The sale of the assets of the summer collegiate Oneonta Outlaws (Perfect Game Collegiate Baseball League) from co-owners Keith Rogers and Dan Scaring of Saratoga Springs (NY) to Oneonta (NY) businessman Gary Laing was completed over the weekend. Because Laing wasn’t interested in fielding a team in the PGCBL or he simply didn’t want to pay for the PGCBL’s more premium franchise rights, he plans to launch the Outlaws as a new franchise in the summer collegiate New York Collegiate Baseball League in 2013, which we understand has a lower or no franchise fee at all. Read more here.
As we understood the facts in comments last week, Rogers and Scaring wanted to operate a team back in Saratoga Springs, where they operated the summer collegiate Saratoga Phillies (NYCBL) before relocating the club to Oneonta in 2011 and joining the PGCBL in 2012. Because there’s really no viable place to play and operate a minor league-like franchise in Saratoga Springs, the pair wanted to sell the club. Rather than selling the entire franchise package, they sold the assets (which included the lease to Damaschke Field and team branding), but they kept their PGCBL franchise rights for use in 2014, or to possibly sell the rights to another party before the PGCBL’s one-year “voluntary suspension” period runs out. Whether Rogers and Scaring will actually operate a team in the PGCBL or run back to the NYCBL when and if a proper facility is developed in Saratoga Springs, remains to be seen.
This is really a classic case of the haves and have nots, or those owners who just want to play baseball and those owners who want to run their operations like a true minor-league business. These same philosophical differences caused teams to depart the Pacific International League for the new West Coast Collegiate Baseball League (now West Coast League) back in 2005, and inspired the creation of the Futures Collegiate Baseball League to compete with the New England Collegiate Baseball League in 2010.
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