The Salt Lake Bees have become a model of consistency.
SALT LAKE CITY—If baseball is a game of inches, then running a successful minor league baseball franchise is an enterprise of details.
Marc Amicone, who has been the vice president and general manager of the Salt Lake Bees (Pacific Coast) for more than a decade, knows this. That’s why the most important questions he asks in meetings he holds with his staff before and after homestands are the small ones.
Did fans get greeted in the parking lot? Was the food up to snuff? What can we put on the video board to keep fans more engaged? How about the grass—was it green? Did we like the pattern etched into it?
A business model based on getting those details right over and over has borne fruit for the Bees. Under Amicone’s stewardship, the franchise has been one of the most successful in minor league baseball in recent years, regardless of the quality of the team on the field.
“Our staff takes tremendous pride and great ownership in what we’re providing,” Amicone said. “We critique ourselves weekly. We discuss what was good and where can we improve. I’m talking about critiquing the experience from the time people get to the parking lot until they leave.”
PCL president Branch Rickey III has fond memories of Salt Lake as a baseball town dating back to his childhood, when his father was a Pirates executive and the city was home to the team’s Triple-A affiliate. And now, he said, the Bees have become a model of consistency.
Rickey credited Amicone for the club’s success but pinpointed the prosperity to 2005, when car dealership mogul Larry H. Miller bought the team. Miller was revered in Salt Lake for turning the NBA’s Utah Jazz—which he also owned—into a consistent title threat in the 1990s and for his philanthropy. He quickly helped establish the Bees as a family-friendly destination built on the pillars of collaboration and community.
Miller died in 2009, but his company, Larry H. Miller Group—which his wife Gail now owns—has continued to run the franchise with that same philosophy.
“This is an unusual club,” Rickey said. “It has a somewhat different approach than other teams in the Pacific Coast League, and that is because of the ownership. When you really want to dig into the heart and soul of the success there, you’re going to be taken back to the root, which is that this is a business founded by a man who was a huge force in the Salt Lake market and had a huge heart.”
One of the first moves Miller made when he bought the team was naming Amicone GM. And Amicone is pleased to help carry on his old friend’s legacy. He said the Millers have always given him the resources to make the Bees thrive in a competitive market.
“From Day One, the (Miller) family has really seen it as a good community investment and a way to be involved in our community,” he said. “I can’t speak for the family, but what I know about how we operate is they’re extremely invested in this community and always have been. It’s all about, ‘What can we do to strengthen Salt Lake City and the state of Utah?’ ”
A ballpark that sits at the foot of the Wasatch Mountain Range has played its part in the Bees’ success, too. Fans have always been eager to pass through the turnstiles and catch games as the setting sun turns the mountains purple and the skies pink.
Smith’s Ballpark is often named as having among the best views in baseball, but Amicone said treating fans to a first-class atmosphere comes down to more than meets the eye. While many newer stadiums throughout the PCL have more modern amenities—though Smith’s Ballpark, built in 1994, is not lacking—the experience in Salt Lake is centered on the best thing the franchise has going for it: games being played on the field.
The Bees staff goes to great lengths to ensure those with only a casual interest in baseball can have a great time, sure, but the game is the top priority of Amicone, a true baseball man who played for the University of Utah in the 1970s.
“You hear about all the fun and games and craziness that you can do in minor league baseball,” Amicone said. “But I think we’re probably more in the middle of that. We still want to make sure the integrity of the game is valued and the people enjoy the baseball game. We have a lot of fun, between innings and stuff we do on the concourse, and that’s all important to us, but we’re not going to go over the top.”
The sustained success the Bees have seen hasn’t come easy, however. The franchise competes directly against the Jazz, the Major League Soccer franchise Real Salt Lake and two major college sports programs (Utah and Brigham Young University), for the entertainment dollars of sports fans in Utah.
But Amicone views that, too, as a positive. He acknowledges going up against those teams is a challenge but said being in a sports-centric town means the Bees have a wider base of fans to tap into. There’s something else, too. He said his staff thrives on the competition—and the results back up Amicone’s theory.
“Part of it is because the number of games, but we draw the second most fans to the ballpark of any team other than the Jazz,” he said. “We talk about that quite a bit. Over the course of our season, we’re bringing close to 500,000 people to the ballpark.”
And according to Rickey, those 500,000 fans, as well as those in the industry who come to town, don’t soon forget their experience.
“There’s a special character that seems to come from Salt Lake,” Rickey said.
