Basically, he says: “It’s all about entertainment.” Two years ago, Feller, along with co-owners Clark Eckoff and Bolder, who handles scouting and recruitment for the club, began by determining how a new college-level baseball team would stack up against existing competitors.
But the Sliders didn’t consider their primary competition to be the St. Louis Cardinals or Chicago’s Cubs and White Sox, or even the Cubs’ AAA minor league team, the Peoria Chiefs. Instead, Feller says, the Sliders would compete against more traditional family-oriented entertainment venues such as Knight’s Action Park and Caribbean Water Adventure and the Kerasotes movie theaters.
They liked their odds. Just consider that a night at the movies runs two adults close to $20 and one day at Knight’s Action Park costs an adult $25.95. Compare that with the cheapest general admission Sliders ticket of $6, Feller says. One of their aims is to make mascot Speedy Slider — based on the redeared slider turtle, which is common in Illinois and other parts of the U.S. — “the biggest celebrity in Springfield.”
“We want to create a carnival atmosphere,” Feller says. They started creating buzz by carpeting Springfield with Sliders merchandise such as baseball caps, T-shirts, batting helmets, pennants, foam fingers, miniature bats and broken game bats last season. For nightly promotions they hooked up with County Market, St. John’s Hospital, the Carpenters Union and Allied Waste.
Although he was a gifted player in his own right — while attending Edgewood College in Wisconsin, Feller was twice named to the all- Lake Michigan Conference, hitting .389 and leading the Eagles in runs scored and stolen bases during his senior year — he remains only tangentially involved on the baseball side of the Sliders.
However, he’s the first to admit that a guy in a turtle costume squirting fans with a gigantic water gun during the seventh-inning stretch can, by itself, only keep butts in the bleachers for so long. Winning baseball games certainly helps.
In 2008, the Sliders’ inaugural season in the Central Illinois Collegiate League, the team went 30-17 for tops in the league. The team’s performance propelled the Sliders into the CICL playoffs and, ultimately, to winning its first championship. And average attendance of 1,600 spectators per game ranked the Sliders a respectable 18th among the teams of the National Alliance of Summer College Baseball.
The Sliders aren’t confident their experiment is a home run just yet. In fact, local amateur baseball has seen its share of successes and failures, starting with the Illinois-Indiana- Iowa (Three-Eye) League. Springfield teams, which included the Hustlers and, later, the Senators, played in the Class B minor league from 1903 to 1949 and won six pennants, according to a Web site maintained by baseball historian and McLean County history museum librarian Bill Kemp. “Throughout its storied history, the league was nationally recognized as a wellspring of Major League talent,” Kemp writes
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