A. Ray Smith Comes to Louisville

Fate landed A. Ray Smith and his Springfield Redbirds on Louisville’s doorstep in 1982, and it was a love affair from the start.

Smith turned out to have just the right combination of guts and moxie to allow him to bring baseball back to Kentucky’s largest city in grand style. In the process, Smith’s American Association team and the leaders and baseball fans of Louisville touched off the biggest minor-league bonanza since the post-World War II 1940s.

Louisville had been without baseball since 1972, when then-Kentucky Governor Wendell Ford appeased seekers of a football stadium for the University of Louisville by spending $800,000 to erect a stationary 18,000-seat concrete and aluminum grandstand in what had been right field at Fairgrounds Stadium.

With no place to play, the Louisville Colonels said a bittersweet goodbye by winning an International League championship and moved on to Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

Louisville was without baseball for nine dreary years until, during the major league player strike of 1981, a committee headed by banker Dan Ulmer and beer distributor Armin Willig raised $4.1 million to uproot the football grandstand and move it back far enough to open the way for the return of America’s pastime.

Ulmer, an avid fan of the St. Louis Cardinals, targeted Smith’s team in Springfield, Illinois, where it had attracted just 425,683 customers over the four season since it arrived from New Orleans. What Ulmer got along with Smith wa a team with just the right blend of veterans such as George Bjorkman, Glenn Brummer, Mike Calise, Joe DeSa, Jeff Doyle, Billy Lyons, Kelly Paris, David Green, Tito Landrum, Dyar Miller, Dan Morogiello, Eric Rasmussen, Gene Roof and Orlando Sanchez, and youngsters such as Ralph Citarella, John Fulgham, Jeff Keener, Ricky Horton, John Stuper, Mark Salas, Dave Kable, Rafael Santana and Willie McGee.

What Ulmer also got in Smith was a savvy baseball operator at the peak of his game.

Smith took a look at the stadium which was generally perceived as a white elephant, saw unlimited possibilities, and negotiated himself a far better lease than the one the financially strapped Colonels had had. He paid Springfield $500,000 to break his lease there, but that gamble was quickly repaid tenfold.

Smith said he would emphasize low ticket prices, a clean ballpark and fair concessions prices for quality products, and he kept his word. St. Louis provided a colorful, competitive ballclub managed by Joe Frazier, former skipper of the New York Mets. The combination was intoxicating.

McGee didn’t stick around long. He soon went to St. Louis and became National League Rookie of the Year. Other original Redbirds were to later enjoy at least brief big league careers, including Brummer, Green, Landrum, Miller, Rasmussen, Fulgham, Horton, Keener, Salas and Santana. Catcher Kevin Kennedy was released early in the season, ending his playing career, but he went on to become a major league manager.

Oh, how the fans loved them!  People from all walks of life converged on Cardinal Stadium to see the Redbirds play and enjoy the county fair-style atmosphere which included a Dixieland band and a wide, designer-decorated concourse concessions area.

In the Redbirds’ first season in Louisville, they smashed the all-time minor league attendance record of 670,563 held by San Francisco since 1946, ushering 868,418 through the turnstiles. In their second season, they became the first minor league team to break the one million barrier, drawing 1,052,438.

After the first season, Smith hired Jim Fregosi, the popular former star big league infielder who had been fired by the California Angels. Fregosi sharpened his managerial tools by winning two American Association championships for Smith, and in 1986 he departed to manage the Chicago White Sox. In 1993, he piloted the Philadelphia Phillies to a National League championship.

Smith had more than a little to do with Fregosi’s success in Louisville. Annually at midseason, Smith and Fregosi would assess the team’s problem areas. Smith would then ask St. Louis’ scouts for advice, and purchase himself a ballplayer such as slugger Gary Rajsich or pitcher Eric Rasmussen. The player would usually perform well, and at the end of the season Smith would sell the player to St. Louis for approximately what the signing had cost him.

That soon became illegal in minor league baseball, as did several other ploys with which Smith made it special to be a Redbird, including paying his players more meal money than any other Triple-A team, and booking his team in the finest hotels.

Just as the fans loved the Redbirds, they embraced Smith, too. One night early in the 1982 season, a new chant rose from a section of the crowd. It was indistinguishable at first, but soon it became clear: “A. Ray! A. Ray!”

