The Springfield News-Leader du lieu suivant : Springfield, Missouri • Page 6

6A Sunday. February 5, 1995 News-Leader from Page one 1 own it myself with no one else, and for me, baseball is it' raised payroll taxes. The controversy that followed effectively killed Bob Under News-Leader Dennis Bastien, owner of the Double-A minor league baseball team headed for Springfield in 1997, works in his box-strewn office Friday at Chesterfield Village. different city. A deal was set for the Knights to be sold to a New Orleans owner and move there.

But an unexpected glitch arose: When Denver gained a major-league expansion team, baseball authorities decided Denver's minor-league team would move to New Orleans instead. That canceled the Knights' New Orleans plans. Suddenly, with the 1994 season about to start, the Knights needed a place to play. League managers decided to place the team temporarily in Nashville, even though it was already home to its own Triple-A team, the Nashville Sound. The Knights were temporarily renamed the Xpress and began playing games in Nashville, while the team's owner, still in Charlotte, continued to try to sell the franchise.

Bastien saw his chance. He offered to buy it and find a permanent home for the team. For payment, he offered Charlotte his Class A Charleston Wheelers and all the team's assets, plus a cash payment he says was "well over $1 million." Then he also found a group of investors from Charleston who agreed to buy the Wheelers back from Charlotte for "a considerable sum" so Charleston could keep its team. The three-party deal was unusual, but Bastien says it offered all sides something they couldn't get otherwise. He says taxes were also far less in the complex arrangement than if the deals had all been made separately.

But when the deal went through, Bastien suddenly had only "a piece of paper," he says. It gave him a team if he could find a home for it. While his Double-A team played its 1994 season in Nashville, he moved to Lexington, his first choice for where the team should be based, and began trying to convince government officials there to build a stadium. For the next year, the Lexington Herald-Leader newspaper said, Bastien "worked relentlessly to bring the club to Lexington." Still, he failed. Local officials, faced with a federal order to build a new landfill, announced the games.

In 1983, he persuaded his dad to mortgage the family farm and seed business, in Vergennes, 111., to help him buy the Winston-Salem team. Later, he bought a bigger franchise and moved it to Charleston, W.Va., where, as owner and general manager of the Charleston Wheelers, he was twice named Class A Executive of the Year by Sporting News magazine. The city, which had lost its Triple-A team four years before, was eager to have a minor-league team again, residents there say. They look at Bastien still as the main reason Charleston has pro ball today. "To his credit, he is responsible for the team being here, and it wouldn't have happened without him," says Heath Brown, general manager of the team since last season, when Bastien left But Brown adds, "He ruffled some feathers when he was here.

He wanted a new stadium and made no secret about that His relations with the city were strained, to say the least Basically, the city was not going to spend any money on the stadium while he was here." Since Bastien left, Brown said, "The city has spent over $1 million on renovations. I think we have a great relationship with the city now." Another resident of Charleston and former associate of Brown's says, "No one was really too broken up about it he left" But the Charleston Gazette said in a 1992 editorial that Bastien and his wife "made the Wheelers a One franchise through their own hard work and endless promotion." Springfield's team After the 1993 season with the Wheelers, Bastien grabbed an opportunity to enter more-prestigious Double-A ball, by making a complicated, creative deal. The team he won is the team that is headed toward Springfield. According to published reports and Bastien, the deal was put in motion when Charlotte, N.C., which had been home to a Double-A team for years, gained a Triple-A franchise, one step below the major leagues. That meant its Double-A team, the Knights, had to move to a any chance of spending $8 to $12 million to build a stadium, says the mayor's spokeswoman, Dottie Bean.

"They might have taken a chance in another economic environment," Bean says. Dick Robinson, chairman of the Lexington baseball task force and the city's commissioner of personnel, says Bastien was a 12-hour a day baseball worker. He never stops." Bob Douglass, president of the Greater Lexington Chamber of Commerce, adds that baseball and Bastien himself were very popular. "He left no stone unturned to try to bring the team here. Almost everybody here the government and business leaders were very positive.

Everybody who heard him talk ended up supporting him. We just simply didn't have the money," Douglass says. Springfield's gain In August, Bastien announced he would try to bring the team to Springfield instead. Other Southern League owners didn't like the idea, but after Bastien agreed to pay to fly in distant teams to avoid long road trips, they approved it unanimously. Some of them still grumble about it, though.

