NEWSMAKER

PLAY BALL!
Baseball League Co-Founder
Hopes to Strike Gold

With a graduate degree from Stanford and a love for baseball, 26-year-old Amit Patel decided to strike out in the hard-hitting world of baseball, co-founding the Golden Baseball League in the San Francisco Bay Area. Richard Springer talks to this young entrepreneur about how he first pitched his venture and the giant steps he has taken thus far.

Twenty-six-year-old Amit Patel grew up in Laurel, Mississippi, watching Major League baseball in the old Fulton County Stadium, the then home park of media mogul Ted Turner’s Atlanta Braves. “I played soccer and basketball (in high school), but I played baseball in my back yard,” Patel remembers fondly.
Going to see the Braves play in person, he adds, “was a great experience in family entertainment.”
Patel is president and co-founder of the new Golden Baseball League, an independent league in the West that wants to provide a similar feeling to baseball fans in the West, with a level of play that is just a shade below that played in the Major Leagues.
But the young entrepreneur had to be as persistent as a baseball-pitching machine running at full speed to get his business plan even admitted into a popular entrepreneurship class at the Stanford Business School.
To grab the last slot, he and three other graduate students had to “write an entire business plan, not just an executive summary,” he points out.
Patel said that one of the two professors admitting students told them, “‘I don’t think anything is going to come of this.’” Only their doggedness got them in, he recalls.
The initial idea was to start a Major League farm team in Pleasanton, California. But because that entailed building a new park, buying an existing franchise and obtaining territorial rights from Major League affiliated teams in the area, the idea was quickly shelved, explains Patel.
The business plan then became a proposal for a new independent league, to bring “The Great American Pastime” to cities in California and Arizona where top-caliber baseball is not available.
For Patel and fellow Stanford M.B.A. grad David Kaval, the league’s co-founder and chief executive officer, what started as a class project became a start-up pitch to investors, with more risk than a line drive back through the pitcher’s mound.
Two of the Stanford students involved in the class project decided not to join the start-up. “Everybody has student loans that they have to pay back,” Patel points out. The two would have had to turn down jobs in the hand for a league in the bush.
A Cleveland Indians fan, Kaval wrote a memoir, “The Summer That Saved Baseball,” which sold 10,000 copies. He also worked at Accenture and helped draft a national security budget for President George W. Bush.
“It was something that Dave and I really believed in,” says Patel. “We were determined to make it happen.” One of the key mentors for the project was Dan Rudolph, a former Intuit executive and chief operating officer of the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

An ‘Angel in the Outfield’

After a funding pitch was made to a panel of venture capitalists at the end of the Stanford class in 2003, a real “angel in the outfield,” Terry J. Garnett -- then at Venrock Partners and now a founder of Garnett Helfrich Venture Capital — promised seed funding of $250,000.
Patel, who has a B.A. in computer science from Duke University and an M.S. from Stanford, remembers he and Kaval sending out about 10,000 e-mails from June 2003 to February 2004 to prospective investors, many of them alumni of Stanford and Duke.
“A lot of people responded. They said they wanted to support young entrepreneurs,” he recalls enthusiastically. “We needed to pass a threshold of $3 million before we could get access to any money we raised.”
The venture eventually snagged about $5 million of investment and a three-year, $3-million prime sponsorship deal from the Safeway grocery chain. For its money, the food giant gets “Presented by Safeway” in the league’s billing. The league has subsequently raised another $4.2 million, bringing total funding to date to about $9.2 million.
While not yet profitable, the eight-team Golden Baseball League — in the inaugural three-and-a-half-month season from June into September last year — drew more than 450,000 fans. They cheered for teams including the Long Beach Armada, the Fullerton Flyers, the Chico Outlaws and two teams in Arizona.
Well-known investors in the league include Tim Draper, founder and managing director of venture fund Draper Fisher Jurvetson; Wheel of Fortune TV host Pat Sajak; Cisco Systems routing business chief Michelangelo Volpi; and Cisco Systems executive Kevin Outcalt, who currently serves as the Golden League commissioner.
Kaval and Patel sold off 75 percent of the venture to investors and they own the rest of the company. Not bad for a business plan that was given slim chances for success.
The son of physicians Bharat and Jaishri Patel, Patel, who is single, has almost no traces left of his Southern accent. “I had the thickest Southern accent. Some (Indian American high school classmates at a Mississippi math and science academy) teased me about it, so I got rid of it,” he laughs.

