In the darkest depths of winter, local baseball is alive.
But largely in the guise of an intrigue-laced story that began two years ago and periodically keeps unfolding, featuring a cast of names that includes in prominent or cameo roles Salt Lake Mayor Deedee Corradini, baseball entrepreneurs Joe Buzas and Jack Donovan, Utah Jazz owner Larry Miller, and steel magnate Joe Cannon.The current conflict is about how the Portland Beavers - a Triple A team now known as the Salt Lake Buzz - arranged to move to Salt Lake City, an issue resurrected recently by owners of the former Salt Lake Trappers, the rookie league team the Buzz kicked out of the area last year.
The Trappers allege impropriety by the mayor and her emissary.
The mayor and her emissary dismiss the accusations as sour grapes.
What's evident, however, is that an apparent conflict of interest occurred after Corradini assigned longtime associate Don J. Leonard to help bring Triple A baseball to Salt Lake City.
Leonard, in spearheading city negotiations to woo the Beavers to Utah with a new stadium, also made a deal to eventually buy the team, to accept ticket perks and to even take a high-profile job with the team when it moved to town.
"If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck it must be a duck," charges Jack Donovan, who owned the Trappers before they left Salt Lake City.
"I find it awfully hard to believe a guy in the beginning says he's a volunteer, negotiates a deal for the city, winds up negotiating a deal for Larry Miller to buy the team and then winds up with a job for the team."
But that's more or less - though not exactly - what happened.
Leonard, a Salt Lake attorney, signed a deal with Buzas that gave Leonard an option to buy the team for $7 million.
Leonard and Corradini say, however, he was only acting on behalf of Miller and Joe Cannon, owner of Geneva Steel, and that Leonard had no intention of profiting himself.
Miller and Cannon said Leonard contacted them separately in the fall of 1992 to ask if they'd be interested in helping bring Triple A baseball to Salt Lake City. Miller said he was willing to buy "some part or all of a team." Cannon, who'd looked into buying the Edmonton Trappers of Alberta, Canada, five years earlier, told Leonard to count him in, though he said he wondered about the appearance of a conflict of interest on Leonard's part.
Cannon said Leonard assured him he was not employed by the city "and was just trying to help Deedee out."
"My involvement was because I love baseball," said Leonard, who notes - as others do - that the deal he cut naming himself the team's future buyer was short-lived and scuttled in early November 1992, only a few days after it was signed.
Buzas by then had agreed to move to Salt Lake City under the terms of a proposal he signed in October 1993 with Corradini in which his team would pay $200,000 a year for the use of a brand-new baseball stadium, which was subsequently built and christened Franklin Quest Field.
After Buzas made that deal with the city, Leonard, though he was chairman of the city's task force assigned with bringing Triple A baseball to Salt Lake City, went to Portland representing himself as the envoy for private-sector interests that wanted to buy the team, according to Buzas.
Neither he nor Corradini would concede this week that his double role was inappropriate, insisting it was spurred by the well-intentioned belief that a baseball team would flourish and stay in Salt Lake only if it had a Utah owner.
"I saw every deal," said the mayor. "Every step of the way we knew what was going on, and Don was working at my behest and the city's behest.
"We felt our best opportunity for success with a team was local ownership," Corradini said. "We looked back at the history of why the (Triple A) Salt Lake Gulls had failed . . . one issue we heard about was that there was no local ownership."
"The mayor wanted local ownership," said Leonard. "I was helping her." Leonard added that he could never afford a $7 million team. "I don't have seven thousand dollars, let alone seven million," he said.
Buzas decided he wanted to keep the franchise in his family, and the sale went down the tubes before it ever went into effect. But Leonard did take a job with the Buzz, working for a few weeks in a management position he quickly lost because he could not get along with Tammy Felker-White, the team's general manager. He and Buzas insist his short-lived appointment had nothing to do with their initial agreement and was made because Buzas needed help interacting with the Salt Lake business community, where he knew few people.
And Corradini said Salt Lake City's contract with Buzas is evidence that the arrangement is above suspicion because at $200,000, the annual lease gives the city more than most minor-league teams pay in other venues.
None of the explanations appease Donovan, though, who concedes he would go away if Buzas would only make good on an arbitration ruling Buzas lost earlier this year. The Buzz owner paid the Trappers $1.2 million last week but has refused to fork over an additional $400,000 in damages because his attorney argues it is redundant.
The dispute has spilled into the news through a series of leaks, which the Buzz and the city say is an unseemly strategy aimed at forcing Buzas' hand, a barb Donovan says is unkind.
"We're defending ourselves," said Donovan, "after being raped."