Bragan, from the Jacksonville team, complains, "Dennis is a guy who bought a Southern League team but wants to live in the Midwest. I consider Lexington just as Midwestern as Springfield. But we got cities like Mobile and Montgomery down here that would love to have a team and he didn't really consider them." Bastien responds: "I don't want to live in a place where there's mosquitoes out on Christmas Day." Now that he's in Springfield, he emphasizes to everyone he talks to that he loves it here. It would have been his first choice, he says, if he knew he could have won approval to include Springfield in the Southern League. "Springfield is going to be a great baseball location," he says.

"There's already so much more support here than there was in Lexington. Baseball is going to be very good to this town." Continued from 1A Thursday setting up office equipment, finally getting to bed at 4:45 Friday morning. Then he was up again in time to attend a 7 a.m. breakfast meeting. "I don't want this to fail because I didn't try hard enough," he says.

Several of his fellow owners of Southern League teams have told him privately he's "really, totally, absolutely crazy," he says, for trying to bring Springfield its first professional team in nearly 50 years. They tell him he should force local people to do it themselves. But everyone who knows him even past associates who say they aren't among his fans agree that if anyone can accomplish the feat, it's Bastien. "If hard work will get it done, I'm sure Dennis will do it," says Peter Bragan owner of the Jacksonville Suns, another Southern league team, who initially voted against Bastion's plan to stretch the league's boundaries north to Springfield. "He works like a dog," says Doug Greene, chairman of the board of the Springfield Professional Baseball Association, who has been working for more than six years to establish a minor-league team in town.

"He doesn't stop, that's what's admirable about him. And he really, truly loves baseball." SPBA President Allen Casey says Bastien "is an incredibly enthusiastic charger at what he does thank goodness. We're lucky to have a promoter like him, because we want this to work. I mean, he's emotionally and financially involved here." Locker-room home There's no doubt that baseball is Bastien's life. When he and his wife, Lisa, got married 11 years ago this weekend, their first home was the locker room of a minor-league ballpark in North Carolina.

As owner and general manager of the Class A Winston-Salem Spirits, Bastien's life savings and much of his dad's were invested in the team. He had no funds left to get a house or apartment, so the newly-weds set up a couch and bed among the lockers and moved in with their cat, named RBI, until the season began. "It was great," Bastien says happily. "What could be better than fashioned way. I own it myself with no one else, and for me, baseball is it.

It's all I do. If it rains, I pull the tarps. And if I can't make money at it, I go broke." Work, work, work He's leaving nothing to chance in his quest to bring pro ball to Springfield. He's doing most of the preliminary work himself: designing explanatory brochures and posters, lining up office space in Chesterfield Village, registering as a Missouri employer, setting up a phone system, hiring a couple of assistants, lugging truckloads of furniture up the stairs at 4 a.m. I Ie spends his free time driving all over town delivering stacks of bright-yellow brochures to restaurants and stores, to make sure anyone who wants an order form can find one.

"People don't realize all that has to get done to accomplish all this," Bastien says. "Then when you tell them all the steps, they say, 'How did you do all that? Well, basically, I just did it. That's how I've always been." He became a minor-league manager in 1979, when at age 26 he was hired to run the Gastonia Cardinals in North Carolina. He was the whole staff, he says he mowed the field, he painted the fences, he popped the popcorn, he being at the ballpark all the time? I tell everyone we had eight showers, three washers and dryers, and the biggest back yard in town. If I felt stressed in the middle of the night, I'd get up and edge the infield." Bastien's adult life has revolved around the game.

He started small and worked his way up by climbing from smaller franchises to bigger, and sometimes putting together complicated deals along the way. A former colleague associated with the Winston-Salem team says many people wrongly call Bastien "slick." "I wouldn't say slick is the word, because slick means deceitful," he says. "Dennis is just very good at business. He knows the angles and he knows what he's doing. The thing about him is he's nickeled and dimed his way to the top, so he's learned a lot on the way.

He didn't just buy his way in like a lot of these guys." Now the youngest owner of a Double-A franchise in the country, Bastien brags he is the only person in America who operates his own baseball team as his only source of income. "Other owners hire a general manager to do the real work for them, or they have investors behind them, or they have restaurants or some other business on the side," Bastien says. "I'm the last guy doing it the old- To all women who have gone through menopause. You can be part of an important clinical research study on osteoporosis. ah i- Who is eligible? We're looking for 3,000 volunteers to test an investigational medication for osteoporosis.

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