Though there was little chance the Tucson Padres (Class AAA; Pacific Coast League) would be a long-term tenant at Kino Stadium, the city’s lack of support for the team is still troubling.
The team should end up drawing around 200,000 fans this season, good for last in the Pacific Coast League. With it being an open secret that the team is on the way to El Paso for the 2014 season, what was already a difficult sell became even harder for GM Mike Feder and staff. From the Arizona Daily Star:
“I understand we’re still perceived as a temporary situation,” Feder said. “My hope all along was to do well enough that somebody would want to relocate to Tucson some day. But how can that happen when we’re drawing 200,000?”
Sometimes you can do all the right things and come up with a disappointing result, and we don’t see any great flaws with how the T-Padres are being run: promotions are plentiful and well-publicized, the ballpark isn’t bad (though the location is; we suspect the team would have been better off at Hi Corbett), and the front office has worked hard to make the team more than a transitory tenant.
We hear there are other baseball development bubbling in Tucson that could be interesting, so stay tuned.
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