Dear Mayor Mitch Colvin:
Congratulations on bringing the Woodpeckers to town. I have recently had numerous professional dealings with this fine organization, and I can assure you they are committed to creating all sorts of revenue streams to your wonderful city, especially Austin Schwartz, Vice President, Sales & Marketing. I do understand your city is having some cost overruns with your stadium, but rest assured, your city is not the first municipality to which this has happened. I have a viable solution for you that will not only save your city millions of dollars, but make you a political giant.
Allow me to introduce myself. I am Bads85, minor league expert and Unofficial Special Assistant to General Manager Joe Hudson of the Inland Empire 66ers and the President of Diamond Concessions. I am sort of like a horse whisperer, except for minor league teams. I also offer pretty sage political advice as Senator Barbara Boxer will attest. You see, for many years Babs and I had a thing going on.
Once upon a time in the early 1990’s, I lived through a stadium fiasco in a city near to me, Lake Elsinore, California. It is a story of greed, corruption and incompetence without the sexual scandals to hold the public’s eye. However, to this day, the city of Lake Elsinore is hamstrung by their stadium. Meanwhile, the city of San Bernardino, a bastion of unscrupulous of malfeasance, said, “Hey we know more about graft and profiteering than you ever will, so not in our backward! Be gone, demons!” Today, the stadium is one of the city’s top assets, even though the city is both morally and financially bankrupt. The mistake Lake Elsinore made was signing high interest bonds for a quick fix. Don’t do, that, Mr. Mayor.
My advice to you is to get someone other than the tax payers to pay for these overruns, and the solution is simple: make the owners of the team pay for it. The Houston Astros are not short of money. The cost of your overruns are about the price of Joe Smith’s contract. What has more long term value, a stable minor league franchise, or a reliever on the wrong side of 35? The Astros can have booth if they choose.
Tell them to cough up the money, or the team can move back to the California League. Tell them you hear Bakersfield and Adelanto are looking for teams because Lancaster is now off the table. They burned their bridges so they really do not have anywhere else to go but the Florida State League, and the only people who go to Florida are those ready to die.
Oh, they will be upset. They will yell, scream, stamp their feet, and make threats. Call their bluff. Ask them if they are really going to treat the city that is the home to the Airborne Infantry suffer this way. Tell them you are not about to sit by and watch them shit down the throats of the families of the US military. Tell them my buddy Nick already has Woodpecker bling, and taking Nick’s Pecker bling away will make him very angry. You do not want to piss of the Lions Club. Tell them that owning a minor league baseball team is tough, and if they do not have the stones to own one, well, the Elmore Sports Mafia will probably take the team off their hands – for a discounted price.
If all this fails, just fold at the last second and have a few bake sales. It’s a military town, and the troops loved baked goods.
Keep your head high in these tough times, Mitch. We shall persevere.
Your friend in baseball,
Bads85
PS: Make sure the hot dogs are grilled at the stadium. And wrapped in bacon. Yum!
Dead Religions 