If you don't like driving two hours every time you want to watch professional baseball, you might be the next to jump on board the Jefferson City Renegades bandwagon.
The team - currently nonexistent - is the brainchild of a group of Jefferson Citians who want to bring a favorite entertainment option to Mid-Missouri in the form of a Frontier League professional baseball club.
"One of the problems in the area is just a kind of lack of summer outdoor family entertainment," said Steve Dullard, Jefferson City Renegades president. "If you want to go to a professional baseball game it's a two-hour drive one way, so you've got an eight-hour day just to go see a professional sport - where we have a population base in Central Missouri to support a minor league professional baseball team."
The Frontier League, founded in 1994, currently comprises 14 minor league teams unaffiliated with major league organizations.
The concept isn't new to Missouri - the River City Rascals have played in their own O'Fallon ballpark since 1999, and Columbia hosted the Mid-Missouri Mavericks during their brief time in the league from 2003-05. The Columbia team, which played in the University of Missouri's Taylor Stadium, went on hiatus after the 2005 season as the ownership group tried to get a minor league stadium built, but never returned, according to a Columbia Tribune article.
Frontier League seasons are 96 games long, meaning 48 home games for each team. A team's active roster can include 22 to 25 players selected from the league's draft and signed as free agents. The Renegades organization hopes to see a few local players on the team as well.
"Our goal is for them to be really integrated into the community - helping with the local camps, helping out with the youth teams," Dullard said. "That's one of the great things about the Frontier League, is that there's really good player interaction with the youth."
Community support
The community integration will be important as the team organizers move on to their next phase - garnering community support.
The Renegades will launch a crowdfunding campaign March 16 on the website Indiegogo, both to raise money for initial architectural designs and to gauge how much community interest there is in the team before bringing any official propositions to the city level.
The organization has targeted Jefferson City's Vivion Field as the ideal place to renovate the existing stadium to minor league quality. Located in Washington Park off Missouri Boulevard, Vivion Field is owned by the city's Parks and Recreation department and used most notably by the Jefferson City High School Jays baseball team.
"We think Vivion Field is kind of the ideal location just because of how central it is in Jefferson City and because it's kind of an iconic field," Dullard said. "It's right by downtown, and it's already a great place. There are tons of restaurants, bars and other shopping available right around that would benefit from increased traffic."
The Renegades wouldn't displace the Jays, according to Dullard.
"Jefferson City High School is the primary user of Vivion currently, and Parks and Recreation, and we do not want to take anything away from them. We're trying to provide a better facility for the high school and also enable the other schools to use it, as well to get that field as much use as possible," he said. "We have in our conceptual plan a high school locker room under the stadium as well, and we have full intentions of providing as much space as possible for local coaches."
The Frontier League season would begin near the end of the spring high school baseball season, so it would be a matter of scheduling around a few home games for both the Jays and the Renegades, Dullard said.
Logistics
While the arrangement likely would require an unprecedented long-term lease, it's not impossible, said Bill Lockwood, director of Parks, Recreation and Forestry in Jefferson City.
"We typically don't enter into a lot of long-term lease agreements - they're usually three to five years - but this is a little bit different of a situation than we've come across before. We'd want to make sure during the time of the lease the property was well maintained and cared for and safe conditions maintained," Lockwood said. "Part of our philosophy is to try to make our facilities available to as many things as possible when they're not needed for our own local programs.
"Even though it's more of a spectator sport for local people as opposed to a participant sport, it's still for recreation. So it's not an entirely foreign concept from what we would consider working with somebody on."
The process would require the Renegades to bring a proposition to the Park Resources and Planning Committee, which would give its recommendation to the Parks and Recreation Commission. The discussion likely wouldn't reach the City Council unless some type of innovative financing arrangement was involved, Lockwood said.
Making Vivion Field suitable for a minor league team would require the Renegades to make several rounds of improvements.
"We're particularly looking at the seating capacity and putting more permanent seats in," Dullard said. Currently the stadium can seat about 700 to 800, but ideal renovations would bring it to 2,500 permanent seats with enough lawn and auxiliary seating to accommodate 5,000 people if necessary. (Frontier League games have an average attendance of approximately 1,500, Dullard said.)
They would also add solid concrete dugouts, locker rooms for home and away teams, luxury suites and a press box. The renovation process would have to consider the field's location in a flood plain.
The team organizers don't have an official renovation cost estimate, as they plan to make some decisions based on how much funding is available.
Parking is another consideration - one Lockwood is particularly concerned about with Vivion Field's location near Lions Field and the Washington Park Ice Area - but Dullard said they're interested in setting up trolley locations throughout Jefferson City to cut down on the need for additional on-site parking.
Funding
The Renegades' March 16 crowd funding campaign will ask community members to donate at least $1 to express their interest in bringing a minor league baseball team to Jefferson City, with an overall goal of $15,000 to go toward architectural design costs. It will also ask participants to provide their addresses so the organizers can gauge how much support there is in the Central Missouri area, not just Jefferson City.
If the Renegades team determines it has enough community support from this campaign, it will move forward. If not, the organizers will consider other avenues.
"With the response we've gotten and just based on market size, we're pretty darn sure that something like this could go," Dullard said. "If we don't hit our initial goal, we'll consider doing a test run of a college wood bat summer team here - it's a level down; it's cheaper to operate. If a team like that can survive, we'd take some more time to see if we need to continue marketing the idea better."
If the first campaign is successful, they'll launch a second Indiegogo crowd funding campaign with a goal of $500,000 to go toward renovations. That campaign would offer participants incentives like discounted game tickets and a "coach for a day" promotion. It would also invite people to become team ownership members, giving them a say in the club's management decisions.
"It will last longer if it's ingrained in the community and the community has a say in it," Dullard said.
Frontier League teams run on an average annual budget of $1 million including payroll, travel expenses and stadium maintenance, he said, which the Renegades would hope to fund eventually through ticket sales, company sponsorships, investors and advertising.
Pending the community support survey and Parks and Recreation approval, renovations could begin around spring 2016, with a Jefferson City Renegades team on the field as early as 2017, Dullard said.
For more information about the effort to bring minor league baseball to Jefferson City, visit jeffcityrenegades.com or the Jefferson City Renegades Facebook page.