Investors who want to put an independent league professional baseball team in Omaha next year apparently have decided to play hardball.
The investors sent out a press release Monday announcing that they have just about everything they need to launch a team that would play 50 games at the new TD Ameritrade Park in downtown Omaha as soon as 2011.
The investors said they have joined a league and have a general manager and a scout who is out looking for players. They even have a name, the Omaha Flame.
But they don’t have a lease to play at TD Ameritrade Park — despite a verbal agreement to terms in September with officials of Omaha’s Metropolitan Entertainment and Convention Authority.
“There’s a lot of frustration,” said investor Jim Space, a business owner from Lakeland, Minn. “We need a contract.”
Space is among the investors in the company that would own the team, Fast Ball Sports LLC. He said the investors include George N. Grammas, an attorney in Washington, D.C., as well as business people in Iowa and Nebraska.
Omahans Walt Peffer, who has worked for P.J. Morgan and two other former Omaha mayors, and Kris Pierce, a political consultant, have a financial interest and have represented the investors in talks with MECA, Pierce said.
Roger Dixon, MECA’s president and CEO, declined an interview request Monday. Through a spokeswoman, he issued a statement that said, “As we have stated before, we are interested in bringing a minor league baseball team with a viable ownership group within a sustainable league to TD Ameritrade Park Omaha. We are not in current negotiations with Fast Ball Sports.”
Independent league baseball has been seen as a potentially attractive tenant to help fill dates around the College World Series at Omaha’s new $128 million downtown stadium. The Omaha Royals decided to build their own stadium and play in Sarpy County.
Fast Ball Sports investors had been working to bring to TD Ameritrade an expansion club of the Northern League, an independent league with teams in the upper Midwest and Canada.
Pierce said MECA’s chief financial officer, Lea French, sent a letter in September to the commissioner of the Northern League saying that MECA had reached agreement on major terms with Fast Ball Sports for a lease to play at TD Ameritrade.
In the letter, a copy of which Pierce provided to The World-Herald, the commissioner, Minnesota attorney Clark Griffith, was asked to swiftly issue a franchise to the investors so that a lease agreement could be finalized.
The investors took that to mean that they would have a ballpark if they had a league, Space said. “We felt that meant MECA was giving us the green light.”
Based on that, Space said, the investors paid $200,000 on a nonrefundable deposit toward a $1 million franchise fee to join the Northern League. They were accepted.
About two weeks later, the nine-team Northern League lost four of its teams to another league, the American Association, in which the Lincoln Saltdogs play.
That raised MECA officials’ concerns about the Northern League’s future, Dixon said in October.
Dixon has said in the past that he has had talks with the American Association. Miles Wolf, commissioner of the league, said in October that he had heard from a group that was interested in putting an American Association team in Omaha in 2012.
Space said MECA was right to be concerned about the Northern League, and the investors set out to address those concerns.
This month, the Northern League merged with two other leagues — the Golden League and the United League — to create the North American Baseball League. It currently has 16 teams in three regions across the United States and in Canada.
Pierce said Fast Ball Sports’ Omaha franchise has been accepted to play in the league in 2011.
“Fast Ball Sports has done everything MECA has asked for,” he said. The investors “want this to get going. It’s important that the people of Omaha see that there’s an opportunity to bring independent league baseball to Omaha.”
Pierce said he was surprised to hear that Dixon said MECA is not in negotiations with Fast Ball Sports. Pierce said an attorney for the investors met last week with an attorney for MECA and with the commissioner of the North American Baseball League.
Dixon, through spokeswoman Rebecca Kleeman, said Monday that MECA is open to talking with the investors.
“This is a brand new league,” Dixon’s statement said. “We would need to do our due diligence to know whether it is viable or not.”
Contact the writer:
402-444-1057, christopher.burbach@owh.com
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