If the proprietors of the Winston-Salem Dash are going to make the monthly nut on the yet-to-be-completed $40.7 million downtown baseball stadium, they are going to need fans like Chuck Strom and Brent Herring.
Between the two of them, Strom and Herring see about 12 games a season in Greensboro's own flashy downtown stadium -- two average fans out of the more than 6,000 that the Greensboro Grasshoppers have averaged at their new park since it opened in 2005.
Tuesday night's game pitting the Grasshoppers and the Hot Rods of Bowling Green, Ky., just happened to be one of those games.
Even though the temperature was still pushing 90 degrees when the first pitch was thrown shortly after 7, Strom and Herring shelled out $8 each to sit three rows back of the visitor's dugout along the first-base line.
"Absolutely this is a great park, and they're doing a great job filling it," Strom said. "It's a real good draw for the downtown and a good thing for Greensboro. I hope it works like this in Winston, but I doubt it will."
Still drawing large crowds
The Grasshoppers finished their 2008 campaign with a final attendance figure of 440,787 and proudly proclaim that they have drawn more than 1.7 million in the four full seasons since the park opened.
In 2004, the team's last year in the stately but slightly decrepit War Memorial Stadium, the ballclub drew 200,477.
The team continued to play in the same old South Atlantic League (a Class A minor league), so the only logical conclusion -- one that surely was noticed by Winston-Salem's movers and shakers -- is that attendance doubled because the Hoppers had a shiny new stadium.
That's part of the reason why Corey Adams turned out on muggy summer night with his fiancee, Renee Degaetano. The couple budgeted $60 -- not including two $8 box-seat tickets -- for a night out.
Both in their early 20s, Adams and Degaetano are also the kind of young, affluent fans the Dash will need to attract to be successful.
"Look around," Adams said. "It's mid-August, and there's a couple thousand people here on a Tuesday. I think a stadium in downtown Winston-Salem would do fine."
4,515 reasons for optimism?
Strom and Herring both live in Guilford County and work in Winston-Salem -- Strom at R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. and Herring at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center.
Since they each have a foot in each community, the men are in an interesting position to watch the drama around the Winston-Salem ballpark and compare it with the finished product in Greensboro.
"No matter who I talk to, it's never about, ‘When can we go to a game?'" Herring said, referring to the Dash's stadium. "It's always about the process still going on, who's in charge, and why is it costing more money."
Back in 2007, the city gave $12 million to Dash owner Billy Prim to help build the stadium -- $6.5 million came from the sale of Ernie Shore Field and $5.5 million came from a loan. Using a dollar-a-ticket surcharge, the team would need to sell 350,000 tickets a season (4,900 a game) to cover the payments on that loan. And of course, there have been additional loans since.
Any team with a fireworks display can draw 6,000 on the Fourth of July weekend; the real challenge is putting fans in the seats midweek. Five years in, our friends in Greensboro seem to be doing just fine. Tuesday's attendance: 4,515.
Can we hope for the same result here in Winston-Salem?
"I really hope so, but I'm not confident," Strom said. "It seems like because they had so much trouble and made so many mistakes that there's a lot of animosity."
Strom's right, of course, but the fact that he and 4,514 others took in a meaningless Tuesday game on a hot summer night in Greensboro seems to be one small argument for optimism before construction resumes here.
■ Scott Sexton can be reached at 727-7481 or at ssexton@wsjournal.com.
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