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gevine in baseball video 3 comments 0 000000 0 000000 23 mar help us fill the z meter posted by eric angevine in the z meter tagged poll polldaddy vote 1 comment spring is here and it s time to fire up the z meter again in case you don t know what that means check out the final post from last season i ve brought back most of the players from that list but i have six spots still open i ve allowed you to vote as often as you like and i ll take the half dozen who come out on top vote and share take our poll 0 000000 0 000000 23 mar bus leagues q a northwest arkansas naturals gm eric edelstein posted by eric angevine in aa texas league tagged eric edelstein gm kansas city royals northwest arkansas naturals strike the sasquatch leave a comment you may not know this but bus leagues has a twitter account busleagues we ve started a list called team tweets where we are gathering all of the official accounts from the hundreds of affiliated and independent teams we cover one of the cool things about that is that we can get in touch with the people who bring us our local baseball from time to time last week we found the twitter account of eric edelstein gm of the northwest arkansas naturals the naturals have only existed for a couple of years as the aa affiliate of the kansas city royals but eric has been with the franchise since it was called the wranglers and was located in wichita kansas he kindly told us a little about what it s like to oversee a double a team your twitter bio says you re living the dream how did you arrive at this point i can give you the short story which is that i m very lucky if someone out there has the same dream is there a standard way to become a gm i would say i certainly wasn t standard but i don t think anyone would say there s a standard way i did get lucky and caught a few breaks i grew up in cleveland and did a high school internship with the cleveland indians while i was still in high school i worked in the pr department and got my foot in the door there i ended up working for four seasons in various ballpark operations i went to school at bowling green for sport management and worked for the sid s office while i was there i worked for the fieldhouse facilities where the varsity teams practiced so i did that all through college then i got an internship in buffalo ny after college and did that for three months then i got hired on by the bisons and i ve been with that company ever since i had three seasons in buffalo then they moved me to their affiliate in jamestown ny where there was an opportunity to be a gm when i had just turned 24 to run a three man office on a short season team i jumped at that opportunity then a year later there was a change at the top in wichita they came to me and asked and admitted that maybe i was a little young and not quite ready for it but they said if you d want to move to wichita and be the gm we ll let you do that so i went and did that i was there for three years and i got the call that asked if i d ever heard of springdale arkansas they said we ve got one more move for you here so if you d like to go and start a team and be part of building a stadium and a new team it s you so i jumped at it and here i am luck and timing played a big role in it knock on wood i haven t screwed anything up yet i grew up in wichita are you talking about the wranglers yes so the naturals took that aa spot in the royals organization right exactly it really is the same team with the same owners and many of the same administrators including myself we moved the team from wichita to here if you weren t able to work in baseball what would you be doing instead long pause i honestly don t even know pause it would have to be in some sport or event i think even without baseball i d become an event person planning hosting and marketing events just in general the most exciting thing what gets me going is when you walk out into the ballpark on friday night and the place is just packed everyone s having a good time the rush of the event is what i get the most joy and excitement out of each minor league team is different what are some of the things you do in springdale that make the naturals feel unique the biggest thing we try to do is we try to be a part of the community what we do inside the ballpark i don t want to say it s standard because every team is different but it feels more unique for people who live here because this is their team we do the fireworks dollar hotdogs dollar beers and other things that are fairly standard across minor league baseball but what s different than even wichita or anywhere else i ve been is that we try to be a bigger part of the community we have a summertime street team that goes out we have an inflatable speed pitch and a second mascot suit that is always out mingling throughout the community we do free appearances and speaking engagements at rotaries and other civic clubs we ve really worked hard though we have room to grow but day to day we try to be a big part of the community you mentioned your mascot your team has a nickname that doesn t easily lend itself to a mascot image what did you end up using strike the sasquatch we came up with the story that strike has been living in the ozark mountains for many years everyone has heard of spying a sasquatch in the mountains and he never had a good enough reason to come out of those mountains when he heard we were building a stadium down here he came to check it out and decided he wanted to make it home i imagine you hire some of the organization s top employees how do you know when you have the right person we do a lot of hiring from within obviously that s how i was brought through being an intern and working my way up we continue to do that we have a pretty extensive intern program that we run during the season that brings new talent in we try to hire that new talent if we somehow don t have the right talent here we do try to look outside for the right person there are often people with other teams that have the right experience but haven t had the chance to catch on but we do try very hard to promote from within my assistant gm here was an intern for me when i worked in buffalo who came to wichita as an account rep when an opportunity arose he became sales manager and when we moved here we made him assistant gm my business manager started out running our team store here in northwest arkansas and when an opening came up we hired her we have a lot of people on staff that i ve known or worked with in some capacity at some point and we ve brought them through the ranks to the current jobs they re holding so sticking it out with the organization is rewarded absolutely i promote from within whenever possible i grew up a royals fan so i know the team has fewer resources to lure mlb free agents with double a is where the top prospects usually end up does that make you feel like your job is really important to the future of the franchise yeah i think it does the royals are a tremendous group to work with dayton moore and his entire baseball operations crew are really good people and they reinforce that when they see you i think a lot of times in baseball we get trapped in what we see on sportscenter that s what we know about a given team the royals do a good job of not just paying lip service to it but appreciating their minor league teams when they come in they re very respectful and grateful for the job we do it definitely makes