UnSound Foundation

Maybe Glenn Yaeger shouldn't be smiling. On an unseasonably cool night in August, the boyish, bespectacled father of two leans against a beam behind home plate in Greer Stadium, lips stretched from ear-to-ear.

On the field are three sets of uniforms. The red, white and black of the Nashville Sounds. The forest greens of a Boy Scout troop. And a half-moon of shock-white T-shirts, worn by a Lutheran choir preparing a Stars and Stripes serenade.

None are the reason for Yaeger's grin. It's the row upon row of filled seats that curves his lips.

As the front-of-the-store guy for AmeriSports, the Chicago owner of the Sounds, Yaeger has a right to be happy. Roughly 8,000 people have chosen Triple-A baseball for their Friday night entertainment. Thanks to a combination of two unbeatable promotional tools—pregame Christian rock and postgame fireworks—the auxiliary lots filled up an hour before the first pitch.

It's not the sort of scene you'd expect for a franchise in peril. But if the chattering classes are to be believed, some sort of tragedy should befall the Sounds any day now. The team will be sold. The team will be moved. The guitar scoreboard will finally give out, leaving the world with one less left fielder.

They're the kinds of stories that get told when plans for a new stadium go up in flames. When a team is forced to call home a crumbling wreck, a park it's been trying to escape for a decade.

But they're not the kinds of stories Yaeger is telling.

"Truth is, we're not going anywhere."

The trouble-a-brewin' headlines began last October. After a group of local investors bought West Tenn Diamond Jaxx in Jackson, rumors whirled that they planned to move the Double-A franchise 130 miles east. Then, in February, Yaeger & Co. helped draft a state bill promising sales tax revenue to help pay for a downtown ballpark. Problem was, plans for a ballpark didn't yet exist. And no one bothered to tell Mayor Karl Dean.

To cap it all off, the Sounds missed a July 1 deadline to extend their Greer lease, which expires at year's end.

But for every ominous sign, Yaeger has an answer, a reason not to worry. And it all starts with his boss, Al Gordon. According to Yaeger, the venture capitalist remains firmly committed to Nashville.

"Al's now owned the team for 11 years. Pretty soon, he'll be the longest tenured owner the Sounds have ever had," says Yaeger. "If you really take a step back, it's clear: [Gordon] and the Sounds want to be in Middle Tennessee."

The fine print would seem to back his thesis. The Sounds can't move without the blessing of the Pacific Coast League. And since the PCL owns the operating rights to Nashville, a Double-A team can't move here without the league's consent either. Talk to PCL President Branch B. Rickey, and neither scenario seems to find favorable odds.

"Our league has a natural attraction to Nashville," he says. "They can support the NHL, the NFL and, because of the potential of the marketplace, we think there's a natural fit for a Triple-A baseball team."

The yet-to-be-renewed lease, the most recent episode in the serial Sounds drama, is a non-issue as well, says Yaeger. Both team and city believe the other is responsible for bringing the 30-year-old Greer up to American Disability Act standards. But as it turns out, that work won't be nearly expensive as originally thought. Yaeger says he'll have a proposal together for the mayor's office within a few weeks. Unfortunately, this is where things have a tendency to get testy.

The Sounds relationship with Mayor Dean has been sour from the start. No one seems willing to discuss the source, but as law director under former Mayor Bill Purcell, Dean had an inside view of the Sounds' failed plans to build a new park on the old Thermal Plant site. The city says the Sounds walked away from the deal. Yaeger says delays by the city's handpicked developers put them over budget. Either way, the animosity was highlighted in a January speech when Dean said the Sounds would never get a new stadium as long as Gordon owned the team.

The Sounds shouldn't take the comment lightly. The one thing that everyone agrees on is that baseball in Nashville won't survive without a new park. Despite new clubhouses built this spring, Greer remains an eyesore. And it may be a sticking point when the Sounds contract with their parent club, the Milwaukee Brewers, expires in 2010.

"To be quite honest with you, it was a challenge signing six-year free agents this year," says Scott Martens, head of minor league operations for the Brewers. "Guys groan when they hear they'll be playing in Greer."

Yaeger knows the odds are stacked against him. Nashville may have granted sweetheart deals to the Predators and Titans, but minor league teams don't carry the same cachet—or the wealthy fan base that spreads its debit cards to nearby bars and restaurants.

Which leaves the Sounds with something of a catch-22. The team's value is providing inexpensive entertainment. But 50 percent of its fans come from Davidson County, which means they're already spending their money here. And they're less the dinner-at-Morton's kind than they are the families who sneak snacks through the turnstiles to avoid concession stands.