Andy Larsen: What are we losing with the Salt Lake Bees’ move out of Smith’s Ballpark?

In the summer of 1926, on the corner of 1300 South and West Temple, the Salt Lake Bees played their first game in a brand new ballpark called Community Field.

In the decades since, the powers that be decided that the name of this ballpark needed to be changed. At first, it was to honor John C. Derks, a community advocate and Tribune sports editor who played a major role in baseball being played in Salt Lake City. The reason behind a later name change on a new set of bleachers on the site was more banal: to make some money with a sponsorship.

And finally, two years ago, it was decided that the thing that would make the most money would be leaving the plot of land altogether.

Ninety-eight years after baseball was first played on this corner, the Salt Lake Bees are playing their final game on that earth this Sunday. Babe Ruth visited there. Bill Murray’s Trappers set an all-time winning record there. The longest home run ever measured was hit there. It is the epicenter of Utah’s baseball history.

But after that final game, the Salt Lake Bees will no longer play in their namesake capital at all. Instead, the team will move to South Jordan and Daybreak, an environmental cleanup site turned planned neighborhood. The decision was made by the Larry H. Miller Company — of course, they own most of both Daybreak and the Bees.

The Miller company is not evil. But they may have lost their soul.

After Miller died, they closed his beloved racetrack in Tooele. In the last five years, they’ve sold the auto dealership business and the Utah Jazz, too. With those proceeds, they’ve purchased controlling interests in real estate holdings and a chain of senior living homes. Those aren’t the sorts of moves made out of love but out of cold demographic calculation: We’re getting more people who need homes, we’re also getting older, and so those are great businesses to be in if you like making money.

The Millers, to their credit, do a lot of charity work they don’t have to do. They donated $50 million to a new children’s hospital, and matriarch Gail’s dollars went a long way in supporting the Count My Vote project, promoting primary primacy in our state. They also will be donating $22 million to the Ballpark neighborhood — of the $100 million the city is seeking — for whatever comes after the Bees.

State legislators have told me the Millers are more collaborative and thoughtful about how their plans impact communities than, say, Ryan Smith’s group.

But a cynic, this cynic, would point out that the Millers’ donations to these projects pale in comparison to the $900 million to be received from taxpayers for another of their projects: the Power District.

That project, too, is largely a real estate development play. The Ramada Inn on the border of the site was originally planned to be housing for the homeless. Instead, the Miller group purchased it. In all, those leading the Power District push promise to transform Salt Lake’s west side into a economic hub for the masses with stores, restaurants, and hotels.

A hole in the plans can be filled by a Major League Baseball team if the league’s commissioner and owners decide to expand and choose Salt Lake City as a place to do so.

That possibility — the game’s best players in Salt Lake City, a real major league team — is the one that would make John C. Derks and those he worked with decades ago support the Bees’ flight to the suburbs. That possibility is what gives Bees fans in Salt Lake City hope that this move will be worth it. But a Major League Baseball team is not a sure thing. Either way, the Power District project will be built.

I spoke to some of those baseball fans at Smith’s Ballpark ahead of the team’s departure, fans who had been going to Bees games on that corner for years, even decades. Some say they’ll make an effort to follow the team out south and west.

But most said they wouldn’t make it a habit if they went at all. Most noted that the smaller ballpark and higher ticket prices could push them out of their seats — an early release of the team’s ticket prices indicated that seats behind home plate would cost $95 per game if a season ticket were purchased.

“I feel like they’re pricing me out of the stadium,” Scott Jones said from his seat along the first-base line. “Rumor has it that my seats are going to be double what they are this year, and I just can’t justify that.”

Other fans were concerned about driving out to Daybreak on notoriously traffic-choked roads around peak traffic times.

Enough people live in the Salt Lake Valley’s southern and western corners that the Bees will likely experience attendance success at Daybreak Field, but it will be a substantially different crowd. Even those who will travel with the team said they’d miss those whom they’d gotten to know — their fellow fans in their section, the concessionaires, ushers and the like.

More than anything, though, it was Smith’s Ballpark itself that will be missed. Even the Bees themselves tout it as one of the top-10 minor league ballparks in the country. Some observers put it even higher than that.

“It’s just a great venue. I mean, even though it’s 30 years old, I think it’s the best Triple-A park in the country,” one concourse fan, Robert Merkley, said. “This view can’t be beat. As you look out at the Wasatch Mountains ... it can’t be beat.”

“There’s been history here going back 100 years, you know. It’s really hard to have it be now moved away outside of the downtown area. It breaks my heart, honestly,” schoolteacher Aaron Morton said. “Yeah, I know what they’re doing, I understand the business thing. But from a history perspective — they named the team the Bees out of a sense of history, and now they seem to have forgotten that.”

The most interesting perspective on the situation, though, came from Bees manager Keith Johnson. As an infielder, he played two seasons at the ballpark, now, he’s in his ninth season managing the club he once played for. Given that his checks are signed by the club, I figured he’d be heavily in support of the team’s move when talking to a reporter.

Instead? Ambivalence.

“At the end of the day, things change, you know? Times move on,” he said. “It’s not going to make the new ballpark any better than this one, or the new community any better than this one. But it’s just going to be different. It’s going to be new, and it’s going to be another chapter.”

It will be. The new Daybreak Field will be good, and new, and shiny. Thousands of families will make their own memories there that they’ll retain for the decades to come.

But all the same, we’re losing something real with the Bees’ move. A great place to watch a baseball game, yes, but also history and tradition. An anchored sense of place, a tie back to generations of those who came before us. All sacrificed for one wealthy family’s definition of progress.

We’re losing a community’s field. I think it’s right to mourn that.