MiLB

During his weekly HBO Max program Last Week Tonight, host John Oliver announced that, after considering applications from 47 minor league baseball games, he would be taking the Erie SeaWolves under his wing and rebranding our 30-year-old team. SeaWolves President Greg Coleman thinks: It’s fun, it’s entertaining, I got a kick out of it.

Thirty years ago, a future Major League All Star playing for the Erie SeaWolves smashed a home run atop the roof of Tullio Arena.

But long before Jose Guillen’s walk-off homer on June 20, 1995, when the SeaWolves played their first-ever game in Erie, Mayor Joyce Savocchio, local and state elected officials, business leaders, and Team Erie volunteers stepped up to the plate to make sure that minor league baseball would remain in Erie and that the team’s sparkling new ballpark would revitalize downtown.

When the SeaWolves celebrate their 30th anniversary on June 20 through 22, the homestand against the Chesapeake Baysox will feature fireworks, 1995 replica blue-and-white pinstripe uniforms, giveaways, nostalgic trivia, and guest appearances by former Erie players.

Just as tantalizing, though, is the teaser about how comedian John Oliver, host of Last Week Tonight on HBO Max, might rebrand the Erie SeaWolves. Will our team really switch to a new name? Change mascots? Pick different colors?

Greg Coleman, Erie SeaWolves president, expects that Oliver’s marketing plan will be revealed by the end of June. But surprise is part of this caper. After all, Coleman was unpacking in Toronto for a Blue Jays game against the Detroit Tigers when he learned by text that on Oliver’s May 18 show, he had selected the SeaWolves out of 47 applicants for rebranding.

“The rest of the world found out before the Erie SeaWolves did. It’s fun, it’s entertaining, I got a kick out of it,” Coleman said.

Coleman invited Oliver to rebrand the Erie team because Oliver had overlooked the SeaWolves on an earlier show highlighting minor league teams with unique names and offbeat promotions.

Coleman sent Oliver an 11-item list touting memorable accomplishments by the SeaWolves, including “Alternative Facts Night” in 2017, when fans got faux championship rings even though Akron had won the Eastern League Championship the previous season; cotton-candy hot dogs on “Sugar Rush Night” in 2018; and in 2021, the reunion of the Wonders band from That Thing You Do!, for the 25th anniversary of Tom Hanks’ Erie-centric film.

“I didn’t want Erie to be left out of the story,” Coleman said. It’s also real news that Erie, a small-market team, did, indeed, win Eastern League championships in 2023 and 2024 and hopes to three-peat this season.

Oliver’s rebrand could play out in the same way that the SeaWolves have become the SnowWolves, the Piñatas, and the Pepperoni Balls on theme nights during the regular season.

But if Oliver pitches “the best thing that ever existed in this world,” there will be serious consideration for his ideas long-term, Coleman said. “We have to go into it open-minded.”

As Oliver researches Erie’s long and storied baseball history, he will learn that change has been a constant for baseball in Erie and also that Erie fans are fully vested in the fate of the SeaWolves. “This is our team,” said Dr. Brad Fox, who has provided physician services to Erie’s baseball teams since 1992. “Fans actually feel that they are part of the team.”

Season ticket holders and staffers make that clear.

Kirk Kinnear, an Army veteran who spent 20 years stationed in Hawaii, is always the first one in line for SeaWolves games, no matter the weather. He also goes on road trips to see “our boys,” he said. The next one will be to Akron on July 5.

LuAn Sheptow, who holds season tickets for both Erie and the Detroit Tigers, said that at Comerica Park, former Erie players always make it a point to ask how “our Erie boys are doing,” she said.

Kinnear describes those associated with the SeaWolves as “one big happy family” and that extends to employees including Beryl Fleming, who began ushering in 1996 during summers off from his job as a history teacher, and Mike Balko, 27, who rose from spinning the prize wheel as a seasonal worker to becoming director of operations.

