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West Coast League

WCL on OSC

by Bruce Baskin
February 6, 2014 - West Coast League (WCL)


There's been a remarkable stability among West Coast League franchises as the loop enters its tenth season, but one team has been looking up at gathering storm clouds in recent seasons due to low attendance figures.

The Kitsap BlueJackets of Bremerton, Washington were one of seven charter WCL entries following a philosophical split among owners of the Pacific International League after the 2004 season. Existing PIL teams in Bellingham, Wenatchee, Bend, Kelowna and Aloha were joined by Kitsap and Spokane for the WCL's maiden voyage in 2005. A total of 66,526 fans turned out for 117 regular season games that year, an average of 568 per opening with nobody averaging 1,000. Kitsap finished third with 760 fans per home game, a number that went up to 849 in 2006.

A lot has happened in the WCL since then. Over nine seasons, 1.6 million people have clicked turnstiles at WCL ballparks. The circuit now boasts 12 teams that drew 338,237 onlookers to 290 regular season contests last season, a number that tops 400,000 when 49 non-league, playoff and All-Star games are added. Ten of the 12 teams averaged over 1,000 for all home games, with only Kitsap and Kelowna failing to top the triple-digit mark. However, while Kelowna has been fairly consistent over the years in drawing between 600 and 800 nightly, things appear to have bottomed out in Kitsap, where the BlueJackets finished far behind the rest of the WCL with 11,432 fans in 28 openings for an average attendance of 408 (about half of eleventh-place Kelowna's 21,732 and 805 numbers).

At first blush, Kitsap County would appear to be one of the WCL's better markets. The county has a population of a quarter-million people, with 40,000 inside the Bremerton city limits, all living on a peninsula in the middle of Puget Sound which creates a sense of "separation" from Seattle and Tacoma across the water to the east. The area is home to a U.S. Navy shipyard and submarine base, there's a nice 1,200-seat Fairgrounds ballpark the BlueJackets host games at in Bremerton plus decent coverage in the daily Kitsap Sun newspaper.

On the other hand, the franchise also has to compete with a Seattle Mariners major league team that's a one-hour ferry ride away and even Tacoma's AAA team is a half-hour trip over via Narrows Bridge to the south away. Radio coverage is nominal at best because there is little local response to Seattle's hegemony of the airwaves and it has to be mentioned that as of the end of January, the team's own website has had no changes since last August. The BlueJackets are struggling despite their close proximity to local fans with the lowest ticket prices in the WCL and the question of how long they can hold on in Bremerton has to be asked.

Since 2005, only one team has moved (Aloha to Corvallis), one has gone inactive (Spokane) and one has folded outright (Moses Lake). This is not a league that goes through franchises like Larry King goes through wives, and WCL president Dennis Koho and his executive board have to be concerned about this one.

Moving the team may be the eventual needed outcome, but to where? If the struggle of teams in or near Seattle, Portland and Spokane has proven anything, it's that the WCL works best in markets outside larger cities with pro ball, Moses Lake notwithstanding. Olympia? No suitable facility. Grays Harbor? Very down economy. Vancouver? Too close to Portland. Lewiston? Perhaps the best potential WCL market in the region, but not exactly West Division material. There are no easy solutions and the best short-term approach may be to stay in Bremerton but change course because the current path clearly isn't working.

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West Coast League Stories from February 6, 2014


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