You’re bias, @R-Dub. 
It’s damn sure a short “ride” home!
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Had a fantastic time at the MLB Raleigh design event last night! Great meeting @OakCityDylan and hanging with @Loup20. Thanks to all who made it such a fun night! #RaleighOnDeck
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Great meeting you guys as well! I loved the creativity with the concepts! I have my opinion on which one I think can actually win (not necessarily my favorite) but let’s bask in the success of the event before we dive into creative criticisms. Oh, you met @OakCityKarla as well but she’s never on here. Need her to change her name too. 
Change it to OakCityKarla?
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@dtraleigh, she won’t care, can you make that happen? OakCityKarla!
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This sounds like it was a great event and I’d love to see all of the concepts. Will you guys be sharing them?
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Yep! They’re being released individually (started today) with additional marks, concept backgrounds, and designer bios on social. “@MLBRaleigh” is our handle across all social channels.
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Are any of these going to be available for sale at any point?
For the guys who are officially promoting “Bring MLB to Raleigh”, what are you personally looking to get out of such a venture? Just super huge baseball fans who just want a local MLB team and are willing to conduct studies, do interviews and research, and host publicity events all on your own time and dime? Or is there some expected financial gain or are you looking for a position in the organization? Not judging one way or the other, just curious about the project.
Thanks for the questions Dave! Back when commissioner Manfred started floating the idea of expansion, the obvious list of cities emerged: Portland, Montreal, Charlotte, Vegas, Nashville, Vancouver, etc.
@Loup20 and a buddy had done research for years on the Triangle’s prospects for MLB (population, income data), but hadn’t yet published anything. But now that expansion was being discussed, they wondered, “why isn’t Raleigh ever mentioned in these hypothetical lists? Why don’t we promote this data?”
I had done a little work on my own, and we ended up meeting/collaborating after an introduction facilitated by @dtraleigh.
Our goal is pretty simple: inform, promote, and energize the community that we are, in fact, a viable MLB market—on par with other small markets like Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Kansas City. The Triangle’s CSA numbers back that up, and income and growth trends start putting us ahead of other contenders. The way we’re doing this is through online/social messaging of the data, fun baseball-themed events, and selling merch with all profits supporting baseball in underserved areas. (We’re working to rebuild the Boys and Girls Club field on Raleigh Blvd currently). We’re not doing this for any personal gain whatsoever; we’re just huge baseball fans who want to see Raleigh “make it to the show.”
We’re also by no means a potential ownership group! You’d have to add several zeroes to our bank accounts to get us into that universe. @daviddonovan is right when he says that teams aren’t just awarded to a deserving city; you’ve got to have the ownership in place in a market that can support it. But, as evidenced by Tepper and Dundon, the next big time sports owner can come from anywhere. They’re obviously going to look at the numbers and want to make sure it’s a profitable investment.
We feel that in addition to the raw numbers being there (population/income/TV market), an invested community is part of that equation and part of the appeal to that owner. So that’s what we’re trying to demonstrate with this campaign.
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As for the concepts, we are releasing 3 a day.
We aren’t doing this to create drama, we’re doing it to create conversation. As I’ve said a few times when we were first starting, I was working on a project that I hoped would allows the city to start initial discussion about brand and identity as a city. This was that event. At the event there were all kinds of great conversations happening. People were learning things about their city and state they never knew before. That was exciting, but we were also excited to release these over social and see what kind of feedback each concept got. We’re tracking metrics and conversation to see what we can learn.
Take a look at the concepts here. We’ll update the page as we release more.
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I’ll be as transparent as possible here. These are just my personal goals for this project…
- I want to help build a platform that allows the baseball fans of our city to organize and amplify the message that we as a city want MLB here in Raleigh. I hope that we expose a market that intices an investor group to get involved and eventually bring baseball here.
That really is the MAIN goal. I really do love baseball/Raleigh that much. But that alone would not have made this project worth it from a time/money standpoint. So, the other reasons I’m involved are…
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Believe it or not, I want to use my talents to help my city and I want to use this movement to build relationships with others who have talents and would like to team up to use them for good.
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I want to see how baseball and large interest react to a totally non-profit people movement that does it all for the love of the game and the love of their community. I know the game is all about money. it’s a business, but that’s not the official messaging stance from MLB. They don’t want that narrative to be part of their public perception. So how do they react to a movement running counter to that? We want to get big enough and loud enough to make them respond at some level.
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I wanted to explore brand in realtime with the city. What is Raleigh known for? How does the public respond to different concepts? Start learning about people’s perceptions and how they react to certain aspects of our city, so eventually, we can use that to find our identity. (that was what this last event was all about)
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I wanted to educate on the size of our region and how the division with Durham/Chapel Hill creates a perception that this area isn’t as big as other cities and shouldn’t expect as much. I also want to later (as we get into stadium talk) start talking about civic engagement, mass transit, etc. Things people get bored with, but will listen to when applied to a potential baseball team.
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Finally, give this city a hat that means something.
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I wanted an outlet to just do things I think would be cool and fun. Things I wish other people were doing that I would want to be involved with. Something not tied to a big company’s promotions or some political agenda. Anymore it’s like nobody does cool shit just to do cool shit, there’s always some catch. I wanted to do something with literally no catch.
(and that last point was really the only rule we made for ourselves coming in. If you wanted to be a part of this, then you can’t expect a dime. You can’t promote yourself, and you have to be doing this for the right reasons. That is also how we deal with companies. We have a ton of companies reaching out wanting to do events or wanting to do promotions with this. The only way we promote a company is if they work with us to do something good in the community. ***For instance. Us doing the event at Little City was based on them promising to donate money to pay for baseball jerseys for the boys club).
I guess if you question is, are we really doing this for free? The answer is yes. We (3 of us) all put in $1000 to start, fully ready to lose it all. It ended up going pretty well and we paid ourselves back and made a lot of money selling shirts and hats. We then used that money to fix a field and then to plan our next event, which then made more money and allowed us to keep the process rolling. We are in talks with other baseball organizations around here who need help.
As for personal money. …Is there monetary gain for us? Not directly with this project, no. But I guess this will be a nice portfolio piece for all of us one day when it’s over and it could help with our careers. But that is just a byproduct and not the reason anyone here is doing this.
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Lou , As much as I love The Atlantic League , I also love your reply concerning You & Your Team !
Thanks Lou & Team for what you are doing ! " Go Raleigh Baseball " !
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I’m impressed. My hat is off to you guys. If Raleigh by chance is awarded a franchise you should get free box seats for life.
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I absolutely love the designs so far. Great work on this project!
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I like the way you think, Stew! Thanks
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