Fans get first look at Travs

Opener chance to see changes

The Arkansas Travelers’ home jersey features Otey, one of the franchise’s two new mascots, on the left sleeve.
The Arkansas Travelers’ home jersey features Otey, one of the franchise’s two new mascots, on the left sleeve.

Paul Allen sat in a Nashville, Tenn., restaurant near the Opryland Hotel about 16 months ago, meeting with two men who would eventually change the Arkansas Travelers’ look more than the club ever had from one year to the next.

It was at baseball’s winter meetings in December 2012 that Allen, team President Russ Meeks, and Jason Klein and Casey White of San Diego-based Brandiose met and hashed out a number of ideas. Brandiose is the company that produced the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs cap with a strip of bacon on it and a mascot named “Mr. Celery” for the Wilmington Blue Rocks.

“We all just hit it off,” said Allen, who was interim general manager at the time. “This could be an opportunity to re-invent ourselves.”

The session resulted in a new set of Travelers logos, a collection of new uniforms and two new mascots that have attracted an array of reactions.

The Class AA Travelers will hold their 106th home opener when they host the Midland RockHounds at 7:10 tonight at seven-year old Dickey-Stephens Park in North Little Rock. Local fans will get a chance to see the club’s first-ever coordinated image makeover since the team formed in 1901.

In October, the team unveiled new logos. In January came new uniforms and in April, two new mascots in Ace the horse and Otey the swamp possum. This completes the look that has replaced deep blue as the Travelers’ dominant color and got rid of the familiar Travelers script on the home jersey.

It was done as an attempt to answer a question every minor-league franchise faces at some point: How does a club attract fans when the allure of a new ballpark has worn off?

“I think it was a good time to take a step back and say ‘The ballpark isn’t shiny and new anymore. How can we re-invent ourselves?’ ” Allen said. “Just like any business, you want to keep things fresh.”

Allen has served two stints with the Travs and in 2008-2012 was assistant general manager. He was appointed interim GM when Pete Laven was fired by the team in 2012, a move that caused a stir among some of the team’s most ardent supporters, and was promoted to full-time GM in January 2013.

His first major undertaking was to update a team image that had remained fairly consistent for decades. That’s when he sought out Brandiose’s Klein and White.

It’s the sort of makeover that Texas League President Tom Kayser encourages teams to do while trying to compete in their own markets during a season that bleeds into the start of football season.

“You can see that at almost every place that has a new ballpark, it will decline over the years until you see a happy medium,” Kayser said. “This cannot hurt in any kind of effort of getting more people into the ballpark. It’ll be a plus.”

The Travs didn’t have to worry about that for much of the last seven years. They had Dickey-Stephens Park, a $40 million stadium near the Arkansas River, to attract fans.

But, according to Kayser, the “general maturation of a ballpark” hit the Travs the hardest in the last two years. In 2007-2010, the Travs averaged 5,290 fans and ranked in the middle of the eight-team Texas League in attendance. But average attendance has dropped each of the last six years and hasn’t cleared 5,000 since 2009.

The Travs ranked seventh in the Texas League in average attendance in 2012 and 2013, and last year total attendance dipped below 300,000 for the first time - the Travs lost five games due to poor weather last year - while hitting a Dickey-Stephens low of 4,519 per game.

“[Attendance] was a major part of what we did in the changes in the front off, on-field promotions,” said Meeks, who has been affiliated with the Travs for almost three decades. “The whole concept is very exciting.”

Not that the process was easy. First, Klein and White asked Allen if he was interested in diverting from the Travelers name, which has been in use since the team was founded and is one of the oldest in baseball.

“No way in heck,” Allen said.

So then the conversations turned to altering team colors and coming up with new jerseys. The camouflage jerseys called “swamp camo” will be worn for batting practice and on military appreciation days, but Brandiose wanted the Travs to wear them as every-day uniforms. Allen nixed that idea.

Allen likes what was agreed upon - a collection that includes red, black and grey - saying they’ve created a new look while maintaining traditions. Most of the reactions have been positive, other than the day two weeks ago when they introduced Otey.

“[What] I’ve heard is that they think we’re making fun of Arkansans,” Allen said. “In no way are we. You don’t want to do that. I mean, you want to bring people to the park.”

So far, the result is what they wanted: Eyeballs on the team during the off season and options for selling new merchandise. Allen is hoping it lasts through the season, too, while setting sights on 320,000 in attendance.

“You’ve got to get creative sometimes,” he said. “You’ve got to take a step out of the box and try to do something that people don’t expect.”

Today’s game ARKANSAS VS. MIDLAND WHEN 7:10 p.m.

WHERE Dickey-Stephens Park, North Little Rock RADIO KARN-AM, 920, in central Arkansas WEBSITE travs.com

PITCHERS Travelers: Michael Roth (LHP, 0-1, 13.50 ERA); RockHounds: Zach Neal (RHP, 1-0, 0.00) TICKETS $12 box seats, $8 reserved ($5 children), $6 general admission ($4 children). Gates open 1 hour before game.

TRAVELERS WEEK AHEAD

TODAY vs. Midland, 7:10 p.m.

FRIDAY vs. Midland, 7:10 p.m.

SATURDAY vs. Midland, 6:10 p.m.

SUNDAY vs. Frisco, 4:10 p.m.

MONDAY vs. Frisco, 7:10 p.m.

TUESDAY vs. Frisco, 7:10 p.m.

WEDNESDAY off

WEDNESDAY’S GAMES No games scheduled

TODAY’S GAMES All times Central Frisco at NW Arkansas, 6:05 p.m.

Springfield at San Antonio, 7:05 p.m. Midland at Arkansas, 7:10 p.m.

Tulsa at Corpus Christi, 7:10 p.m.

Sports, Pages 17 on 04/10/2014

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