Tim Bennett details bringing baseball to South Mississippi – The Sun Herald

Biloxi’s journey to land the Shuckers started in backyards near Orlando, Fla., as Tim Bennett mowed lawns after moving from San Francisco.

Bennett, who helped bring minor league baseball back to the Jackson area, was instrumental in bringing the Shuckers to Biloxi in 2015. Friday he told the audience at the “Our Love Affair with Baseball” luncheon at the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art how he got into baseball and how he brought two minor league franchises to Mississippi.

Bennett said there were a lot of obstacles to bringing baseball to Biloxi. However, the road started in 2005 when he met with Biloxi’s Barry Lyons, a former major leaguer.

While Lyons got Bennett interested in a minor league team in Biloxi, it was the recovery from Hurricane Katrina that convinced him to work to bring the team to the Coast, noting the resilience of the area’s residents as they built back.

“I can’t think of a community that deserves a baseball team more,” he said.

Still, it wasn’t easy to bring a team to Biloxi. One thing Bennett had to overcome was the city’s gaming industry. While baseball is still leery of gambling influencing the game, he said the game has made its peace with the casinos in Biloxi.

Bennett said other issues that had to be overcome were the city’s proximity to minor league teams in Mobile and New Orleans.

And there was the matter of the local market.

“Biloxi is one of the smallest Double-A markets,” he said, noting the size of the market made it difficult to bring a AA team to the Gulf Coast.

10-year project

However, Bennett said he thought his ties to baseball owners, including Southern League Commissioner Don Mincher, and his being part of baseball’s diversity movement, which was trying to bring minorities into baseball ownership, would help him quickly bring a team to the Coast.

He also invested his own money into bringing baseball to the Coast, much of which he lost early in the venture.

Still, he continued to work to bring baseball to Biloxi.

“What started off as a one-year project became 10 years,” he said.

The major problem, he said, was finding a suitable team to bring to the Coast.

As he did earlier in Pearl, Bennett was able to find a Double-A franchise —the Milwaukee Brewers’ Huntsville Stars — that was playing in an old stadium. When Huntsville couldn’t pull together the funds to build a new stadium, Bennett was able to get Biloxi and Mississippi to come together in a private-public partnership and build MGM Park.

And in 2015, the Stars moved to Biloxi and became the Shuckers.

Long partnership

Bennett expects the association with Milwaukee to last a long time, noting the Brewers were affiliated with the Stars for 15 years. He also noted the Brewers and Shuckers signed an extension that keeps them together for the next four to five years.

Bennett noted the nature of minor league baseball is developing up-and-coming players and moving them through the system.

“We want all the players playing for us to play at the major league level,” he said. “But we don’t have control of the players. As owners, we do our part to make sure the players have a place to develop.”

The beginning

Bennett’s career in baseball started after his family moved from San Francisco to Orlando in the mid-1970s and he started mowing lawns. One of the yards he mowed was owned by the Bostick family, who owned the trucking firm Comcar Industries.

In 1992, Mark Bostick joined with Vince Naimoli and other partners to purchase the San Francisco Giants and move the team to the Tampa Bay-St. Petersburg area. The Florida group built a dome and worked out a memorandum of understanding with Giants owner Bob Lurie, but the deal fell through.

Even though the Naimoli group did not land the Giants, their efforts paid off in 1995 when Major League Baseball expanded and awarded the group the rights to the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

Bennett, who was coming back to the United States after doing missionary work in the Caribbean, South America and Africa, decided to get into baseball. And his former customers, the Bosticks, gave him his start in the Devil Rays organization.

“I knew it was a good opportunity for me to make money,” Bennett said of joining the Devil Rays, joking that baseball was better than mowing lawns.

Back in Mississippi

In 2000, Bennett moved from Orlando to Jackson, which had just lost the Jackson Generals to Nolan Ryan and an ownership group from Texas, which relocated the team to Round Rock. Bennett came to Jackson with a purchase option for the Orlando Rays, Tampa Bay’s Double-A team.

However, Bennett said getting Jackson officials to work with him was difficult.

“I came to Jackson to build a stadium in Jackson,” he said. “But they didn’t have the vision. They didn’t believe I could pull off what I said I was going to do.”

Bennett relinquished his purchase offer for the Orlando Rays, which in 2003 moved to Montgomery, Ala., and became the Biscuits.

While Bennett found resistance in Jackson, Pearl Mayor Jimmy Foster got interested in baseball. However, since Bennett’s option to purchase the Orlando Rays was gone, Bennett had to find another team to bring to Pearl.

The Atlanta Braves had their Double-A team in Greenville, S.C., and were happy with the arrangement. However, when they wanted a new stadium and Greenville balked at the Braves’ demands, Bennett stepped in and offered Pearl as a possible site.

In 2005, after giving Greenville a period of time to build a new stadium, the Braves decided to move their Double-A affiliate to a new stadium in Pearl.

Bennett said he is proud to have brought two minor league teams to Mississippi, something he said he was told wouldn’t happen.

“The easiest way to get me to do something is to tell me it can’t be done,” he said.

Bennett said baseball has been good to him.

“I’ve never owned a baseball bat or glove, and never played,” he said. “If I can do it, anyone can do it.”