Orioles legend Cal Ripken Jr. brought minor league baseball to his tiny Harford County hometown as a way to boost its stature and finances. Two decades later, though, Ripken has tapped out, the city views Ripken Stadium as a boondoggle, and the future of Aberdeen and its IronBirds is murky.

Tension between the city and the ballclub named for its favorite son — known as baseball’s “Iron Man” for his consecutive games record — has been bubbling for years. Aberdeen Mayor Patrick McGrady thinks the city got a raw deal when it signed a contract with Ripken and other team owners in 2002, while Ripken and his family have said the city has not lived up to the terms of the lease.

The IronBirds have for years seen anemic game-day attendance, and Ripken Stadium hasn’t drawn the kind of development around it or landed the special events original dealmakers once banked on.

There was a 2018 lawsuit over who pays for what that eventually settled. Then, although the Ripkens in 2022 exercised a contractual option to renew another 20-year stadium agreement, the two sides have taken a dispute to arbitration that brings the potential for the agreement to be voided. In October, as the arbitration process continued, Ripken and his brother, Billy, sold their majority stake in the team to Attain Sports, a Virginia-based company that owns other minor league and independent teams.

Money — or lack thereof — is behind years of acrimony. Aberdeen, a city of 18,000, doesn’t have the millions of dollars needed for stadium upgrades, the mayor said, and wants the team to pay a larger share of the costs. The city owns the ballpark and believes it should receive $2.5 million a year from the IronBirds. Meanwhile, the IronBirds under Ripken thought that figure should be a fraction of that — more like $100,000, McGrady said. A ruling in the arbitration case could come any day.

“I’m not willing to spend another 20 years subsidizing the baseball stadium at the expense of everything else that’s going to be falling apart in the city,” McGrady said in an interview. And yet a win for the city in arbitration, he said at a September city council meeting, while Ripken still owned the team, could “mean an empty stadium.”

Asked whether the IronBirds’ future is in Aberdeen, Attain founder and CEO Greg Baroni said in a statement through a spokesperson that Attain is committed to keeping “affordable, family-friendly baseball” at Ripken Stadium. He didn’t specify, however, that it would be the IronBirds that would remain in Aberdeen, and the spokesperson did not reply to follow-up questions.

Attain has engaged city and county leaders in recent weeks about the future of the club, which has McGrady feeling “optimistic,” he said in December. “And skeptical,” he added, “because I’ve seen everybody get excited about baseball in Aberdeen before.”

Play ball in Aberdeen

From its outset, the Aberdeen ballclub was synonymous with Ripken.

Soon after No. 8 retired from his 21-season career with the Orioles in 2001, he and Billy purchased the Utica Blue Sox, moving the club from New York to Aberdeen to play as a short-season, minor league Orioles affiliate at Ripken Stadium. Visible from Interstate 95, the ballpark was built with a combined $18 million from the city, county, state and team owners.

At the 6,300-seat ballpark’s grand opening that June, Cal Ripken addressed a sellout crowd from home plate. “I’ve always looked for the opportunity to do something significant for Aberdeen,” he said. “Me standing here today in my hometown makes me feel very proud.”

The Ripkens’ business partners negotiated a deal with then-city leadership that the city would own the stadium, leasing it to the IronBirds. In addition, next to the ballpark, Ripken built youth fields resembling big league parks such as Wrigley Field and Yankee Stadium, and an adjoining hotel in the style of the B&O Warehouse at Camden Yards.

Martin J. Greenberg, a Milwaukee-based attorney who studies stadium agreements and reviewed the IronBirds lease for The Baltimore Banner, described the agreement as fairly standard.

As is often the case, the team retains the bulk of generated revenue, while the public entity is tasked with capital improvements. The ostensible benefit for the city is that the presence of a team is expected to create economic impact — a conclusion that economists have countered for decades.

“I think it was a good deal for Ripken that follows, pretty much, the pattern of these types of relationships,” Greenberg said.

But Aberdeen, a fraction the size of many other minor league cities, is not as large as most municipalities that strike such deals, making it a bigger financial gamble.

Fading expectations

Per the city’s deal with the IronBirds, most of the money to be made from baseball games went to the IronBirds’ owners. To offset the costs of stadium construction and improvements, city officials were counting on revenue from the amusement taxes associated with home games and special events, plus development around the stadium.

But both aspects of the city’s plans for revenue generation floundered.

At the time the stadium was under construction, then-Mayor Doug Wilson anticipated a typical minor league team that would play 140 games a year, half of them in Aberdeen. Instead, the incoming IronBirds were to be a short-season team, which played about 38 home games a year.

Realizing the team would play so few games “ticked me off,” Wilson said in a December interview.

“I’m not blaming anybody about that,” he said. “What am I gonna do? I’m building a stadium. What am I gonna say at that time, ‘Oh, don’t bring your team here, it doesn’t have 70 games?’”

As the city brokered an agreement with the Ripkens, it also negotiated a deal with Nottingham Properties to build a 16-screen movie theater, shops and restaurants next to the ballpark. But the development faced delays, and Nottingham was purchased in 2006 by Corporate Office Properties Trust, which specialized in building offices, not retail districts.

