Mission: To be the best sports and entertainment value in the city every summer
Assets: Baseball tradition at picturesque Nat Bailey Stadium, the city’s oldest outdoor pro sports venue
Yield: Steadily increasing attendance for single-A baseball; a potential return to Triple-A in the cards
Vancouver Canadians’ president Andy Dunn jokes that his journey through professional baseball front offices has been Forrest Gump-like. So let’s start with the first Canadians game he saw in 1999, when the Pacific Coast League (PCL) champions beat the Charlotte Knights to win the Triple-A World Series in Las Vegas.
Running a baseball team in Vancouver was the furthest thing from Dunn’s mind. If he could change anything about the team before him, it would have been the uniforms he deemed ugly. So it was hardly a coincidence that after Dunn was hired in 2008, the class-A Northwest League C’s were repackaged with a clean, classic red, white and black look that set them apart from the PCL team that moved to Sacramento, California, in 2000.
In 2011, it’s all about blue. Specifically, Blue Jays. Unlike other Toronto-Vancouver relationships, the player-development deal signed in 2010 means Canada’s only major league and minor league clubs fit like a glove. Blue Jays greats, including Hall of Fame-bound Roberto Alomar, have appeared at Scotiabank Field at Nat Bailey Stadium for meet-and-greets. Toronto stocked Vancouver’s roster with an unprecedented six Canadian-born prospects. The Rogers-owned Jays even donated cash and equipment to the new Vancouver Canadians Baseball Foundation.
“They want West Coast viewers for the Blue Jays games,” Dunn said. “B.C. is the hotbed of baseball in Canada. It makes sense to have a Jays affiliate here, and in four or five years from now, you will see those players in Toronto. They want positive PR coming out of Vancouver, and from what I understand, that wasn’t always the case.”
Dunn, who has a 1992 degree in sport management from Western Carolina University, got into the business as a $400-a-month intern with the triple-A Oklahoma City Eighty-Niners and ended up staying there three years before returning home to Florida with the Cubs’ double-A team in Orlando. He spent six years with the Florida Marlins (including three as director of Florida operations) and then four years in charge of the Montreal Expos’ Florida operations.
When the Expos moved to Washington and became the Nationals in 2005, so did Dunn. His biggest challenge in the capitol prepared him for the idiosyncrasies of the C’s.
“I had 45 days to get RFK Stadium set up for baseball in D.C. I walked into there and thought what the hell am I doing?” said the 42-year-old, who is married with three children and lives in South Surrey.
“I remember when I got here I asked, ‘What’s the capacity in the barbecue area?’ Nobody could tell me. … The seats weren’t even numbered. One of the toughest sales jobs was to get the guys on the staff at the time to understand you can’t set your business plan expecting to operate at 35% capacity. You’ve got to set it at selling every ticket, every night.”
Mike Veeck, the “fun is good” minor league promotional guru, recommended ex-Marlins cohort Dunn to the C’s co-owners – lumberman Jake Kerr and fast-food tycoon Jeff Mooney – in 2007. He was ultimately sold on the passion of the owners, who made him a minority partner.
“He’s not only an incredibly knowledgeable sports and baseball executive, but as fine a person and a leader that I’ve ever met,” said Mooney, the A&W Food Services chairman. “This year is better than ever at the ballpark, in everything; he’s improved every dimension of the experience.”
A chance meeting with an inquisitive BC Hydro employee in the barbecue area one night in 2008 led to the Crown corporation redoing the 1951-built stadium’s electrical system, Scotiabank buying naming rights and the 2010 installation of a new Daktronics video scoreboard.
Dunn was asked why the floodlights were on at 6:30 p.m. for a 7 o’clock first pitch on a sunny summer’s evening. “I said, ‘I hate to turn them on, but if they don’t come on I know I’ve got two hours to get them fixed.’ The power equipment in this building was so old and antiquated.”
Dunn increased the points of sale for food, beverage and merchandise to 60 from 12 when he realized that the club couldn’t rely on parking revenue.
“First time I looked at the numbers for parking I thought somebody was stealing money,” he said. “When you factor 8.2 fans per car, the math doesn’t work, but when you see it operate for a year there is such high public transportation, biking and walking to the ballpark.”
The C’s, who charge $12.50 for general admission and $16 for box seats, are halfway through their home schedule and hope to surpass last year’s record 154,592 attendance for 38 dates. That’s 45,000 more than when the Southern Oregon Timberjacks moved north to fill the void of the PCL team’s departure in 2000.
The C’s financial information is closely held, but Dunn said Vancouver leads the NWL in revenue and is comparable with East Coast moneymakers like the Lowell, Massachusetts, Spinners or Brooklyn, New York, Cyclones. Dunn credits hard work in the year’s nine other months.
“I have a motto: if we don’t have success in the off-season, we’ll never have success in the season. In reality, 95% of all the work is done from September to opening day. From opening day you’re implementing the plan you’ve had in place, executing and delivering what you’ve sold everybody.”
Dunn said he’s happy at the Nat and is in no hurry to return to a big-league franchise. Kerr and Mooney’s long-term goal is to return Vancouver to triple-A. Easier said than done: they’d need to buy and move a team here and expand Nat Bailey.
“Without Jake and Jeff it would never happen; without Jake and Jeff you wouldn’t have baseball in this market, this club would’ve left four or five years ago,” Dunn said. “Right now, is there a plan in place or a franchise we’d go out and purchase? No there is not.”