THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, February 23, 1995 TAG: 9502230442
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: HICKORY, N.C. LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines
Already one of the hot merchandising commodities in the country, the Hickory Crawdads have become the first minor league baseball team on the Internet.
Internet surfers can check out the catchy crustacean logo on the full-color electronic catalog, and download order forms for Crawdads caps and T-shirts to their printers.
Wired-in baseball junkies can catch up on team news, trades, schedules and even send questions to the team's management.
Still to come: Game statistics and player profiles, with photos, and ultimately, E-mail souvenir orders.
``Everything I read says this is the wave of the future in marketing and merchandising, and we wanted to catch it early,'' Marty Steele, the Crawdads' vice president of baseball operations, told The Charlotte Observer.
The Crawdads, the Chicago White Sox affiliate in the Class A South Atlantic League, aren't the first baseball team on the Internet. The major league Seattle Mariners beat them to that distinction.
The Crawdads connection is the latest feature of North Carolina NetWorks, a service offered through the World Wide Web. The Web is an increasingly popular segment of the worldwide computer network called Internet, which requires a fee to access.
John Ellis, a Catawba Valley Community College professor, started NetWorks about two months ago to offer tourism information for visitors' bureaus in 13 North Carolina cities. It also carries advertising, for a fee, for Hickory's furniture dealers and for the upcoming Southern Spring Show in Charlotte.
Before Feb. 2, when the Crawdads went on-line, the most people who had tapped into Ellis' service in one day was 845. On Feb. 6, Ellis, who gets a fee from the Crawdads for providing access to the Internet, got 3,140 ``hits.''
Right now, the Crawdads don't have enough computer power to get on the Internet from their offices, much less accept electronic orders for their wares. Internet shoppers will have to print the team's order form off the computer and mail or fax it in.
``But by the end of the season, we'll have our computers upgraded and be ready for E-mail orders,'' Steele said.
Baseball executives will be watching the Crawdads' Internet experiment closely, said Miles Wolff, publisher of Baseball America, a weekly newspaper that covers minor league baseball.
``If they are successful, they'll have everyone else in minor league baseball copying them,'' said Wolff, who owned the Durham Bulls for 12 years until he sold the team in 1991. ``Until the world is a little more plugged in computer-wise, I see this as having a limited impact on the sale of team-logo merchandise to start with. But you never know. This could be the start of a trend.'' MEMO: For those who want access: NetWorks' address is URL
http:/wwww.hickory.nc.us/ncne tworks. From there, access the Crawdads
menu by clicking on the words ``professional sports'' on the main
screen. Or click on the main icon, and when the N.C. state map comes up
on the screen, click on the Hickory locator dot.
by CNB