Aiken and professional baseball need a break

Could professional baseball work in Aiken?

Right now, bringing a pro baseball team back to Aiken would be about as appropriate as posting a sign on Richland Avenue that reads "Happy New Year 2012". Eventually, it's going to be useful. Right now, it doesn't make any sense at all.

Michael Hardin is figuring that out the hard way. Hardin is a young entrepreneur trying to resurrect the Atlantic Coast League of Professional Baseball (not to be confused with the Atlantic Coast League, which appears to be a much better match for Aiken than Hardin's league).

Hardin and the ACLPB have nothing to do with the Aiken Foxhounds and the South Coast League that left the city hanging this spring. The SCL suspended operations in April with no signs of making any type of return. A few hundred season ticket holders and a good amount of sponsors were owed money. They're still owed money.

Hardin saw what happened early on and actually decided to avoid the Aiken market.

"That was the main reason I was against pursuing Aiken for a team," he said. "But then I got some calls. Aiken only hit our radar because people there were asking if we were coming."

Apparently, a few Aiken fans were already willing to risk it with another unstable, newly created independent league. USC Aiken was not.

The town's only major baseball stadium, Roberto Hernandez Stadium, is owned and operated by USC Aiken, and the SCL used the facilities last season. USC Aiken baseball coach Kenny Thomas, who was in no way affiliated with the Foxhounds, ended up stuck doing the grunt work for the independent baseball team on several occasions. Then the league skipped out on several commitments (only some of them financial in nature).

Thomas, along with the rest of the USC Aiken athletic department, won't let that happen again.

"The university would listen (if a new team wanted to use Roberto Hernandez Stadium), but a lot of things would have to be different," Thomas said. "No. 1 is to go get private ownership."

Hardin's Atlantic Coast League of Professional Baseball doesn't have any private owners. Hardin admitted the search for an Aiken owner hasn't even begun. In fact, the league doesn't have even one commitment from a city to field a team yet. Hardin said Albany, Ga. was a "high possibility".

The new league is as unstable and risky as the SCL, if not more so. The league's own Web site, which rips stories from newspaper Web sites and posts them on its home page, offers a convincing snapshot of how incredibly difficult it's going to be for this league to work in former SCL cities.

Take, for example, Macon, Ga., another town burned by the SCL that has also turned Hardin and the ACL away. Both Aiken and Macon are now in the same boat. They're big enough to support a team, but too burned to give a similar league a shot. Let's put that 2012 sign in the closet for now. Perhaps we can take it out and give it another shot a few years down the road.

Until then, the next big question for baseball fans in Aiken is: How high must gas prices get before it's no longer profitable to drive to Thirsty Thursday at Lake Olmstead Stadium? Do the math before you reach the ballpark.