‘A Home Run’: City of Waco experiencing renewed appetite for minor league baseball
WACO, Texas (KWTX) - Waco and professional baseball once shared a nearly 60-year history, but it’s been even longer since the city has actually had a team.
There has been a continued effort to bring the summer tradition back.
“I think we’re the right size and scope for a minor league team,” Lane Wakefield, Director of the Center for Sales Strategy in Sports Entertainment at Baylor, said.
The conversation about a team coming to Waco comes after the city considered moving up the timeline for construction on a new baseball stadium downtown.
The city is looking at a stadium with 6,000 seats but it wouldn’t just be the stadium it would also be surrounded by shops, restaurants and apartment buildings.
Wakefield said the ownership would have to prioritize the fans and entertainment outside of baseball to be successful.
“So you have your pocket of fans that are baseball people and they’re going to be a core audience, but you have folks like me that have a wife and four kids that just want to have a good time in the summer in Waco,” Wakefield said.
That mentality has been one of the key pillars in success for the round rock express who host their games just over an hour away from Waco at Dell Diamond.
“I’ve not lived full time in Waco since 2009, but I know things have changed a lot as it relates to a lot of growth that’s come that way,” Round Rock Express General Manager Tim Jackson said. “But you really need that to support and of course the fan base, I mean, you need people understand that minor League Baseball, is a 75 home games here in Round Rock...that’s a lot of games. ”
Jackson is no stranger to Waco, he played baseball for the Bears and said he thinks Waco would be a good potential site for a Double-A team in the Texas League.
“There and you know you’re going to bus a lot in that league. And the fact that it’s in Central Texas makes it easy to kind of get to a lot of those areas,” Jackson said.
Waco can look back at history at Katy Park which starting in 1906 the Waco Navigators called home until 1919 before the team became the Waco Cubs. The park also hosted the Waco Dons, who eventually became the Waco Pirates playing in the 1940s and 1950s.
“it provided a hub for sports and entertainment in Waco and within that history you had a pretty remarkable set of stories and teams that would come through Waco and really make it a rich part of the story of baseball,” Dr. Paul Putz, Director for the Baylor Master of Arts in Theology and Sports Studies said.
Putz has researched sports as well as religion at Baylor. He said baseball plays a very significant story in Waco’s history. From Babe Ruth and company barnstorming in Waco to an historic night during a game involving one of the crown jewels of the Negro Leagues the Kansas City Monarchs.
“In 1930 you had the very first game in Waco that was played at night, so the first night baseball game in Texas...The Waco Cardinals against the Kansas City Monarchs.
While this phase of the project for a minor league team wasn’t supposed to start for at least another 12 years according to their timeline, strong interest from developers has caused the city to reconsider.
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