it very rewarding i do feel a small piece of pride when a guy who comes through here goes up to the big leagues and has real success if the naturals are doing their job right the best players get better and leave how do you get fans to buy in when the roster is constantly changing it does bring its challenges there are definitely some people who struggle with that the key for us which hasn t quite happened yet is for one of those players to make the big leagues and become a regular i think that ll make it more palatable and understandable being a college town here they re used to players going on to the professional ranks be it football basketball or baseball but they re used to it happening after the season is over so there s a little bit of a challenge in getting people to understand that but we also have tried to really stress that if the organization is doing its job the person coming up behind the guy who leaves should be able to perform just as well or may even be an improvement what do you do during the offseason it s all about getting ready for the next season coming up a large portion of what we accomplish during the season is set up before we throw a pitch all the sponsors come on board for all those signs in the outfield and the advertisers that show up in the program and your radio broadcasts 95 of those are booked by opening day season tickets are a major determinant of how successful we are before anything on the field is decided getting all those people back on board setting the schedule and being ready to go then my job during the season becomes more about the subtle tweaks that need to be made if we do a good job making decisions in the offseason then it s more about maintenance and running each event as well as we can in the minors employees often have to wear many hats to get the job done is that true of the gm as well yeah pretty much there s certainly no ivory tower management here if there s a box that needs moved the tarp needs pulled or phone needs answered whoever s available does it you definitely have to be all in i don t think there s a gm out there who would do it any differently i definitely have a hand in just about everything going on here there s nothing that i m too good to help out with if a trash can needs emptied it gets emptied 0 000000 0 000000 23 mar falling in love with baseball posted by brian in baseball tagged andrew romine austin romine boston red sox family kevin romine 3 comments about a week ago my wife and son and i visited my parents we used to make the trip over to their house on the new hampshire seacoast two or three times a month and stay for the weekend but since the boy was born both the regularity and duration has been halved just too tough to load up an infant toddler and all the required accessories and make sure he s behaving with his cousins and still enjoy oneself for more than a few hours at a time still for a variety of reasons i like to visit obviously i like to see my parents even at thirty there s nothing like my mother s home cooking and my father and i have spent many an evening in the kitchen talking about everything from the red sox to barack obama and they like to see their grandson but more than that i just like being in the house while my wife moved around a lot as a kid i am very fortunate in that my parents still live in the house in which i grew up until i moved in with my wife a few months before we married it was the only home i had ever known and though it may be lacking in a great many respects my mother wants nothing more than to win the lottery buy a ton of dynamite and blow the place up if you know my mother you understand that she will do this if given the opportunity the simple truth remains that it is home the best part about the house is the backyard whereas most of the other homes on the street sit parallel to the road this 215 year old monster built by my father s ancestor joseph locke in the 1790s stands at an angle maybe fifteen feet from the road at its closest point this isn t always a good thing when i was nine or ten a drunk driver mistook my parents bedroom for an empty parking space slamming into the outside wall hard enough to separate it from the rest of the building it s a fascinating and frightening thing to stand in your living room and look up at a star filled sky fortunately the accident occurred early in the evening and nobody was injured on the plus side they own an acre of land and a house that sits near the front of an acre of land allows for a huge backyard my parents yard is bordered on three sides by a stone wall and squeezed another fifteen feet or so by a variety of trees leaves and other growth down the middle though was a wide open expanse of sometimes rocky sometimes mossy grass that allowed plenty of room for four children and later their children to run unencumbered that wide open space was where i learned to play and love baseball not long after we arrived last weekend as i was searching the freezer for something to eat my father mentioned that my older nephew had decided at the age of eleven to try his hand at little league for the first time my father and brother in law had been taking him out and working with him a little bit on throwing and catching but my father thought that maybe it would somehow help him to see the ball coming from the left side so we took him out into the backyard to throw the ball around in keeping with the family tradition begun by my old man who taught me to play the game while wearing a ratty old walt dropo model first baseman s mitt that he still owns and uses i wore a glove that my grandfather gave me twenty years ago a pedro guerrero model i rarely touched it as a boy preferring instead the don mattingly model that my dad bought me i used that glove until my freshman coach in high school ordered me to buy a new one that would allow me to actually catch the ball that new glove served me well enough but i don t think it has anybody s name in it which is a pity so out we went into the spacious backyard made even more spacious by the violent windstorms that have made a habit of tearing through every year or so and taking down a handful of mountain ash and maples and threw the ball back and forth while i looked around and had myself a bit of introspective reminiscence there was the stone wall separating my parents yard from the neighboring ritzos the first wall i ever hit a ball over i had probably lost fifty baseballs over the years in the huge piles of dead leaves on the edge of mr ritzo s property there was the wall at the back of the property about 200 feet away where i took aim as a ten year old celebrating wildly whenever a long drive so much as approached it in my mind s eye there was the old metal swing set that doubled as my first base and the tire nailed to the tree that served as second the tree that i considered third base where i once made my five year old sister stand and act as a third base coach giving me signals to slide or stand is still standing well part of it anyway the rest has succumbed to the wind as my son ran wildly across the open space chasing a ball here scampering through a puddle there i thought about some of the baseball related moments that took place in that yard my aunt rose who later helped inspire a lengthy obsession with jewish major leaguers whipping a low throw that i couldn t handle bruising my left thumb for the first time my brother leaning his upper body back back back his hand almost touching...