Columnist Dean Juipe: Logan’s sincerity legitimate

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, April 5, 2000 | 10:40 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or 259-4084.

Slowed by the hectic pace of recent weeks, Don Logan lowers himself into his office chair as if his 41 years on the planet has suddenly doubled. It's clear he could use a couple of days off.

But he's not getting any.

Busy on two fronts as the point man for the Las Vegas Stars, who open their season Thursday, and as the catalyst behind the notion of Southern Nevada building a spring-training complex for an assortment of major league baseball teams, Logan finds his plate piled high.

His golf game suffering and his sleep schedule routinely interrupted, he moves accordingly. Yet pry him with questions about the validity of his spring-training project, and, perhaps, his ulterior motives, and Logan comes to life.

Surely it has crossed everyone's mind as they've followed the ongoing spring-training debate: Beyond the obvious, what is Logan's itinerary? Isn't it possible, if not probable, that he has positioned himself as the project's fulcrum simply to advance his own career and land a job in the front office of some major league team?

He takes the inquiry, which some would say was intrusive, in stride.

"No, that's not it at all," he said. "I'm not going anywhere."

Most men his age and in his position are still upwardly mobile, yet Logan -- who is beginning his 17th season as general manager of the Stars -- dispels the belief he has something up his sleeve by pointing to his family situation.

"I have to be part of Adrienne's upbringing," he said, referring to his 11-year-old daughter, who lives with her mother. "I'm not going to be a long-distance dad."

Besides, he insists, if he wanted to go to the big leagues he would have already made the move.

"I could pick up the phone and get a job in the majors right now," he said. "I've been offered, geez, in the last seven or eight years, maybe half a dozen big-league jobs.

"But what I'm doing here is a better situation in terms of stability."

There's an earnestness in his voice that he wouldn't dare fake, and it carries over as he makes yet another appeal on behalf of a spring-training proposition that, to date, has received only a lukewarm response from a community wary of the idea's ultimate price tag.

An out-of-state report over the weekend that put the cost at $100 million was way out of line, he claims.

"It was $55 million in 1997 and there's no way it's gone up a heck of a lot since then," he said. As for an addendum item, that the incoming teams would receive financial guarantees, Logan was equally dismissive.

"I don't think guarantees are appropriate," he said. "I'm not a proponent of them and in our case I don't think they'll be part of any deal."

With both major and minor league teams opening their seasons this week, the project's status is on temporary hold. Logan said within a couple of weeks he hopes to "get the framework of a deal" ironed out with the possible participants, at which time he can take that "letter of understanding" and make a final pitch to community leaders.

"We can unequivocally tell them they'll do better here than where they're at," he says almost energetically, his earlier infirmities seemingly long gone.