“I love to see the smiles on the faces of fans,” Balko said. That joy of taking in a ballgame never changes, even though Erie’s team names have changed many times in the past. The current ballpark didn’t even have a name when it opened in June 1995. It became Jerry Uht Park in August that year and then UPMC Park in 2017.

The SeaWolves started as a single-A team and advanced to AA in 2003. The ballpark has been renovated multiple times, and the Stadium Club, which opened in 2021, is a year-round venue.

We teetered on the brink of losing pro ball when team owners bolted and because of Major League Baseball requirements for facility upgrades, which were completed. We were on the chopping block when MLB shrunk the number of minor-league teams in 2019 but then spared Erie.

The baseball business is stable right now. SeaWolves’ owner Fernando Aguirre signed a 10-year lease for UPMC Park with Erie Events in 2021 and a similar agreement was reached to keep Erie’s affiliation with the Detroit Tigers for the same length of time.

But it’s also important to recall that Erie has pluck, as demonstrated by the Erie SeaWolves’ fight song. Two seasons ago, Coleman, who plays guitar, came up with the melody on a drive home from a game, then added lyrics. Professionals polished up the ditty and Jason Dougherty, entertainment director, created the video that plays on the scoreboard during crucial game moments.

“We are home of the fierce and the fun,” the song intones in a catchy rhythm ideal for clapping along. “We dream and we build and we just go out and get another win.” It’s the kind of bold attitude that Erie demonstrates time and again.

“It’s catching steam, especially with the kids,” Coleman said. Listen for yourself on YouTube.

(Clockwise from top left): Second baseman Trei Cruz makes an exciting out as the SeaWolves work their way towards the Eastern League Championship; The yearbook from the inaugural season of the Erie SeaWolves was published for their first game in 1995 – the club celebrates their 30th anniversary this year; UPMC Field was originally christened Jerry Uht Park; The Seawolves celebrated back to back Eastern league championships in 2023 and 2024. (R. Frank Media/Contributed)

The first-ever SeaWolves game that featured a dramatic come-from-behind win could have used a fight song. It happened at the SeaWolves’ home opener on June 20, 1995. With Erie tied 2-2 against the Jamestown Jammers in the bottom of the ninth, Guillen, a hot Pittsburgh Pirates prospect, came up to bat and blasted the first pitch to the top of Tullio Arena for a 3-2 win for Erie.

The capacity crowd of 6,300 went wild.

But those who had worked for years to secure a new stadium and minor league team for Erie already knew that they had a winner three days earlier, on Saturday, June 17, when hundreds of people braved high humidity and hot temperatures in the Ballpark-to-Ballpark Home Run (and Walk).

The route took them from beloved Ainsworth Field on West 24th and Cranberry streets, home to Erie’s minor league and amateur teams for decades, to the new ballpark at East 10th and French.

Craig Latimer directed the walk/run race, part of the City of Erie’s 1995 Bicentennial celebration.

“I had a lot of experience putting on races but usually in low-traffic areas in the country or the easier-to-control Presque Isle,” Latimer recalled. “A daytime race from Ainsworth to the new downtown park with a flood of runners, walkers, strollers, and skateboards about to stream through a gaggle of hopefully secured intersections was giving me race-director hives.”

Would there be a train running along the 19th Street tracks through Little Italy? Would the 16th and Liberty intersection be safe for pedestrians? Nevertheless, Latimer called about 800 participants to the starting line and as “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” played, he yelled “Go!” and watched as “the ambulatory dam burst with a tide of folks keen on getting to the new era of Erie baseball.”

Fans eager to check out Erie’s new downtown ball team wanted to pay tribute to Ainsworth Field, which has its own history that should be preserved. This field, owned by the Erie School District, has hosted exhibition games featuring Honus Wagner from the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1906 and then Babe Ruth twice – in 1923, when Ruth’s barnstorming All-Stars beat the Erie Moose Club 15-1, and again in 1932, when Ruth and fellow Yankee Lou Gehrig lost to the Erie Sailors 7-4, as documented in the Mark Vatavuk-Richard Marshall book, Baseball in Erie.

