Trash Pandas deliver $1.4M ‘blast’ to Madison

MADISON — To put it in baseball terms, the Rocket City Trash Pandas knocked one out of the park for the city of Madison.

The Minor League Baseball team, just a few weeks away from Opening Day, will be making a $1.4 million payment to Madison as part of its financial obligation. The money – $1,403,115 for the 2022 year – is to help the city in its $46 million investment in building Toyota Field.

“We consider ourselves a community centerpiece,” said Garrett Fahrmann, the team’s executive vice president and general manager, at Monday’s City Council meeting. “We’re not a church, but we are a great place to go after church on Sundays … even though during COVID, we actually were a church.

“We take this role (as a community centerpiece) seriously.”

Also at Monday’s council meeting, auditor Adam Nelson said there were no issues in the city’s venue revenue report.

“Based on the procedures we performed, we noted no variances in the dollar amounts reported by BallCorps (the team’s ownership group) related to the items we tested,” he said. “We found no significant deviations in what BallCorps reported to the city related to the subsets of venue revenue that we examined.”

As part of the team’s agreement with the city, the Trash Pandas were to pay Madison at least $1 million per year. In the first year, the season was canceled due to the pandemic. The team hosted some non-Minor League Baseball events and paid about $622,000 to Madison.

The 2021 season was a COVID-limited 60-game schedule and, including more non-MiLB events, the Trash Pandas presented a check for nearly $1.25 million to the city.

The 2022 season featured a full 69-game home schedule (138 total games) and several non-MiLB events. The upcoming season begins April 6 and includes home games Memorial Day and July 4 and several non-baseball events – including next month’s Big Ol’ Ballpark Carnival and the inaugural Smoke in the Outfield BBQ Festival.

“The ballpark is going to its fourth year but this (2022) is its first full season,” Fahrmann said. “We’re not done yet.”