Branch B. Rickey III - 10 With MLN Interview on the Sports Business & Albuquerque Baseball (p.2) - MLN Sports Zone

A One-on-One With PCL President
Branch B. Rickey III
(Continued from Page One)

MLN Follow-up: Did you draft other proposals at the winter meetings?

There were two solutions for 2001, both of which failed. One was that the International League thought Cooperstown would be a solution. How can you do better on the 100th anniversary of baseball to go back to the roots of the whole game?

Perhaps the people from West of the Mississippi, people from the Pacific Coast League said 'You have a village of 2,500 people there, and we want to play three games averaging 10,000 people. How are we going to achieve that?

Rickey's legendary grandfather,
W. Branch Rickey, created the first modern minor league farm systems and also helped Jackie Robinson break the color line with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Had we been able to hold that championship in Memphis, we could have put 15,000 people into the ballpark easy.

Then the International League said, 'That's all well and good if you don't have a team in Columbus, Ohio where Ohio State announces it's playing a football game on the very day that you're having your championship, and you can't compete against an event like Ohio State football. So we ran into different problems from different perspectives.

I think that in the light of the inability to create attendance in Las Vegas for several years we didn't want to do a fourth year of going somewhere else and not doing it right."

MLN: Do you see a resurgence in interest in that second-tier and maybe third tier level of play? We've seen a lot of new markets seeking out baseball teams, and a lot of rebuilding of infrastructure for the AAA and the AA in the last decade.

BR: "That's an interesting question. I think the message of running potentially profitable franchises has gotten out. A lot of people have jumped in naively. I think that it's modern culture reflecting what was happening a hundred years ago. There are people [back then] who jumped into minor leagues that aren't around any more."

CONTINUED...

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