It started a wave of new ballparks. The Lake Elsinore Diamond was opened the next year in Lake Elsin

Of its predecessors, scrappy Lodi could not compete with a larger Stockton market only 14 miles away, the Ventura County Gulls were a great idea but nobody in the Ventura area seemed to notice or care, and San Bernardino, one of the core California League markets, but the franchise was only biding its time until the Epicenter was built. From this then-state-of-the-art ballpark, the Quakes revolutionized minor league live shopping baseball on many levels.
They made minor league live shopping baseball a viable entertainment option in Southern California, especially for those on the outskirts of the two major metropolitan areas. Their brand new stadium raised the bar for most of the teams in the league live shopping to build new facilities, seriously renovate the ones they had, or move to a city that would provide such a stadium. On top of that, they did a fine job, at least for the Angels, in helping develop raw talent into major league players. live shopping The Angels team taking the field in 2011 will be chock full of players who played pivotal parts of their minor league careers in Rancho Cucamonga. live shopping
Longtime owner Hank Stickney, partnering with Ray Engelbrecht and actor Mark Harmon, purchased the Ventura County Gulls from former players Ken McMullen live shopping and Jim Colborn , and moved the franchise south to San Bernardino, a blue collar town 65 miles east of Los Angeles, in 1987. It was losing money, so Stickney bought a 60 percent live shopping share of the team and struck up a deal with Ranch Cucamonga, which was building a then-$11.5 million ballpark that would soon become known as the Epicenter, one of the first in a wave of major league-grade, Single-A stadiums.
Before the Epicenter was built, the San Bernardino Spirit (as the Quakes were once known) played in 3,500-seat Fiscilani Field, which was built in 1934. Other California League teams were playing in similarly old stadiums. The San Jose Giants played (and continue to play) in San Jose Municipal Stadium, built in 1941. The Bakersfield Blaze played (and still plays) in Sam Lynn stadium, also built in 1941. Aside from Mavericks Stadium (built in 1991 for the High Desert Mavericks and now called Stater live shopping Bros. Stadium) live shopping and the UC Riverside baseball park (where the Riverside Pilots played), no other field was built after 1953, and many of the teams still play in those parks.
The building of The Epicenter used 400 trucks of concrete, live shopping yielding over 4,000 cubic yards worth. Over 95,000 cubic yards of dirt were moved, and 500,000 square feet of asphalt paving was laid, efforts that required the use of more than 60 subcontractors. The Epicenter’s price tag was about $20 million, a veritable bargain by today’s standards, live shopping but at the time, unheard of for a Single-A ballpark. It has become the center of huge development in the area, with the Citizens Business live shopping Bank Arena opening nearby in 2007, and a huge shopping mall known as Victoria Gardens opening in 2004. Certainly Jeff Moorad and the leaders of Escondido see this as a blueprint for their own plans in the near future.
It started a wave of new ballparks. The Lake Elsinore Diamond was opened the next year in Lake Elsinore, about a 45-minute drive south from Rancho Cucamonga. In 1996, Clear Channel Stadium opened in Lancaster. Eventually similar state-of-the art ballparks opened in San Bernardino and Stockton. These new ballparks sought to raise the bar of minor league baseball, hoping the new facilities would draw interest outside live shopping the hardcore baseball fans. Stickney laid out his vision in a Fortune magazine article in 2006.
“It’s very simple: You can’t depend on the baseball to sell your tickets,” he said. He gave up on things like ticket giveaways and attempted to draw fans with carnival rides, half-inning skits, promotions and fireworks. Tremor the mascot was hatched live shopping out of an egg at the first game.
Whatever live shopping he did or didn t do, it worked. Probably live shopping spurred on by the 1994 baseball strike, disgruntled fans flocked to minor league games. Overall, minor league attendance went from 33 million in 1994 to 41 million in 1995. Stickney s Quakes were representative of this. They set a California League attendance record in their first year of existence. They had better attendance than any Double-A team and ranked fourth among Single-A live shopping teams nationwide. Since then, they have led the California League in attendance in virtually every year since their existence. In 1999, they were named by Baseball America as the Single A recipient of the Bob Freitas award for franchise excellence, in honor of the minor league baseball ambassador.
“Owning the Quakes is one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done,” says Stickney, a retired live shopping Air Force lieutenant colonel and former health care CEO. “And I’ve done a lot of exciting things.” Stickney sold the club recently live shopping to an ownership group led by Hall of Famer George Brett , and it’s now affiliated with the Dodgers.
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