by Kent Jennings Brockwell
Staff Writer
Kirk Goodman starts his work day like most businessmen.
He usually arrives at work around 8:30 a.m. and heads straight to his computer to check his e-mail, regular mail, voice mail and other pressing matters.
Then he goes out to check on the field.
Goodman isn’t a farmer but everyday he goes to look out at a sea of the greenest grass and rich orange clay. Sometimes there are a few silver hot dog wrappers strewn about in the grass from the night before, but that is expected. The ushers don’t always find all of the trash when cleaning up after a night game, especially if the lights are turned off too soon.
But as assistant general manager of the Jacksonville Suns, Goodman can’t worry about a stray hot dog wrapper. He has a couple thousand customers arriving in four hours for a 1:05 p.m. “Businessman’s Lunch” game.
Though “assistant general manager” for a minor league baseball team sounds a bit like a cushy desk job, Goodman, and anyone that has seen him work, can assure you that his job isn’t a cakewalk.
Following the morning ritual of checking his multiple mail systems, Goodman’s day is packed with a variety of tasks ranging from looking up baseball trivia and writing the announcer’s script for the evening game to dragging the infield in the fourth inning. If it rains, you will find him on the field getting wet with many of the other office staffers, hurrying to cover the infield with a large rain tarp.
At the end of the day, his shirt is damp and his shoes are covered with orange dust or mud and grass stains. If he is lucky, there will be a day game or away game and Goodman might be able to go home around 6 p.m. Most days, however, he won’t see his Arlington home until 11 p.m. or later.
“It makes it pretty hard to go out on dates,” he said, jokingly.
Goodman isn’t complaining, though. His job is baseball.
“It’s a job like any,” he said. “It’s not all hanging out with the players and watching baseball all day. There is a lot of grunt work. I work out on the field. I have to deal with a few whiny fans. I have to fire someone that yelled at a fan because they don’t have any customer service skills. I am scrambling when a scoreboard goes down.
“But then I think, ‘My office is a 10-second walk from a baseball field.’”
For most sports fans, working in an executive position for any professional sports team might seem like the fulfilment of a lifelong dream. For Goodman, however, working in sports came as a suggestion during college while he was working as a pump boy at a gas station in Ithaca, N.Y.
“I was pumping gas and one of my professors stopped in,” Goodman said. “We started chatting and he asked me what I was doing for internships. He mentioned that a couple of guys in my major were doing sports management and sports (public relations) and he knew that I was a big sports nut.”
From there, Goodman completed a few internships with baseball teams around the country. By the time he made it to a new position with a team in Boise, Idaho in 1996 he knew he had found the perfect work environment with the ol’ ball game.
“It was in my system and I couldn’t get it out,” he said.
But Goodman had baseball fever long before his professor suggested a future in sports management. Goodman’s love of baseball comes from his childhood days spent in the backyard with his father learning how to catch and throw, though he never took his passion for playing the game past high school. Goodman said he had played the game “in the backyard since I could pick up a bat and walk” but not too much for his high school team and never in college.
“(In high school) I played left bench,” he said.
Nevertheless, Goodman has always been a huge baseball fan and still is today. There was, however, one point in his life when he said he became burnt out and disenchanted with the sport as a youth.
“In high school, during the strike time in the early 90s, baseball was on ESPN every night of the week and I started to get so I hated it,” he said. “I started to be disgusted to be involved with it. Then when they had the lockout, we went a month without baseball which I thought was great.”
Goodman’s disgust with the sport continued until he regained his baseball spirit during a summer trip spent checking out colleges with his dad. The trip covered colleges from Maryland to the Carolinas so Goodman and his father decided to check out a few pro baseball games along the way to break up the time on the road. Camden Yards, the home of the Baltimore Orioles, was conveniently on the way.
“We ended up with sixth row box seats on the first base line,” he said. “Fans were joking with each other. A guy caught a foul ball and called his mom to tell her about it. It was just an incredible atmosphere and I have been an Orioles fan ever since.”
Goodman even named his dog Ripken after Cal Ripken Jr., the famous shortstop for the Orioles, who holds professional baseball’s iron man record with 2,632 consecutive games played.
Besides reinvigorating his love of baseball, Goodman’s trip to Camden Yards also caused him to enjoy the family-friendly ballpark theme that the Orioles home stadium was based upon. When Goodman came to the Suns, he found the same type of family-friendly atmosphere at the Baseball Grounds of Jacksonville, which he said is a great perk that comes with working for the Suns and another good reason to come to work in the morning.
“It can get pretty hairy around here sometimes, but the thing that keeps me going is any time you open the gates and you see a guy walk in with his two kids or when you hear the crowd cheer when there is a home run,” he said. “It kind of reminds you of what we are here for.”