Albany-Colonie Yankees

Eastern League (1985-1994)

Background

This Class AA farm club was Exhibit A of the skyrocketing marketplace for minor league baseball clubs during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. During the fall of 1982, Ben Bernard scraped together $100,000 to purchase the Eastern League’s defending champion West Haven A’s. Bernard, then in his late 20’s, knew the Eastern League well. He had recently resigned as General Manager of the league’s Glens Falls White Sox club.

Bernard moved the team to suburban Albany, where officials hurried to erect 5,500-seat Heritage Park in time for the 1983 season. The team’s popularity shot through the roof in 1985 when the Yankees replaced the A’s as Albany-Colonie’s parent club. The team shattered the Eastern League annual attendance record with 324,003 fans that summer, a mark that stood until 1994. Bernard sold the team in 1987 for more than 20 times his original investment five years earlier, pocketing a reported $2.3 million. The team sold again five years later to a group of Wall Street investors for $3.3 million.

Albany-Colonie was hardly alone in the gold rush. As a wave of corporate and financial industry buyers bought out mom-and-pop operators like Ben Bernard, gleaming new taxpayer-financed ballparks popped up all over the country. By the early 1990’s, Heritage Park, less than a decade old, was obsolete within the industry. In 1992 Albany-Colonie’s latest owners sparked controversy with a plan to move the Yankees to a new 6,000-seat stadium planned for Long Island.

Championship & Superstars

Before the Albany-Colonie Yankees fell victim to the financialization of minor league baseball, the team brought championship and superstars to the Capital Region. The club won Eastern League titles in 1988, 1989 and 1991. Albany-Colonie also led the circuit in attendance for three straight seasons from 1985 to 1987.

Many of the brightest stars of the Yankees’ late 1990’s World Series dynasty came up through Albany-Colonie and Heritage Park, including:

• Jim Leyritz (Albany-Colonie ’88-’89)
• Bernie Williams (Albany-Colonie ’89-’90)
• Jorge Posada (Albany-Colonie ’93)
• Derek Jeter (Albany-Colonie ’94)
• Andy Petitte (Albany-Colonie ’93-’94)
• Mariano Rivera (Albany-Colonie ’94)

Other top future Major League stars included 1990 N.L. Cy Young Award winner Doug Drabek (’85), Roberto Kelly (’86) and Al Leiter (’87). Future Pro Football Hall-of-Famer Deion Sanders stole 17 bases in 33 games for Albany-Colonie in 1989, the same summer he was a 1st round draft choice of the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons.

Flameout

Perhaps the most anticipated of these prospects was New York’s 1991 #1 overall draft pick Brien Taylor. Taylor’s fastball clocked in at 99 mph in high school.  During his senior year at North Carolina’s East Cataret High he struck out 213 batters in only 88 innings.

Taylor’s family held out through the summer of 1991, rebuffing lowball offers from the Yankees. Jeff Passan wrote a great retrospective on the Taylor negotiations for Yahoo! Sports in 2006.  With assistance from agent Scott Borras, Taylor’s mom Bettie, who worked in a seafood processing plant, faced down the Yankees’ negotiators. Taylor ultimately landed a $1.55 million signing bonus, the largest ever paid to a Major League Baseball draft pick.

Taylor’s pro debut came in 1992 with Fort Lauderdale of the Florida State League. He lived up to the hype, striking out 187 batters and posting a 2.57 ERA.  Taylor headed to Albany-Colonie out of spring training in 1993.  The 21-year old was poised to become one of the dominant power-pitching left-handers of the 1990’s alongside the Seattle Mariners’ Randy Johnson.

The summer of 1993 in Albany turned out to be Taylor’s peak.  He won 13 games and Baseball America named him the sport’s top prospect that year.  Back home in Beaufort, North Carolina in December 1993, Taylor and his cousin confronted a man who assaulted his brother in an earlier dispute.  In the altercation that followed, Taylor was knocked down. He suffered a catastrophic tear to the labrum and capsule of his pitching arm.

After surgery, Taylor lost his control and 8 mph off his fastball. He puttered around the low minors until 2000, but never again rose above A-ball after the fight.  Taylor became the second #1 overall pick to fail to make it to the Major Leagues.

Move To Connecticut & Aftermath

In 1992 a group of Wall Street investors bought the team for just north of $3 million. Four of the six men lived on Long Island and soon announced their intention to move the Eastern League club to the hamlet of Brentwood on the Island. Their hopes were dashed when the New York Mets exercised their territorial rights to block the deal.

Eventually, in June 1994, the team confirmed a move to Norwich, Connecticut where city officials approved a 6,200-seat $9 million ballpark set to open in 1995. Demoralized local fans stayed away from Heritage Park as the lame duck club played out its final summer in 1994. Albany-Colonie’s attendance of 115,819 was the worst in the Eastern League. Fans missed the chance to see a remarkable 1994 team that included Derek Jeter, Andy Pettite and Mariano Rivera.

One of Albany-Colonie’s late era owners was a bond trader and veteran minor league investor named Frank Boulton. Boulton refused to give up on Long Island after the Mets squashed the club’s move to Brentwood. Instead, Boulton formed the Atlantic League of Professional Baseball, which began play in 1998. Because the Atlantic League was independent from Major League affiliation, the Mets and other Major League organizations had no authority to wield territorial monopolies. Boulton’s independent Long Island Ducks franchise finally began play in the summer of 2000. The Ducks proved wildly profitable. Boulton continues to operate the Ducks and control the Atlantic League as of this writing in 2019.

Independent baseball also made its way to Heritage Park. After the Yankees departed in 1994, the Albany-Colonie Diamond Dogs of the independent Northeast League set up shop in 1995. The Diamond Dogs played at Heritage Park from 1995 to 2002.

Heritage Park was demolished in 2009.

Albany-Colonie Yankees Shop

In Memoriam

Pitcher Jeff Hoffman (Albany-Colonie ’92), a 14th round draft pick of the New York Yankees in 1988, died of a cardiac arrhythmia in his hotel room during a road trip to Binghamton on August 29, 1992. He was 24 years old.

Links

Eastern League Media Guides

Eastern League Programs

###