A push to build a huge office park near the ballpark also fell apart. Wilson lamented that the original vision of a retail district never came to fruition.

“Unfortunately over time, that’s come to hurt the stadium,” he said.

Ripken Stadium had strong attendance in its first decade, regularly selling out, but the appeal of the team started to fade. In 2014 the IronBirds saw the largest attendance drop of any short-season team, and from 2012 to 2019 ticket sales plummeted nearly 52%, according to David P. Kronheim, who tracks minor league baseball attendance.

The IronBirds limped along. But, when Major League Baseball in 2020 cut 40 affiliates, including the Frederick Keys, from the traditional minor league ladder, the IronBirds survived. In fact, Aberdeen became High-A, now playing about 66 home games a year.

And, though that means more games, it can also make it harder to fill the stadium. In 2023, the team sold an average of 2,203 tickets per game. On a Wednesday in April of 2024, the team attracted just 637 fans.

Some locals grumbled in online forums that the team was doing little to draw fans, particularly to weeknight games, skimping on promotions and events that can serve as lures.

Harford County Executive Bob Cassilly said the stadium also is being underutilized beyond baseball. He mentioned a desire for more on-field concerts, car shows, swap meets and fairs in the parking lot.

“It’s a great facility that can be very successful; it just has to be marketed well,” Cassilly said.

The IronBirds without their ‘Iron Man’

Ripken, who became a minority owner of the Orioles last year, hasn’t said much about his family’s sale of the IronBirds.

“The Ripken family is proud to have been able to bring an Orioles affiliate to their hometown for over two decades and grateful for the support that the team has received from the community and fans,” said John Maroon, a spokesperson for Ripken.

Unlike the Ripkens, who have roots in Aberdeen dating back generations, Attain Sports lacks hometown attachment.

McGrady said Attain pitched the idea of a 10-year lease renewal with two, five-year options, pointing to the agreement that another Orioles-affiliated team on Attain’s roster, the Chesapeake Baysox, has with Prince George’s County as a template.

The Atlantic League of Professional Baseball, an independent league, has reached out to Aberdeen about tenanting the ballpark should the IronBirds leave town, McGrady said. Independent leagues are similar to minor leagues, but the teams are unaffiliated with big league clubs, so they lack the same allure to some fans.

Cassilly, who has offered county financial and other support for the IronBirds, said in a late-November interview that he found Attain to be noncommittal about the team’s future. He said Friday that there have been recent productive conversations about making sure the stadium hosts baseball in some form.

The city has identified tens of millions of dollars' worth of renovations needed at Ripken Stadium, but there is no obvious funding source.

A pot of state money is available to make upgrades to the ballpark but not necessarily for the types of fan-facing improvements the city wants. The intent of a 2022 bill allotting $200 million in bonds, to be paid off with state lottery revenues, is to improve five minor league stadiums so they can comply with player-focused standards mandated by Major League Baseball for teams to retain their big league affiliation.

The ballparks in Frederick and Bowie, for example, are expected to receive roughly $40 million and $50 million in renovations, respectively, with construction beginning as soon as this year, but Aberdeen, as it navigates an uncertain future, lags. Gary McGuigan, the Maryland Stadium Authority’s vice president of capital projects, said that, of the five projects, Aberdeen’s is the furthest behind.

A new nest for the IronBirds?

McGrady said he’d had limited contact with Attain in the months following the IronBirds’ sale, but he said city, county and team officials reconnected in December with a goal of keeping the IronBirds in Aberdeen for the long run. He asked Attain what, if anything, in the course of negotiations could prompt it to move the IronBirds.

The only thing, he says team officials told him, would be if state funds to improve the ballpark to MLB’s standards didn’t come through.

Some have speculated that the IronBirds could move to Hagerstown, which formerly hosted minor league baseball and welcomed a new, state-funded ballpark last year. But an Atlantic League team, the Flying Boxcars, has a “long-term lease” to remain in Hagerstown, according to Frank Boulton, the founder of the Atlantic League and one of the Boxcars’ co-owners.

A neighbor to Hagerstown is Frederick, though, which has a storied baseball history and has been hoping to bring back affiliated baseball after it lost its team in the reshuffling of 2020. The city has two independent league teams: an Atlantic League team on hiatus in 2025 and an MLB Draft League team. Attain owns both.

Frederick has a population of roughly 86,000 — nearly five times larger than Aberdeen’s — and a plan and budget in place to improve its stadium.

In August, just weeks before announcing its purchase of the IronBirds, Attain said it wants to bring an affiliated minor league team to Frederick’s Harry Grove Stadium.

“Stay tuned,” Baroni then said Nov. 22, when asked if affiliated baseball could return to Frederick, according to Mid-Atlantic Sports Network.

A minor league team could, hypothetically, come to Frederick from out of state, or it could come in the form of the IronBirds. As Attain and Aberdeen continue discussions regarding the future of the ballclub, the next IronBirds chapter — its first without Ripken — remains unwritten.

Frederick Mayor Michael O’Connor is eager to welcome back affiliated baseball. While saying he isn’t privy to Attain’s plans, O’Connor said he was aware the IronBirds were a possibility.

“We want minor league baseball in Frederick,” he said. “If that’s the way it happens, we’ll work with Attain to figure it out.”