THE baseball fraternity in the Limestone Coast has been buoyed in recent weeks with the announcement of an Australian Baseball League four-game series to be played in Mount Gambier from December 21-23.
It is a home series for one of the latest expansion teams in the league – the Auckland Tuatara – who host the Adelaide Bite.
The series promises big coverage for the Blue Lake city, with live vision expected to go into the Asian region.
It all leads towards the future plans of the league to add a further expansion team down the track, with Mount Gambier on the radar as one possible location.
This season saw two expansion teams enter the competition, with the second a Korean team based in Geelong.
Geelong-Korea has already gained huge support from that particular region, along with live television coverage into Korea, which has again garnered big support from fans across Asia – close to 2.5 million viewers in the first four games of the season.
While it may be some time off, a further expansion team in Australia could include the likes of Japan or Taiwan, possibly consisting of a number of “local” players, with a predominantly Asian base.
That would bring close to 50 players and staff into whatever region gains the rights to claim the side, with the incoming players and staff to live in the region for the full season.
Baseball Australia chief operating officer Ben Foster said it was a model that has worked well so far, with Mount Gambier certainly in the running for the chance to base a side in the city in the future.
He said when the city hosts the latest ABL fixture just before Christmas, he would look to bring as many interested parties to the table as possible.
“We will bring senior executives to town to give the place a proper once over, to get a sense of what a future could look like,” he told The Border Watch.
“Whether we can entice some of our investors to town, the type of people who might invest in an expansion team is certainly another thing that may be on our list.
“It is a matter of coordinating those efforts to get as many people to town as humanly possible.”
Foster said the strong base for the sport in Mount Gambier was one thing that interested the league.
“Certainly there would not be enough local players to start an expansion team from scratch,” he said.
“With that in mind what we see is probably not an exact carbon copy of what we have done in Geelong this year with the Geelong-Korea team, but more of a hybrid.”
Foster said baseball was the number one sport in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
“If we can get a couple of those parties interested in potentially investing in the town and the venue and potentially bringing a team in there it would be a great catalyst,” he said.
“I think the mix of international and regional is good for us because the international flavour brings the things we cannot generate from a smaller population base.
“It brings the players we need and the general basis for establishing the on-field product, but certainly the regional element is more than capable of doing the off-field product.”
Foster said the Geelong-Korea team was already gaining good support from the community.
“At this point it is a rolling five year agreement they have in place and the economic impact of bringing that many people into town is pretty significant,” he said.
“But the more encouraging thing is in the very short period this season, everyone has embraced them as their own.
“Everyone is wearing the kit, everybody is cheering them as if they are part of the community.
“They are very serious about integrating and being part of the community.
“They see themselves very much as a team from Geelong.”
Foster said the ABL uses a model based on minor league baseball in the USA, where he said teams based in towns outside major cities became the lifeblood of those regional centres.
While Mount Gambier faces stiff opposition in the form of Tasmania, Northern Territory and Wollongong, nothing is yet set in stone for a future team.
“We have not locked ourselves in to any agreements,” Foster said.
“We have had meetings with a lot of different places.
“Wollongong is among the leaders at the moment because they have put up their hand to host 80-odd games previously.
“Proving you can host one game is a massive step in the right direction.”
But Mount Gambier has plenty going for it in the run to gain the nod for an expansion team.
Apart from the quality of the venue, the passion of the baseball fraternity in the Limestone Coast is one thing which has stood out to Foster.
“I have photographs of a small army there mobilised to get the playing surface up to shape,” he said.
“There is no shortage of activity and volunteers down there helping out.
“That is one of the things that gives us a great deal of confidence that we did pick the right place and it has the potential to grow.
“But it does come back to that venue as well.
“The reason the Koreans are Geelong-Korea is the venue.
“Geelong Baseball Centre was up to standard.”
A new club would be up against the two new expansion teams from this season, plus Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney.
