by Trey Nosrac

Once upon a time, a vacationing young couple attended a minor league baseball game in Buffalo, NY. Neither had ever seen a minor league game. The couple had a wonderful evening watching a well-played baseball game in the stadium used to film the Robert Redford movie The Natural. The following morning, on the drive home, the husband had an idea for a niche business. The wife supplied a name – Minor Trips (A Travelers Guide to Minor League Baseball).

They wrote to each of the over 200 individual teams for stadium information, driving directions, playing dates, interesting nearby sites of interest, logos, radio stations that broadcasted the games, a list of famous former players, and quirky events relevant to their team and town. This undertaking took place just before the dawn of the internet and required a lot of writing and postage.

The new product had two parts: a pamphlet-like directory with baseball parks organized alphabetically by state, team information, and home playing dates for the upcoming season. The publication would also have a 36-page, bi-annual newsletter with quirky columns, quotes, statistics, history, reports, letters, and trivia from the wonderful, wacky world of low-level professional baseball across America. The couple purchased one small advertisement in a national sporting publication to introduce the product.

In the first year, there were more than 400 subscribers. In the second year, 90 per cent renewed, and another thousand joined them. Soon, the subscriber list was several thousand. Organically, it grew almost too fast. Despite the headwinds of the growing digital world and increasing postal and printing costs, this print product lasted for over two decades before being sold. The ownership of the publication was the touchstone for extraordinary adventures for the young couple and their infant daughter, who arrived on the scene in the first year of the publication and went on a road trip every summer of her youth.

But this is a horse racing site. I want to tell you about another publication.

A few years after the baseball publication caught fire, another idea crossed my mind: a spinoff publication for horse racing. I discovered that almost the same number of horse racetracks operated across America as minor league baseball parks, plus jai-alai frontons and greyhound racetracks. We created a name: Making Tracks (A traveler’s guide to Pari-mutuel Locations in America). We had a blueprint to follow and followed it to the letter.

*See below for a sample page from over 20 years ago.

Compiling the horse racing guidebook was challenging because horse racing had several lone wolves and no league office. Many individual racetracks were suspicious and slow to answer. We found that harness racetracks and thoroughbred racetracks were on different planets. They often had no idea about other racetracks in other states. Nevertheless, we completed the task and again launched the publication with an advertisement in the national sporting publication.

Making Tracks was not an instant replay of Minor Trips. The first year, we received a handful of racing subscribers, not hundreds, let alone thousands. The word did not spread like wildfire in the horse racing universe. Ironically, many of our racing customers came as crossovers from baseball subscribers. Despite a solid effort for a few years, we realized that the racetrack adventure/product, while interesting, was a financial failure and pulled the plug.

Then, as now, I occasionally ponder entirely different responses to what was, in many respects, the same product. Minor League and Independent League Baseball flew, and horse racing flopped. And it was not merely a matter of the number of subscribers. Nor was the difference a matter of advertising because neither publication ran a single advertisement. It was a vibe. The baseball subscribers, the fans, the park personnel, and the management had energy. The horse racing world felt grumpy and jaded, which was irritating because we all know that horse racing is full of wonderful people.

There are many reasons for our surprising success with the baseball audience and our failure with the racing audience. Horse racing depends on gambling money, while low-level professional baseball depends on selling tickets and hot dogs. Horse racing is strictly regulated. At a ballpark, enjoyable experimentation is encouraged. In the newsletters, racing people wanted wagering advice. The baseball audience craved wacky contests, crazy names, promotions, wrote letters, and shared travel tips. But if you asked me for a single word to explain the difference between the two publications, I would choose – engagement.

Ballpark operators work tirelessly to fill every moment for every age group. Horse racing offers a race and then half an hour of almost nothing. It is challenging to sell empty minutes, especially in today’s competition for attention. Baseball fans are packed together, united, pulling for the home team or the hot dog race, leading to engagement and mingling with fellow fans. A racing fan is more likely to be surrounded by empty seats and people with noses in a racing program.

The two sports are apples and oranges. Despite cell phones, the home attendance at ballparks grows, and the attendance at racetrack grandstands is a losing battle with few soldiers. From my experience and POV, allow a few simple suggestions for the future, in which gambling, while always necessary, may not be the ONLY reason to visit a racetrack:

• The length of a racing program should be halved, at minimum.

• The grandstands at racetracks should be eliminated and replaced with green spaces and paths. On this manicured sloping lawn, visitors can bring their seating, and there should be a small, all-weather facility for around 200.

• Live horses should always be visible in person and on a video screen every minute. Visitors and customers need to engage with the horses as much as possible.

• The racetrack should strive to offer a relaxing, bucolic experience, an antidote to the digital world.

These cost-effective adjustments could push racing out of our current attendance malaise and offer a friendly, fun vibe.