Here's hoping next baseball league will be a hit

By JOSEPH TERRY 

The hope was there. So was the effort.

For the club, its fans and its sponsors, professional baseball in Whitefish showed it had promise.

The Glacier Outlaws won the last four games of their only homestand at Memorial Park and finished the season 6-4, tied for the most wins in the fledgling Mount Rainier Professional Baseball League.

While the team found success on the diamond, outside of it the short tenure of the MRPBL was mired with broken promises and disasters.

While not officially dead, buzzards are circling around what is left of the MRPBL.

The league is out of money a little more than a week after it started playing games.

Officially, three teams have already called off their seasons, after the league has failed to meet a multitude of payments to teams, players, coaches, officials and businesses in the six member communities.

Mike Greene, the owner of all six teams and league commissioner, has yet to officially pull the plug.

In Whitefish, Greene sold the team and its league on the promise of fixing past mistakes. Greene was a manager in the Pecos independent baseball league, his last stop at the now-defunct Douglas (Arizona) Diablos.

He wove a story of large financial backing, telling The Daily World in Grays Harbor, Washington, of “a couple of backers who are financing this.” He would tell an Olympia, Washington, sports blog a week later of his fully committed, anonymous donor and that, “the league will not fold for lack of paying players or stadium leases.”

That mantra took its hits early.

Before Glacier’s first game, its opponent, the Skagit Valley (Washington) Lumberjacks couldn’t find a bus driver to escort them to Whitefish. Even when the Lumberjacks found a driver, their bus overheated on its way to Memorial Park, causing them to be late for the game.

Neither team had uniforms for the first series, the Lumberjacks playing in blue T-shirts, the Outlaws in borrowed jerseys from Whitefish’s American Legion baseball team, the Glacier Twins. Then, they had to borrow baseballs to play the game.

After consecutive losses to start the season, the Outlaws won their first game, only for one of their pitchers to be arrested that night, charged with rape. That player was immediately released from the team.

Ellensburg (Washington) rolled into town for the next series, but played only two of the scheduled four games, leaving when they couldn’t pay for transportation or lodging.

Finally equipped with its own uniforms, Glacier traveled to Ellensburg for its first scheduled road series only for the league to put out a statement two games later that it was out of money.

The league didn’t pay for Glacier’s hotel stay that night and effectively left the team stranded in western Washington. A team parent paid for one night of lodging and Outlaws staff had to borrow a bus from the Glacier Twins to shuttle the team back to Whitefish.

While bills continue to go unpaid, Greene has made multiple statements in the last few days saying he wishes to save the league.

On Saturday, he wrote a press release claiming he would give away franchise rights for free to find a new group of owners. On Monday, that press release was gone, replaced with a new plan to shrink the league from six teams to four, with the four remaining teams to be individually owned.

The last press release promised more news on Tuesday, news which never came. Greene has not answered phone calls from the media since.

In the meantime, Greene posted Tuesday on the Facebook page of the Skagit Valley Lumberjacks that he had plans for the team and the league to start playing games by June 10. On the Facebook page of the Ellensburg Bulls, he posted that the team had found new ownership in former Major League Baseball player Selwyn Young, again stating the league is not folding and reiterating his four-team plan.

However, all of his statements have seemed to contradict what officials for the six member teams have said in the last few days.

On Wednesday, only hours after Greene’s Facebook post, Young’s attorneys denied the purchase of the Ellensburg team when asked by the Daily Record newspaper in Ellensburg. The post has since been taken down.

Ellensburg Bulls and Moses Lake Rattlesnakes general manager Keith Marshall told the Daily Record on Tuesday that not only had the Bulls not been sold, but Bulls players, coaches and staff had yet to be paid.

While many of the players from those two teams have hung around western Washington in hopes of the league’s survival, or possibly waiting for payment, the three other teams have disbanded.

Skagit Valley Lumberjacks manager Ryan Parent told the Skagit Valley Herald on Sunday that all of his players left town after the league ran out of money. The same happened with the Grays Harbor Gulls. The Oregon City Mud Turtles officially announced the end of their season as well.

The league never paid the Glacier Twins for its stadium lease at Memorial Park and has left other bills unpaid. Whether the team receives payment for its second week is to be seen.

What is known, even if it’s unofficial, is that there’s not much hope left in the MRPBL. The league has struck out.

“Nobody made money on this, even the guy that duped everybody,” Outlaws assistant general manager Lindsay Fansler said, harshly reflecting on his own experience.

“He’s hoping he’s not to blame because his intentions were to provide playing opportunities for young men. That doesn’t excuse the fact that a lot of these people in these small towns brought their names and their reputations and their work and they brought these teams in, all to be left in doubt. 

“He’s a guy that I think meant well.” 

Fansler said he felt misled by Green when he claimed “he had financial backing and the capability to pull this off. What it appears to have been is that he hoped that he could take a little bit of money, cover some start-up costs, then have a self-funding enterprise. Independent league baseball leagues do not operate like that. They’re notoriously difficult to fund. He made us believe that he was aware of that.”

Fansler said he still believes professional baseball can work in Whitefish.

At minimum, the eight days in late May showed that to be possible. Whether there is another opportunity for the city to take a swing at the pros will have to be seen.

The hope was there, and so was the effort.

Hopefully the next chance the Flathead Valley gets at professional baseball can be a hit.