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Lodi closing in on deal for new baseball team
Lodi may soon play home to a new baseball team.
The Lodi Parks and Recreation department is currently working out a plan to bring in a summer baseball squad made up of draft-eligible Division I college and junior college players in 2008 as part of the newly developed Sierra Baseball League.
"We think Lodi's a perfect community to support this," said Stevie Mack, the league's owner. "We tried to do this last summer, but a deal wasn't able to get done in time."
The roughly 45-game season would run from the beginning of June into the second week of August, with games held from Thursday through Sunday. Home games would be played at Zupo Field.
Lodi would represent one of six teams in the league, with the others including Stockton, which would play its home games at Billy Hebert Field, Sacramento and Vacaville.
"Everybody's excited about it — they are and we are, too," Lodi Parks and Recreation Director Tony Goehring said. "I think it would certainly be a good opportunity to bring a high level of baseball back to Lodi.
"And because of it's short season, we're not talking about displacing local teams."
In summers past, Zupo Field has been home to American Legion baseball, but its status for upcoming summers is unknown. Should Legion continue, Goehring says, the league could simply play its games earlier in the week.
The idea of the Sierra Baseball League is to give college players who haven't been drafted additional opportunities to improve their games and gain exposure from major league scouts.
"It's really a good caliber of play — sometimes even better than minor league ball," Goehring said.
Most of the details have yet to be figured out, but Goehring says the league is on a relatively stringent timeline and both parties would like to get something figured out by the end of July.
The league's representatives would like to find ways to improve Zupo, including the lighting system.
"We're still trying to hammer out the field issues, and I don't think they're insurmountable," Goehring said. "They came up with ideas of how to make the field look more like old, nostalgic parks."
Goehring believes the team will need to average between 800 and 1,000 fans per game in order to support the cost of the club.
Another issue will be the need for host families who can house the players during the summer.
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