Pro ball in Hawai'i is great idea, but . . .
By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist
It would be wonderful if professional baseball came back to Hawai'i," said Dave Elmore, the last man to operate a minor league franchise here, "but . . ."
"I'd love to see baseball in Hawai'i again," said Fred Whitacre, once the most successful general manager of any pro sports team in the state, "but . . ."
Fourteen years after the Hawai'i Islanders left town on a wave of red ink, that "but" still looms Diamond Head-large in any discussion of getting a team of our own again.
There are reasons Honolulu remains the largest city in the country without a professional sports franchise and when it comes to baseball, most of them are just as valid now as they were Aug. 18, 1987, the day the Islanders announced they were ending a 27-year relationship.
Which is why the current wishing out loud about landing a new minor league entry has the sound of an extreme long shot.
"I don't want to be a pessimist, but the economics of it still don't add up," said Elmore, who ran the Islanders for seven years and still operates six minor league baseball franchises.
For one thing, Aloha Stadium remains too big and soon-to-be Les Murakami Stadium too small to support a team for an entire season.
And even if somebody's deep pockets had the $10 million to buy a Triple-A franchise and the $30 million to $50 million to build it a 10,000-seat home, the biggest obstacle remains the 2,500 miles that separate it from its nearest competition on the continent.
Pacific Coast League operators weren't thrilled about the trip even when the Islanders, whose president owned a string of travel agencies, was subsidizing their travel. And now that the PCL has taken in the old American Association — stretching its boundaries from Sacramento to Nashville, Portland to Memphis and Canada to New Orleans — there is less interest in expanding here.
As one owner of a PCL team put it, "when we went to Memphis and Nashville, it raised our travel budget almost 50 percent and complicated the scheduling. Think what Hawai'i would do."
If not the Triple-A, then who? Certainly not Double-A. The nearest one of those teams is in El Paso. As for Class A, both franchise operators and their Major League parents resoundingly rejected that idea years ago and show no signs of relenting.
The only full-time professional baseball format that makes sense here is a self-contained circuit along the lines of what the Hawai'i Winter League had years ago.
Until then, much as we might wish otherwise, the concept of professional baseball team of our own is one that, as University of Hawai'i president Evan Dobelle is fond of saying, doesn't have much hope of passing the common-sense test.
