Why do I get the feeling that...

the News Sentinel is the paper that is the more negative of the two dailies in Fort Wayne?

Too soon to predict revival

In their first season downtown, the Fort Wayne TinCaps won the Midwest League championship and far surpassed the largest attendance the team pulled when it was the Wizards playing at Memorial Stadium on Coliseum Boulevard.

The team itself has clearly been a success, but has it helped make downtown Fort Wayne a success, too? The concise answer is: Too soon to say.

Some restaurants near Parkview Field say they saw more business on game days. And the presence of the team and Parkview Field downtown appear to draw thousands of visitors from outside Allen County. But there's no certainty that the stadium and team are catalysts to ignite and support a broader revival in the heart of Fort Wayne. It may be years before tax receipts, property values, occupancy rates and other objective measures reveal how well the city's gamble on Parkview Field pays off.

“We have a lot of good anecdotal evidence, and I don't want to ignore that, because it's important,” said Rich Davis, president of the Downtown Improvement District. Through their presence, he said, the TinCaps and the new stadium have drawn “upwards of 400,000 people” downtown and given them a “mind-opening experience” of entertainment available there.

This next story is a bit more of a look at the bright side of life.
Record-book crowd

Despite initial skepticism about their new name and logo, a tough economy, a very wet spring and hard feelings from some about their new ballpark, the Fort Wayne TinCaps may have had the perfect summer from a business perspective.

With a total of 378,529 fans during the regular season, the team averaged more than 1,000 more per game at Parkview Field this season than last year at Memorial Stadium. Merchandising was also up by about 40 percent over last year.

It doesn't hurt that the team had its best-ever first half with 45 wins, capturing the Midwest League's Eastern Division title and went on to top that in the second half with a 49-21 mark.

“We obviously took some heat for changing the name,” TinCaps President Mike Nutter said in June. “We took a chance. What we did know when we made the announcement is that we didn't have a game for a while, and a negative perception might stick for a while. We think the name is goofy and fun, and we had a perfect storm of the new ballpark and the team playing well. I just think it's a lot of stuff.”

This next story may be the best I've heard in the baseball business genre in awhile.

The team early in the season wanted to purchase a reinforced window for the office where money is distributed and collected for souvenir and concession stands so the door would not have to be opened. A new window would've cost about $1,000, Nutter said, but someone came up with the idea of buying the same window at the Memorial Stadium auction.

“We had one of our employees go over to the auction, and he had to wait for six hours or whatever until it came up, but we bought it for $5,” Nutter said.

That, kids, is called a good omen.