El Paso Inc. article told us that average attendance last year was 3,696 for the El Paso Diablos. The Diablos are an independent team. They are not AAA, or AA, or even A. They are categorized outside of minor league baseball.
El Paso loves a winner. I hope that we support the team. If we cannot improve the attendance numbers this whole ball park deal will get even worse.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
If you check, they didn’t do much better in Portland which is why they were replaced with a soccer team. This is the team we had to purchase quickly before someone else would scoop them up such as Stockton CA, or Dell City. Are we lucky!, ?.
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The parent San Diego Padres are in next to the last place in the National League West. Only 3 teams in the entire National League have more losses. But to quote Mountainstar’s president, Minor League Baseball isn’t about baseball; it’s about entertainment, which suggests that they’re not concerned about fielding a winning team. It’s a good thing because they didn’t buy a winner and the Padres organization has only had 13 winning seasons in its history, due in part to their lack of commitment to player development.
Mountainstar’s principals clearly aren’t baseball people and they chose to buy the AAA affiliate of a losing franchise. Why? Looks to me like they’re confusing baseball with real estate development, which truly shows how little they know about baseball.
Meanwhile, I’m betting that the new ballpark will not open in 2014 and that Mountainstar, city management, and city council all know that. Odds are that they will play the 2013 season at Cohen Stadium because:
— Autozone Park in Memphis broke ground in January 1998 and opened in April 2000.
— Oklahoma City’s Bricktown ballpark (the one a large El Paso entourage visited and used as their role model) broke ground in October 1995 and opened in April 1998.
— BB&T ballpark in Charlotte broke ground in Sept 2012 and opened in April 2014.
— Tucson Electric Park, which basically looks like Cohen, took a full year to build.
— Renovation alone of Cheney Stadium in Tacoma took eight months even after considerable pre-planning.
Mountainstar and their city puppets shoved this process down the taxpayers throats based on the need for the new ballpark to be open in spring of 2014. Sounds like that 2014 opening date was either a lie or based on a lack of due diligence by city management and council.
Our new ballpark will not be ready next year. Perhaps I will be proven wrong, but I don’t think so, especially when only 25% of the project has been put out to bid. We’ll know in nine short months.
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What your not stating is the ones with High Attendance all have new ball parks, majority downtown. This offers fans choices before and after games. If Independent averages high, Triple A will do fine.
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It’s not the location, its the high handed ways they did this. Just imagine knocking down the city hall without owning the land, traffic problems and more and more.
Would prudent person do all these things without decent planning?
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Round Rock’s Dell Ballpark is NOT “downtown”. Albuquerque’s Isotope Ballpark is NOT “downtown”. You’re also implying that a downtown location is the key to attendance, which it is not. Major League affiliation matters. Sacramento is an affiliate of the Oakland A’s and Fresno is an affiliate on the Giants; both tap into the popularity of those two in-state Major League franchises. Memphis is an affiliate of the St. Louis Cardinals, a winning franchise, which has always had a strong following in that region.
There is a lot of emphasis on people visiting bars before and after games. So our economic model for downtown redevelopment is for people to drink downtown before games, drink lots of cheap beer at the ballpark, and then drink more at downtown bars before they drive home to the far east side or west side where most people live. That’s just what we need to improve our quality of life —- more DUIs.
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This is also the team that we were told that Boise, ID was going to buy. That is the reason the rush was made to push the stadium issue thru City Council. When phone calls were made to Boise, no one in Boise knew anything about anyone wanting to buy the Padres’ affiliate from Tucson. We were fed a bunch of lies all along.
This issue is all about our city’s “deep pocket” families owning real estate downtown……that is the only reason the stadium had to go downtown. During an off-the-record meeting in Reno, NV 3 years ago, Branch Rickey III divulged that he had already been to El Paso to look at Cohen Stadium and that it would take major changes to make Cohen Stadium suitable for AAA baseball. He felt a financial outlay of at least $20 million would be required to bring the stadium to AAA standards! I would gladly spend $20 million rather than razing City Hall and jamming an undersized stadium on 5 acres! Cohen Stadium holds up to about 9,000 fans while our new stadium downtown will only hold about 7,000 +/- fans.
Rumors have it that Paul Foster is putting an upscale restaurant near the new downtown stadium site and he will have the son of another prominent El Pasoan running the facility. These guys have been planning this entire scandal for a long time. The downtown site is about the team owners’ owning other downtown properties whose values would escalate if the stadium went downtown. We taxpayers are mere pawns in this scandal so that our “deep pocket” families can get even wealthier at our expense. I hope the FBI is taking note of all of these facts, as El Paso’s graft and corruption is not limited to the EPISD, Sunland Park, NM, Socorro, etc. We taxpayers are being fed a bill of goods, and the authorities need to thoroughly investigate this crime against El Paso’s citizenry!
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You’re 100% correct. There are other AAA stadiums that basically look just like Cohen, but with simply more seats. Some have upper decks, which could have easily been added at Cohen. Joyce Wilson and others keep saying downtown is a convenient central location, yet the most densely populated areas of El Paso are the far east zip codes and the far west. If you look at a map, Cohen is clearly more central to all areas of El Paso.
Yes, this is purely a downtown real estate play. Foster and others are sitting on lots of empty space and real estate yet to be fully developed. This is a so-called public/private partnership in which the public shares the cost, but not the profits. Taking from the hotel owners/guests and giving to downtown developers sounds to me like their version of income redistribution.
The last-minute offer by Mountainstar’s principals to donate profits to charity was purely spin to help reduce the huge wave or resistance that caught them by surprise. They stand to make the most money off the real estate and the terms of the stadium lease agreement provide them a hedge against Mountainstar losses. Plus they can always load Mountainstar up with management fees and overhead charges, etc., to make it appear that there are no profits. Hunt left himself plenty of room to manipulate the profits and losses when he stood before city council and said they will not open their books. He said we have to trust him, that his record speaks for itself. That’s the problem.
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