Minor-league baseball best deal in other Bristol town

This is just too good to be true. It's gotta be, especially if you're a baseball fan.

Adult general admission tickets for the Bristol Sox, a rookie-league affiliate of the Chicago White Sox, go for $3. Kids under 12 get in for $2. Box seats are more expensive, of course. They're $5. General admission ticket books, good for 30 home games, cost $35. Box-seat yearly passes are a whopping $65.

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Consider this. Some seats near home plate at the new Yankee Stadium go for $2,500 a pop for a single game. For that price, you could have the best seats in the house at Boyce Cox Field in Bristol, Va., for the next 38 years.

Pay the Bristol Sox $2,500, and they'd probably give you a uniform and let you sit in the dugout.

"It's just a good feeling to be able to provide professional baseball to our community," says Mahlon Luttrell, president and general manager of the Bristol Sox. "Without it, it would be a big hole left. So it's very important, I think, to the local community that everyone supports it, as well as city governments. You can bring a family to a baseball game for $1.17 a ticket. You can get a hot dog for $1.50. It's just unheard of."

How are the Sox able to provide such an amazing value? Simple. Costs are low in the Appalachian League. Horror stories of overnight bus rides are legendary in the low minors, but that's not a factor for the Bristol Sox.

Three other teams are located within an easy 30-minute driving distance -- Johnson City, Elizabethton and Kingsport, all in Tennessee. The team's longest trip, to Danville, Va., is just four hours or so.

"Our feeling is that we're a not-for-profit organization," Luttrell says. "All of our board members are volunteers. We only have one paid position, and that's the official scorekeeper. That's one of the ways we're able to keep our costs down the way we do."

The club has had only two major-league affiliations in its 31-year history, with the Detroit Tigers from 1978-94 and with the White Sox ever since. Some fairly big names have come through Bristol throughout the years, names like Mark Fidrych, Alan Trammell, Lou Whitaker, Tony Clark, Travis Fryman and Lance Parrish.

The team's current manager is none other than Ryan Newman. No, really. That's his name. He's not that Ryan Newman, of course. The Ryan Newman who manages the Bristol Sox played three years in the Pittsburgh Pirates' minor-league system, and he's the son of former big-league catcher Jeff Newman.

Never mind the fact that the Sox are currently 13 games under .500 and dead last in their division. It's baseball, and it's in Bristol.

"It's truly a great experience working with these young men as they fine-tune their skills and try to make their way on up the ladder," Luttrell says. "You never know who's coming through, what kind of talent they have. It's really, really a great experience."