This is what is the matter with baseball.
Cypress is playing Douglass in the RBI League, a summer league
for inner-city kids 14 and under. The temperature on the Cypress Junior High
fields approaches 100 degrees. The Douglass outfielders are standing
listlessly in their dark blue caps and shirts as their coach makes a pitching
change. The scrubs for both sides are wandering off into the shade of the
trees and the water jugs. All the reasons that baseball is dying seem to be
apparent — too little action, too much standing around, too much heat.
Then, just when the game needs a lift, a little-used Cypress
player named Osmany Marshall, a fifth-grader at Klondike Elementary School,
provides it. He lines a shot into left field that deflects off the fielder’s
glove and rolls past him. Osmany rounds second, heads for third, and gets the
windmill sign to keep going. But the leftfielder makes a perfect throw to the
catcher. With coaches and players on both sides screaming, Osmany puts on the
brakes and scrambles back toward third. But the Douglass catcher and third
baseman know what to do and catch him in a rundown. Three, four, five times
they toss the ball back and forth, flawlessly executing a play that even the
better high school teams routinely botch. Finally, one of them holds the ball
an instant too long and Osmany scoots home safe.
The stragglers are back. The outfielders look alive. The game has
been energized by a single play. Under sandlot rules, it’s a home run for
Osmany Marshall and, for this morning at least, for RBI (Returning Baseball to
the Inner-City) baseball.
As the baseball season hits the midway point, the Memphis
Redbirds are on pace to set an attendance record at AutoZone Park. The team is
losing more than last year on the field but drawing better than any team in
the minor leagues. At this pace, some 900,000 tickets will be sold.
Few of those fans will ever see, and many are not even aware of,
the RBI program that is a key part of the Redbirds’ unique organizational
status. RBI and STRIPES, a sports program cosponsored by the Redbirds and the
Memphis City Schools, are the cornerstones of a $72 million stadium financing
plan. Osmany Marshall and his teammates are, in a special way, as essential to
the Redbirds story as founders Dean and Kristi Jernigan.
Special because as nice as it is to see inner-city kids playing
organized ball on a summer morning in Memphis, no other city in the country
has such an arrangement between sports and charity. The Memphis Redbirds
Baseball Foundation is the only nonprofit organization in the U.S. that owns
and operates a team and its playing facility. The unusual arrangement drew the
attention of the Internal Revenue Service. After an audit, the Redbirds agreed
earlier this year to pay the IRS $1.6 million to preserve their tax-exempt
financing.
In a different context, the issue of the public or private nature
of professional sports facilities came up last week in Chancellor Walter
Evans’ ruling against the city and county and HOOPS L.P. in the NBA arena
deal.
Declining interest in baseball, especially among inner-city
youth, is a national phenomenon, if not exactly a national crisis. RBI
baseball was around for several years in Memphis and other cities before the
Redbirds latched onto it. There are actually two organizations in Memphis that
go by the name RBI. The other one, which is for older kids, is called Reviving
Baseball in the Inner-City and has no connection with the Redbirds. Apart from
these groups, churches, the Memphis Housing Authority, and other organizations
promote youth baseball (and other sports) for recreational and competitive
teams. The mainstays include Idlewild Presbyterian Church, Bellevue Baptist
Church, and Nolen Wilson’s Pendleton League at Colonial School, which sponsors
leagues and three summer tournaments for all comers, staffed mainly by
volunteers.
The RBI baseball program differs from these groups in its
marketing power, its financial muscle, and its vital connection to the
Redbirds Foundation’s tax-exempt purpose of “instituting programs to
combat juvenile delinquency.” The kids in the RBI program are balancing a
lucrative, well-staffed, and sophisticated downtown organization on their
narrow shoulders.
Reggie Williams, vice president of community relations for the
Redbirds, says the combined budget this year for RBI and Stripes is $300,000
to $400,000. The RBI program, he says, has expanded from six sites in 1998 to
14 this year, with about 60 kids at each site. The Redbirds buy equipment and
uniforms and pay four coaches at each site $200 to $300 a week. Kroger donates
food and other sponsors have donated books and materials.
One of the Redbirds’ slogans is “Baseball is our business
but the community is our bottom line.” The Redbirds yearbook says
“every cent of profit the Redbirds earn goes back into the charitable
work of this foundation.”
It isn’t clear, however, how much the Redbirds Foundation spends
on program services compared to other expenses of running the front office,
operations, paying off debt on the ballpark, ticket sales, and the Plaza Club
(a taxable subsidiary). Because of the unique financing arrangement, most of
these things fall under the nonprofit umbrella. And their bills get paid
before “profits” go back into inner-city baseball.
The Internal Revenue Service requires public disclosure of
expenses and executive salaries, but the Redbirds have not filed a Form 990
since moving from Tim McCarver Stadium to AutoZone Park, where attendance has
tripled and revenue has exploded. Chief financial officer Marc Greenburg said
the Redbirds requested an extension of time to file their 1999 return, which
covers the 2000 season. On their 1998 form, the most recent available, the
Redbirds Foundation lists salaries of $2 million (not including players, who
are paid by the St. Louis Cardinals, the parent team) and total expenses of
$8.9 million for their last year at Tim McCarver.
Williams, a 1978 graduate of Southside High School, played pro
baseball for the Los Angeles Dodgers. After retirement in 1991, he was
assistant principal at Ridgeway High School and principal at Ridgeway Middle
School.
“Back in the Seventies, WDIA had successful leagues in
Memphis,” he recalls. “The big dropoff in baseball may have come
when the NBA got big with Kareem Jabbar, Magic Johnson, and Michael
Jordan.”
Baseball won’t overtake basketball in popularity, but Williams
would love to see such things as a middle school reading and math curriculum
based on baseball and inner-city fields with dugouts, fenced-in benches,
backstops, neatly cut grass, and carefully lined basepaths.
“It would give the children something to have pride
in,” he says.
Of course he would also like to see more competitive teams like
Fairley High School, which made it to this year’s city championship game and
has sent several players on to college baseball.
“The RBI program is giving them a chance to play,” says
Fairley coach James McNeal, who also coaches the Cypress RBI team. “When
they get to us in high school, they need to know something. You can see them
progress from week to week. And RBI feeds them and gives them reading material
too.”
The success of the Redbirds can be measured in the standings and
at the ticket gate. The success of RBI and the Redbirds Foundation will depend
on how many Osmany Marshalls stay involved with the game and stay in school
five or six years down the road.
You can e-mail John Branston at branston@memphismagazine.com.
