by Bob Carson

Editor’s Note: The USTA website is pleased to present freelance writer Bob Carson and his popular “Outside the Box” features. This monthly series is a menu of outlandish proposals presented with a wink — but the purpose behind them is serious. The views contained in this column are that of the author alone, and do not necessarily represent the opinions or views of the United States Trotting Association.

Bob Carson

The Zanesville Greys were a terrific professional baseball team. They won the championship of the Frontier League in 1992. The Greys (named after Zane Grey, a famous writer of western novels who was born in Zanesville, Ohio) are long gone. Despite being outstanding on the field, the ball club was a flop at the box office.

In baseball, despite the dreadful wreckage of franchises like the Greys, entrepreneurs are always standing in line, willing to give baseball ownership a try. Among a short list of teams that tried to find the magic formula that would turn a profit in the sport of independent professional baseball in the Frontier League since the Greys went belly up were the Canton Crocodiles, Canton Coyotes, Chillicothe Paints, Dubois County Dragons, Erie Sailors, Johnstown Johnnies, London Werewolves, Kenosha Mammoths, Kentucky Rifles, Midwest Sliders, Ohio Valley Redcoats, Slippery Rock Sliders and Springfield/Ozark Mountain Ducks.

They all went broke.

Even so, the flame of the franchise continued as new prospective owners always lined up to take the torch.

The Phoenix Trotting Park was built in 1964 in Goodyear, Arizona. It opened in 1965 and lasted about two seasons. The building stands like a ghostly monolith on the desert. The track never re-opened.

The Phoenix Trotting Park, just like hundreds of baseball franchises, was a dream that did not come true. The racetrack had problems and obstacles. The summers were overly hot. Roads to the track were not complete. Like most fledgling businesses, the track struggled. But unlike most failed baseball franchises, when The Phoenix Trotting Park went broke, nobody stepped in to take another swing. Failed racetracks like Freestate, Saginaw, Muskegon, Liberty Bell, Brandywine, Roosevelt and Quad City never received another chance. More recently, Quebec, Windsor and Hiawatha Racecourse lost the umbilical cord of slots money will stop racing. Nobody picked up the reins.

Autumn Ryan graphic

Harness racing has a shortage of entrepreneurs ready to step up to the plate and take their hacks. If not for casino operators, who are not really in the harness racing game, or Jeff Gural, who is a blessed anomaly, failing racetracks have few enthusiastic suitors anxious to take the reins and work hard to turn the bottom line around.

We are talking about the little guys, not about racetracks with racinos that currently receive revenue from from slot machines. Our focus is on racetracks in states like Michigan, Arizona and California, which do not have additional revenue.

Where are the business gamblers in the states with struggling tracks or tracks that are no longer in operation? Troubled assets are the bargains; these are the franchises that are available. Why is there such a shortage of capitalists with the energy to refuel, reorganize and try to get these struggling tracks up and running? While everyone seems to think they can rejuvenate failing baseball franchises, few think about picking up the reins of failed racetracks.

Some smart people should; the chances of success are better in harness racing than independent league baseball. Success is possible.

Last summer, a new baseball team, the Southern Illinois Miners, took the field in the Frontier League. The Miners are the most recent reincarnation of the long-forgotten Zanesville Greys. They played their 84 home games before an average of almost 5,000 paying customers. Twenty years ago, on a good night, the Greys played before 500.

Sometimes it just works. Using the same product in a worse economic environment, the Miners found a way to pay their bills when ten teams in the endless line of ownership could not. Should the Miners wake up and find they can’t meet their payroll, they will join the Greys in the scrap yard of failed sports franchises, a surprisingly large scrap yard.

Finding revenue in the sporting world is, and always has been, difficult, very difficult. Amazingly, customers are reluctant to simply hand over money. Instead, entrepreneurs must wrestle money from gnarled fists. If monetizing the sport of harness racing (without slot machines in the equation) sounds impossible, here are a few blue skies.

Horse racing has more revenue potential that independent baseball. Baseball, at the level we are using as a reference, has three primary revenue streams — tickets, concessions and local advertising. Racing has these three and on site gambling, off site gambling, agricultural subsidies, new territories, new television channels and others.

Many of these sources of revenue have had more than a few laps around the track, but they can work. New revenue streams for our old sport are possible. One new stream that looks promising is cyberspace. Others are foreign markets and non-traditional wagering. Others may be percolating in your mind.

What we need in the tired arena of harness racing are viable business models (it is possible these new models to monetize racing may be unrecognizable to the present-day perception of our sport) and what we need are new entrepreneurs who are willing to step up to the plate because we have a good product, better than most.

Often, the discussion is, “How do we save harness racing?” That is a very tall order. The people that take a stab at professional baseball teams do not ask, “How do we save baseball?” They simplify the problem to, “How do I make a profitable enterprise out out my little franchise?”

When the ownership of the Southern Illinois Miners decided to take a fling at Independent League professional baseball, they did not look beyond a 25 mile radius. They did not care about paying players low wages, they did not care about begging legislatures, they did not focus on the internet, they did not look at the trajectory of baseball — they zeroed in on one simple premise — when we put on our 84 shows next summer, can we cover our costs and make a little money. And the Miners did it. They, and others, offer blueprints for future business/sports entrepreneurs.

Creating a little island of success should be the quest of any new harness racing ownership group. Carve out a profitable niche of your own, on your own. Prove it can be done. If you do, others will follow. You want a challenge, we have one — make a business model for 2013 that makes a failed horse racing venue profitable without slot machines.

At this point, 99 percent will think, “Yeah, well how are you going to do that?” and do nothing.

It’s the oddball, the one in a hundred who will say, “I have a plan and I will make it work.” Baseball seems to have an endless reservoir of these oddballs; harness racing needs a few. In these difficult economic times, deals are doable. We need a few business people who think they can make money from rehabilitation, resurrection and hard work in harness racing.

There has never been a better time.