Eric Brookhouser, 56, an Erie SeaWolves season ticket holder, nurtured his love of baseball at Ainsworth. “I was going to Roosevelt Middle School when the Erie Cardinals came, back in 1981. I lived around 36th and Greengarden and could walk from my house and then walk home at night. I probably saw that last game at Ainsworth (when the Sailors were in the independent Frontier League) and I was at the first SeaWolves’ game and saw the famous Jose Guillen game-winning home run.”

Brookhouser is the great-nephew of the late Betty Peebles, who broke ground as a female baseball columnist before becoming society editor of the Erie Times-News. She was part of Team Erie, the volunteer organization that Savocchio credits with being key to Erie landing the SeaWolves franchise.

“So many projects depend on partnerships, not just political partnerships. Team Erie was part of a very significant partnership,” she said. “One thing I’ve learned in being mayor is that if you don’t dream big, you don’t get big.”

Al Swigonski had that can-do attitude as president of Team Erie and facing a daunting task. How do you find millions to construct a new ballpark when you start with only a $30,000 shoestring budget from local fundraisers? “We were pulling teeth. Frankly, it was a painful process. It was five years of purgatory.”

Swigonski became determined to save Erie baseball in 1990, after Erie Daily Times Sports Editor Kevin Cuneo wrote about the poor maintenance of Ainsworth Field. Swigonski had seen his first ballgames there as a kid, with his parents and two brothers. He wrote to Cuneo: “Let’s do something.”

A 1992 feasibility study determined that Ainsworth would not be a good site for a new ballpark and recommended that the stadium be built on the west bayfront, where the Erie Bayfront Convention Center now sits, although the study pointed out that the “smell” from the nearby asphalt plant might offend fans. Erie City Council members also complained that gulls would foul up the field.

But there are no complaints now when gulls occasionally glide over UPMC Park during a game. The birds won’t distract you from a conversation with new usher Orzeko Seneta, 28, a Navy veteran who will go to college in the fall to become a math teacher. He is a “sports nut” who knows more trivia about the team and the ballpark than anyone I’ve ever met.

Also count yourself lucky if you run into Michael and Shannon Barry, military veterans who chose to retire to Erie six years ago from San Diego, because he loves hockey and can root for the Erie Otters and she can cheer for the SeaWolves in her favorite sport, baseball. They had no ties to Erie when they relocated here but are now season ticket holders.

And before John Oliver unveils his rebrand of the Erie SeaWolves, have some fun dreaming up your own new team names. Doc Fox likes the Olivers or the Hazards. I’m partial to the Erie Dinor-saurs.

Liz Allen became an Erie SeaWolves usher in 2016 after retiring from the Erie Times-News. She can be reached at lizerie@aol.com

Fun fact

Greg Coleman, Erie SeaWolves president, pioneered the practice of employing temporary team names when he was assistant general manager for sales and marketing for the minor league team in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

The team had rebranded as the Hot Rods but Coleman also liked a goofy name that was rejected before he came on board. He created “What Could Have Been Night,” with the Hot Rods morphing into the Bowling Green Cave Shrimp. It won Minor League Baseball’s promotion of the year.

Help Ainsworth

Al Swigonski, former president of Team Erie, is looking for supporters to help decide the fate of historic Ainsworth Field, which is still used by the Erie High Royals baseball team and other leagues.

“Ainsworth is a living, breathing disgrace. We should be ashamed it’s come to this. Our kids deserve the best,” Swigonski said.

For detailed accounts of Ainsworth Field’s history, consult Baseball in Erie by Mark K. Vatavuk and Richard E. Marshal, and Swigonski’s two books, *Erie Baseball and Softball 360, volumes one and two.

To learn more about preservation and rehab efforts for Ainsworth Field, email Swigonski at alswigonski@aol.com.