Where else, except maybe in Bill Veeck’s heyday in Chicago, did fans every chant in appreciation for a club owner?  Smith was a combination of Santa Claus and the Pied Piper. On his call-in radio show, he took fans’ suggestions, and by noon the next day he would have acted on the most reasonable of them. He would walk through the stands and work the crowd, taking comments, complaints and compliments from the common man.

To see the 1982 Redbirds play, it cost $1 to park, $3.50 for reserved seats and $2.50 for general admission, with tickets for the young and elderly priced at even less.

“Isn’t that basic?” Smith asked. “Does it take a genius to keep a place Dutch clean?  Does it take a genius to figure if you get them to the park they might buy a hot dog?  There’s nothing new about any of that.”

Many things had to happen to create the Redbirds’ instant success, Smith said. “First is the facility. It’s a great one. Next, there was the professional way it has been brought to the attention of the fans by all of the media. It set off a startling chain reaction, fan to fan, church to church, and so on.

“Next, we had unbelievable support from the people, who contributed more than $4 million for renovation of the stadium. Next, I have a feeling we’re a product of the times. We’re offering something the ordinary man can afford. I call this the all-collar sport, in the truest sense of the word the only family sport in this country, and that’s not knocking any of the other sports in any way.

“Next, our staff has gotten the job done. Timing has been a big factor. It’s a fantasy that has fed on itself, person to person.”

Smith, who attended Oklahoma State and Indiana universities, was a lieutenant colonel in the Army Engineer Corps in World War II. After the war, he went to work for Texas oilman Clint Murchison, but when Murchison bought the Dallas Cowboys of the National Football League, Smith shifted his attention to heavy construction and made his fortune.

Among Smith’s company’s major projects were the repairing of a fault that endangered the Panama Canal, the dredging of the St. Lawrence Seaway, the building of an $80-million tunnel in New York, the building of Barkley Dam in Kentucky and the construction of military installations in Puerto Rico, Venezuela and Lebanon.

Smith bought the Redbirds for $25,000 in 1960 in an attempt to save baseball for Tulsa, Oklahoma, his base of operations. In 1976, Smith was faced with a deteriorating stadium and no governmental help to repair it, so he moved the Redbirds to New Orleans. After one year in the Louisiana Superdome, which wasn’t designed for baseball, he moved the team to Springfield.

In Louisville, Smith not only loved to visit with fans int he stand, he would hold court nightly in the finely appointed Stadium Club. No subject was too small or too large for discussion, and anyone could join in. Smith’s open, hands-on method of operating the club, and the results that came of it, earned him national recognition as a business leader.

Smith’s methods are widely used in baseball today. Before the Buffalo Bisons opened their new downtown stadium in 1988 and began drawing a million annually, their executives studied the Redbirds’ operation carefully and put its principles to use on a larger scale.

The successes in Louisville and Buffalo led to a huge increase in the value of minor league franchises. In the 1990s, Triple-A teams fetched as much as $9 million, and in the American Association alone there were new stadia at Buffalo, Iowa, Indianapolis and New Orleans — and others were under construction. The going rate for an expansion Triple-A franchise in 1996 was $7.5 million, plus a $1 million indemnity to the Double-A club whose territory was taken, plus $500,000 or so to get a front-office staff up and running.

During the Redbirds’ heyday, Smith put together a group that included Hall of Fame catcher Johnny Bench and made a bid to buy the Cincinnati Reds. However, a contract clause provided that minority stockholders would be granted preference and Marge Schott exercised that option.

In 1983, Smith staged the Triple-A World Series, in which young pitcher Dwight Gooden sparkled for the victorious Tidewater Tides. Smith wanted to continue as host, but withdrew when no provision was made for an automatic berth for the home team.

In 1986, Smith sold the Redbirds for $4.2 million to Ulmer and a group of seven other Louisvillians, and they have continued the tradition, basing their operations on Smith’s theories and attracting more than 500,000 — the generally recognized benchmark for minor-league success — every season.

Smith worked for a time for a group trying to bring a big league ballclub to Tampa-St. Petersburg, Florida, then retired to his ranch in Grove, Oklahoma. In 1995 he sold the ranch and moved to Oklahoma City.