By all accounts, Allentown has proven to be a tremendous host city for minor league baseball. However, the general manager of the Lehigh Valley IronPigs now says that the team’s future as the Triple-A affiliate of the Philadelphia Phillies is unclear.
Kurt Landes — the president and general manager of the IronPigs — says that the team is willing to commit $1.5 million towards stadium upgrades, and told Stephanie Sigafoos of 91.3 WLVR that the franchise has secured $5.7 million “in either committed funds, or funds that have been requested.”
While that puts them well over the original $6 million budget that was believed to be needed to upgrade Coca-Cola Park, “spiraling costs and inflation” have now increased the amount needed to $9.5 million. If the IronPigs do indeed have the $7.2 million in hand that Landes believes, they still have a sizable gap to close to get to $9.5 million.
Ahead of the 2021 season, Major League Baseball drastically overhauled Minor League Baseball, taking a more active role in the pipeline to the big leagues.
J.J. Cooper of Baseball America noted all the standards that Major League Baseball was requiring Minor League stadiums to meet before the start of the 2023 season, including clubhouse and training room expansion, female staff locker rooms, improvement of stadium lighting and the addition of batting/pitching tunnels.
Per Sigafoos, the plans at Coca-Cola Park specifically include “expanded clubhouse, male and female locker rooms, training facilities, hydro space, and a new centerfield entrance.”
Cooper reported at the time that teams without a female locker room would be given a 10-point violation, with the expectation being that if they had 16 or more points worth of violations, they could be viewed as non-compliant and potentially lose their affiliation. Not all violations are worth as much as 10 points, but if the IronPigs don’t currently have a female locker room for staff, they would already be just five points away from hitting the maximum threshold.
“Selfishly, we have a concern because if we don’t have the project completed by April, Major League Baseball has the ability to essentially take our franchise and do what they want with it. So that’s scary,” Landes told Sigafoos.
Coca-Cola Park opened in 2008, the first season of play for the IronPigs. More than 356,000 fans attended their home games in 2021, ninth among all Triple-A affiliates. That was despite the team going just 52-66 and not having any players viewed as star prospects on their roster.
Of course, Coca-Cola Park isn’t going anywhere, but it’s hard to imagine the stadium and baseball being a profitable venture if the franchise no longer was affiliated with the Phillies. Whether it comes in the form of tax increases to help upgrade the stadium or lost economic opportunities because the team moves to another market, residents of the Lehigh Valley figure to bare the brunt of the new standards imposed by Major League Baseball.
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