“I always thought Rome was the perfect spot for minor league baseball,” Davis says. “I mean, it was all laid out. Plus, we’ve always had baseball in Rome. I was in Washington D.C. on a trip and found brochures in a sporting goods store saying, ‘let’s bring baseball back to Washington.’ In the brochure, they were selling season tickets for a team that didn’t exist (yet). I found that to be an interesting concept, so when I got back home, I went to the Chamber of Commerce and pitched to them how Rome would be a great place for minor league baseball.
They agreed and got behind me and the project, and we decided that ideal they were using in Washington would be a great model to follow. We could sell season tickets for a team we didn’t have yet. Then we would go to a league and pitch our story to them. After research, the South Atlantic League was a fit for us as far as size and cities.
We told people that if they bought the tickets and we didn’t get a team, we’d hold their money in escrow, drawing interest, and if we didn’t get the team in a certain time frame, we’d give it back, which we ended up doing.
We had teams that were interested in relocating to Rome, but we couldn’t develop a plan to get a stadium. We couldn’t conjure up a financial mechanism. We finally figured out that it was gonna take a lot of money to get a stadium. The project then kind of faded out for a little while.
A group of us got together and decided the only viable way to get a stadium was to go to the public and have a SPLOST vote for a stadium. The proposition failed miserably. The St. Louis Cardinals were the team that was coming here because of their interest in the Budweiser plant being so close. We also had a shot at the Braves then (10 years before we got them), but that was also the same stadium issue. Later, a proposition for a vote went through, and in that first SPLOST vote for a stadium, in which we had asked for a million and a half dollars, it failed.
We decided we’d try again. And the Atlanta Braves got behind us, with public promotions and such. The community also got behind the project. So, then came the second vote, 10 years later. We made our minds up that this time, since we were gonna ask the public to pay for a stadium, that we’d ask for a good one. And if we were gonna fail, we were going down swinging, so we asked for 14 million dollars for a sure enough first-class stadium,” Davis explains.