Right from their start, in April 1994, the Portland Sea Dogs have been embraced by their fans in Maine. In their first year, they drew an Eastern League record 375,000 fans. By the next year, the team was drawing well over 400,000.
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On April 18, 1994, Kathie Lee Gifford sang the national anthem, her husband Frank threw out the first pitch, and the Portland Sea Dogs played their first home game in the city.
It wasn’t the first time professional baseball had been played in Maine — even in the previous decade — but it felt like a new era.
Two years earlier, Dan Burke, CEO of Capital Cities/ABC television, filed one of 13 applications for two new Eastern League minor league baseball teams made necessary by the National League expansion. Portland City Council voted that same year to back the effort.
The pitch was successful, and the Sea Dogs, then an affiliate of the Florida Marlins, were born.
Even before the team took the field, they were popular. The logo — a fierce-looking half-puppy/half-seal flopping through the opening of a “P” clutching a baseball bat in its mouth — immediately became a minor-league top seller, according to MLB.com.
When tickets went on sale in February 1994, fans camped overnight in temperatures that dropped to 12 degrees.
The team, playing in refurbished Hadlock Field, didn’t have trouble filling seats. In their first year, they drew an Eastern League record 375,000 fans. By the next year, the team was drawing well over 400,000.
Just a few years before, in 1988, the Maine Guides had fizzled out in Old Orchard Beach and moved to Pennsylvania after drawing only 80,000 fans.
But the Sea Dogs had staying power. In 2002, they became a Double-A affiliate Boston Red Sox, adding the appeal of the local favorite Major League Baseball team.
Steve Solloway, a longtime sports writer for the Portland Press Herald, says the team’s key to success had to do with the men behind the effort — Burke and the man he hired as president and general manager, Charlie Eshbach, a career minor league baseball executive.
“More than feasibility studies and business models and lots of cash, it’s people that do the work and have the dreams that lead to success,” Solloway says. “[Burke and Eshbach] both enjoyed baseball. They somehow melded fun with good business practices. They were visible at games and in the community and approachable.”
Solloway says he always wanted to address the owner as Mr. Burke, but he insisted on “Dan.”
“They hired front office staff, ticket takers, ushers, concession workers who seemed to be in perpetual good humor,” Solloway says. “It started when you first walked through the main gate. You couldn’t really avoid Harold ‘Top Dog’ Lucas, who sold game programs from his slightly elevated kiosk. He wasn’t shy and he set the tone for the game-day experience.
“Throw in a great location for a clean stadium without a bad seat. Add concession food that was actually quite good at reasonable prices. I know. Rather than eat press box food, I stood in line downstairs for a fish dog.”
Burke died in 2011, and the team is run by his son, Bill Burke, and daughter, Sally McNamara. Eshbach stepped down as president at the end of last season, but is still on staff as a senior advisor.
Over the past 25 years, more than 7 million fans have passed through the turnstiles at Hadlock Field. They’ve also had more losing seasons than winning seasons, but that doesn’t seem to matter.
Burke and Eshbach really had no say in the year-to-year team on the field, Solloway points out.
“The Florida Marlins, and then the Red Sox, were responsible for that. But the young ballplayers, chasing dreams most of us could relate to were accessible for autographs and sometimes a smile or even a brief conversation.
“It all worked.”