Columnist Brian Hilderbrand: LV Stars strike out in name game

Thursday, Dec. 21, 2000 | 11:38 a.m.

Brian Hilderbrand is a Las Vegas Sun sportswriter. Reach him at bh@lasvegassun.com or 259-4089. Regular columnist Ron Kantowski has the day off.

In many respects, the Las Vegas Stars franchise has mirrored the triple-A career of one of its former players, outfielder Melvin Nieves.

In 1994, Nieves hit an impressive 25 home runs in 111 games for the Stars but set a club record by striking out an astounding 138 times in 406 at-bats. In other words, the switch-hitting slugger struck out roughly every third time he strode to the plate.

Just as Nieves was wont to do, the Stars whiffed mightily this week in their first official plate appearance as the top affiliate of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

The folks at Mandalay Sports Enterprises, the brain trust that owns the Stars, unveiled a new nickname for the team on Tuesday -- the Las Vegas 51s -- and, in doing so, went down swinging with the bases loaded.

(There was some question among longtime Stars observers whether the "51" was in reference to the nearby top-secret government base, Area 51, or the average number of wins the team has posted in the past decade.)

After 18 years as the top minor-league club of the San Diego Padres, the Stars finally landed the Hope Diamond of affiliations -- the Los Angeles Dodgers. Yet, instead of capitalizing on the new partnership with one of the most storied franchises in Major League Baseball, Mandalay Sports took the greedy way out and opted for a new nickname and logo that is guaranteed to sell lots of hats and T-shirts but provide absolutely no identity with its parent club.

Instead of changing their name to the "Las Vegas Dodgers" and switching their team colors to blue and white with an interlocking "LV" on their Dodger-blue caps, the franchise elected to plop space aliens on its hats and uniform tops in its quest for the almighty merchandising buck.

And this comes at a time when the local minor-league franchise is stranded on base in its attempt to grow its attendance in proportion to the Valley's population boom.

In their inaugural season in Las Vegas, in 1983, the Stars drew 365,848 fans to Cashman Field. Seventeen years later -- despite the area's population nearly tripling in size -- the Stars drew a little more than 322,000 fans this season.

The Stars should have learned several years ago that merely adopting a new logo, team colors and mascot does not automatically translate to more fans in the seats. In 1995, the Stars went to the wildly popular teal-and-purple color scheme. In the ensuing six seasons, the team hasn't come close to matching the 386,310 fans it drew in 1993.

Stars officials will contend that their attendance has suffered because the Padres didn't supply them with the talent to put competitive teams on the field through the latter half of the '90s, but that protest rings hollow. During their record-setting attendance year in '93, the team was a dismal 58-85 on the field.

What the Stars needed was a dynamic parent club with widespread recognition and a solid fan base. They also needed to exploit that relationship, as do the Iowa Cubs, Pawtucket Red Sox and Omaha Royals.

Three months ago, the franchise got the pitch it was looking for: A waist-high fastball in its wheelhouse in the form of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Like a long-forgotten outfielder who never realized his potential, the Stars swung and missed.