Instead of playing games almost every night from mid June to late July at Growden Memorial Park, the Alaska Goldpanners of Fairbanks are playing just three weeks of games starting
June 10 and ending July 1.
The Goldpanners will play in the Midnight Sun Baseball Game, but the Goldpanners — a team comprised of mostly college and junior college players — won’t be playing in the Alaska Baseball League this year and the Athletes in Action Fire will be based in Eagle River instead of North Pole.
Goldpanner general manager Don Dennis said the loss of gaming revenue and the death of Bill Stroecker, who had been president of the nonprofit organization that runs the team since 1962, are the main factors the Goldpanners have been forced to cut operations to about two-thirds of their normal capacity.
“It’s pretty simple, really,” Dennis said earlier this month. “We’re taking a proactive approach in a pretty tight money market.”
According to Dennis, The Goldpanners normally operate on a budget of about $400,000, much of which comes from gaming proceeds.
Gaming proceeds have been drastically reduced since 2008 when Dennis said the team received more than $200,000 from that revenue source. He anticipates the figure to be about $77,000 this year, a loss of about $140,000.
“Basically, we’ve cut everything back to two-thirds of what we’ve done in the past,” Dennis said. “Season ticket prices will be scaled back, but tickets for the Midnight Sun Game will increase from $10 to $15.”
The increase in the Midnight Sun Game tickets should help offset some of the losses as the game usually attracts between 3,500 and 4,000 fans.
Dennis said Stroecker’s death on Nov. 8, 2010, was a tremendous blow to the organization.
“We lost our safety net when Bill Stroecker passed away,” Dennis said. “Every time we came out of a season a little short financially, he would manufacture a way to get us to the next season.
“Sometimes it was out of his own pocket, other times it was through a loan, but he always found a way to keep us going,” Dennis added.
“You cannot underestimate what he meant to this organization from 1962 to 2010,” Dennis continued. “He was absolutely rock solid.
“In all those years and all those meetings, he missed less than five in 48 years. He was hands on, but kept himself completely in the background.”
Charlie Cole, a former Alaska attorney general and longtime Goldpanner supporter, has taken over as president of the organization.
This summer
The Goldpanners will play an independent schedule this summer, including some games against ABL teams.
The season starts June 10 with a three-game series against the Anchorage Bucs. The annual Midnight Sun Game will be against the Oceanside, Calif., Waves at
10:30 p.m. on June 21. The final home game is July 1 against Athletes in Action.
The Goldpanners close out the season with two weeks of road games, including a series at the Kenai Peninsula Oilers, a tournament in Kamloops, British Columbia, and a barnstorming trip down the West Coast, playing in several towns near where players on the team live. Dennis said it is more cost effective to play the schedule that is planned for this summer than it would be to play in the ABL.
Jim Dietz will return as the Goldpanners’ field manager. Jerrod Riggan will return for his fourth season as pitching coach. Nathan Pratt of Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Ore., joins the coaching staff as an assistant.
The 2011 schedule is available in today’s Sports Scoreboard on Page D2.
Satellite team
The Goldpanners are creating a satellite team — the Midnight Sun Goldpanners — who will play in the Fairbanks Adult Amateur Baseball League. The team will be coached by Randy Barber and Sean Timmons and hopes to attract local players who are playing junior college and college baseball in the Lower 48, but aren’t quite ready to play at the Goldpanners level.
Dennis hopes the some players on the Midnight Sun team will make their way onto the main roster for part of the season.
The Midnight Sun Goldpanners will play games at Growden through July 17, including a couple of games against the parent club and one against Athletes in Action.
The future
What’s in store for the Goldpanners in the years to come is anyone’s guess.
If gaming proceeds increase and Athletes in Action return to the Interior, the Goldpanners could be back in the ABL.
Dennis said another possibility would be to morph the Midnight Sun Goldpanners into another ABL team from North Pole.
“We just don’t know which of those, or if any of those will actually happen,” Dennis said.
A year from now, everything could be back to normal and a full summer of baseball could be back on the docket.
“We want to stay in the ABL if it’s feasible, but we’ll go whichever way benefits us the most economically,” Dennis said. “It all has to do with money.”
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