‘Entrepreneurial Itch’

After spending a summer working for the Merrill Lynch technology group in New York, Patel joined a new program at Stanford that combines management science and engineering. “It was the old industrial engineering program for engineers who want to give back to the engineering school,” he explains, adding that an “entrepreneurship itch” got him to apply for what became a pivotal class at Stanford.
Dressed casually and operating from a scenic corner office in a Pleasanton shopping center, Patel candidly relates to Indian Life & Style the ups and downs of the Golden League’s first season.
One highlight was the participation of a visiting team from Japan — the Samurai Bears, who played a one-season stint of a hectic 90 games in 96 days. Former Major Leaguer Warren Cromartie managed the Bears, which began poorly, but won a rash of games late in the season.
Another team, the San Diego Surf Dogs, managed by former Major Leaguer Terry Kennedy, starred former Oakland A’s outfielder Rickey Henderson, the Major League’s all-time stolen-base leader. Henderson, who turned 47 recently, failed to catch on in the Big Leagues last year. He played in the Golden League at the maximum player salary — $3,000 a month for the three-and-half-month season. However, he recently accepted a job as batting coach for the New York Mets, so he will not return this season.
One of the league’s key concerns was to place teams in cities with good existing baseball parks. Fullerton was chosen in part because the facilities at Cal State-Fullerton are available in the June-August time period, long after the end of the college baseball season. The league being flexible allows it to be creative — paying for a new grass field for the school, for example, instead of renting the park, if that is what the university prefers.
In organized baseball, each Major League team, such as the San Francisco Giants and the San Diego Padres, owns five or six farm teams, which begin in quality at the rookie league and go up to the A, AA, and AAA level, as players try to make the Major Leagues.
Patel says the Golden Baseball League plays at an “AA” level, which puts it just below the quality of a team like the AAA-level Sacramento Rivercats. Some former Golden League players have already had their contracts purchased by several Major League teams.

Swamped at Tryouts

The Golden League was swamped at the initial tryouts, recalls Patel, when many more players applied than were expected. The reason, he says, is that many baseball players were talented stars in college, but had no chance to make the Major Leagues. They still are able to play at a high level, as can many former Major Leaguers with diminished skills.
A low point of last season, the Indian American entrepreneur recollects, was the abrupt withdrawal of a team from Tijuana, Mexico, which led to the scramble to book the Japanese team.
The Tijuana squad, which led attendance in Mexico’s most popular baseball league with about 13,000 fans at each game, was led by a maverick and flamboyant owner who angered the other owners with his wild promotions. He decided to quit the Mexican league and join the U.S. league.
A press conference was held in Tijuana to announce the partnership. It was held in a fiesta-like atmosphere, with appearances by Tecate beer cheerleaders, costumed mascots and local officials, but the fact that Patel had to travel to the event in a bulletproof car should have alerted him to the dangers looming ahead.
He left for a vacation in India and checked in with his office by phone in January 2005. He found out that the stadium had been raided by Mexican police, who rode in armored vehicles and carried automatic weapons with scopes. They claimed the U.S. league had no right to use the stadium. During a second assault by police, one of the Mexican baseball team’s workers, who had chained himself to a fence, had a gun held menacingly to his head by police.
The Golden League not only lost its Mexican franchise, but also a fancy scoreboard it had purchased from Foxborough Stadium in Massachusetts and shipped to Mexico. Patel appealed to the Mexican league, Mexican officials and even to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, but to no avail.
The Golden League from its start eschewed the franchise model in favor of central ownership, because the founders wanted to avoid problems plaguing defunct and troubled leagues — including a failure to pay players and vendors, not having liability insurance coverage and other management snafus.
Currently a smattering of unaffiliated minor leagues are succeeding in the U.S. and Canada, including the Northern League, the Frontier League and the Atlantic League. However, the West has not been as accommodating in recent years.
The Western Baseball League, which operated in California from 1995-2002, lost $12 million and left behind failed franchises and unpaid bills. Most independent leagues franchise their teams, but that trend has been shifting of late because of the California league’s success, Patel says.
The first pitch of the new season is June 1. The league has scaled down to six teams, eliminating some places that were not drawing well. The current nines (teams) are in Chico, San Diego, Long Beach, and Fullerton in California; Yuma, Arizona; and Reno, Nevada.
Tickets are $5 each, a price that allows an entire family to see good baseball at affordable prices. As they say: “Play Ball!”