Owner: New baseball team needs Lynn’s help

LYNN – There’s no name yet, and the pieces are just now starting to fall together, but the owner of the New England Collegiate Baseball League team that will be in Lynn next summer is already formulating his plans.The first thing that owner Phil Rosenfield wants to do is name the team. And like everything else he plans on doing, he wants this to be a community thing.”We want to have a baseball organization that people in the city will feel they have a stake in, so that people will feel that it’s a good, solid enterprise,” Rosenfield said.Rosenfield, a Swampscott native, is big on community involvement. His team and his league, which is comprised of some of the best college players in the country, count on residents within their cities and towns to house players – a situation similar to how the famed Cape Cod League runs.”This helps create community involvement,” says Rosenfield. “If you live on a street where one of our players is staying for the summer, you’ll be interested in how he does.”And if that happens all over the city, there will be a lot of streets where these kids are looked up to, and neighborhoods will become involved.”That, he says, is what will happen “if we do our jobs right.””We absolutely need the support of the community,” he said. “But it’s up to us to put a product on the field that the community will support.”Rosenfield and his general manager, Robin Wallace – who was the GM last year for the CanAm League champion Nashua Pride – were in Lynn Wednesday to introduce themselves to city leaders. Wallace – who is also executive director of the New England Women’s Baseball League, and who worked in Lynn under former North Shore Spirit owner Nick Lopardo for the women’s league, – says the new team’s goal is to “let the community take ownership of the team.”We have some great college players, and some real quality baseball coming to Lynn,” she said. “And it helps that they’ll be living and working in the community. That should be a great asset.”Wallace said that the team had no plans at this time to add any existing structures to the Fraser Field grounds.”It appears we’ll be working out of existing facilities,” she said. “We’ll be in the (Howie) Grob building, and we’re looking at some other options too.”Like the Spirit, the new team will have fireworks, and it also plans to have the same type of between-innings games and contest for children.”We want to provide a place where families can come and have fun,” Rosenfield said. “We have one contest where we take kids from the stands, see who throws the hardest, and then we measure them up to the radar gun.”Financially, the overhead involved in running the new team is different than the Spirit.”My costs are significantly less,” said Rosenfield, who, still, says he’d at least like to make back his investment.”We don’t pay the players, and our front office staff is mostly voluntary,” he said. “You take all that off the table, you’re talking about $300,000 to $400,000.”This doesn’t mean, however, that Rosenfield wants to look at an empty Fraser Field night after night.”If we got between 1,000 to 1,500 that would be great,” he said.As for the baseball, “we are among the premier college leagues in the country,” said commissioner Mario Tiani.There are 12 teams, including the Lowell All-Americans, and eight of them make the playoffs. The season begins June 8 and ends July 31, with three best-of-three playoff series to follow. It all wraps up, usually, by the middle of August.”And I think that’s just enough,” Wallace said. “It’s a shorter period of time. I have a really good feel about this.”