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| Sightings such as this may be more rare in 2011 as the Goldpanners will play an emergency- shortened schedule. |
Faced with overwhelming costs imposed by the loss of the team's "Olympic Village" housing complex and debt racked up from running without access to the public water utility, the Goldpanners of Fairbanks have decided to scale back their ABL league schedule and shake things up for the 2011 season, according to this press release on the team's website.
Assuming a role that team GM Don Dennis calls "adjunct membership", the Goldpanners will sharply curtail their Alaska Baseball League schedule. Their games against ABL opponents will mostly occur during the first half of the season, starting on June 8th. While the team should should face all the other teams of the ABL, their schedule will include fewer road matches against the teams of southcentral Alaska.
In order to keep costs down and keep the Goldpanners tradition alive and exciting for their fans and players, the team will be shaking things up for the remainder of the summer. They will be looking at attending at least one tournament outside of the state that will get their players a little closer to home before disbanding, perhaps the international Kamloops tournament.
"There will still be plenty of excitement. It is basically the last three weeks of the AK season that will be lost," says assistant GM Todd Dennis,"although we will likely be competing in the Kamloops International Tournament in the first week of July (a tournament Fairbanks has won more than any other team)."
The team is also considering other measures to help slash costs, such as asking players to cover a portion of their travel costs. Asked whether this would hurt recruitment efforts, T. Dennis replied, "We're talking about the Goldpanners here."
The financial outlook for the team should take a turn for the better as Growden Park will be hooked up to the public water utility for the next season. The move away from the traditional league schedule is expected to be a temporary, one-year strategy to help the team reach financial solvency before returning to the fold. Nor is it all necessarily set in stone; if the team's financial prospects improve, things could certainly change.
In the mean time, the Goldpanners will also look to shake things up by making an investment in developing local baseball in the adult league, fielding a team that will be composed of high schoolers ineligible for Legion ball, local-area collegiate players, and perhaps even a few players from the "big" Goldpanners. The team will be coached by local legends such as Sean Timmons and Dan Clark, who is now the head coach at Monroe High.
As with much of the baseball world, the Alaska League teams have been hit by a series of financial setbacks. Finances played a significant role in the Goldpanners' 11th-hour decision to bow out of the NBC tournament in Wichita after the 2010 season, and half of the other teams have made it known in the past few years that they are not interested in assuming the skyrocketing travel costs of attending. This comes on the heels of the Miners' financial crisis last off-season and reports that attendance is down around the league.
However, this is far from the worst that could happen, or has happened. In 1988 most of the teams of the league suspended play for the entire season before resuming again the next year. While this may come as a big shock to many, the other teams of the ABL will almost certainly forge ahead with the 2011 season as the Panners think outside of the box to weather the financial storm and return to full league status intact.
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