Normal CornBelters
| Normal CornBelters | |||||
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| League | Frontier League (West) | ||||
| Location | Normal, Illinois | ||||
| Ballpark | The Corn Crib | ||||
| Year founded | 2009 | ||||
| Colors | Green, gold, black, white |
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| Ownership | Steve Malliet | ||||
| Manager | Brooks Carey | ||||
| General Manager | Mike Petrini | ||||
| Media | The Pantagraph | ||||
| Website | normalbaseball |
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The Normal CornBelters are a professional baseball team based in Normal, Illinois, which is part of the Bloomington-Normal metropolitan area. They began play in May 2010 as a member of the Frontier League, which is not affiliated with Major League Baseball. The "CornBelters" name refers to Illinois' location in the Corn Belt.
On March 30, 2009, ground was broken for a $12 million multi-purpose stadium adjacent to Heartland Community College on Raab Road. The CornBelters will share the facility with Heartland’s baseball, softball, and soccer programs. The facility was completed in time for the CornBelters' inaugural 2010 season.
On October 20, 2009, it was announced that the stadium would be known as The Corn Crib. The name was the result of a naming rights partnership with the Illinois Corn Marketing Board (ICMB). The naming rights agreement lasts for two years with an "automatic renewal". Both team and ICMB officials declined to disclose the financial terms of the partnership.
Name-the-team contest and surrounding controversy
The CornBelters were named after a fan vote to determine the name. A publicity stunt occurred after the four finalists were unveiled:
Normal Nutz; an homage to the Beer Nuts brand based in nearby Bloomington (NOTE: The entries were originally "Nuts," but the ownership modified it to avoid conflict with the California League's Modesto Nuts) Normal NightHawks; a popular alliterative nickname. Normal CornBelters; a reference to Illinois' location in the Corn Belt. "Belt" is also a slang term meaning to hit the ball hard. Normal Coal Bears; submitted by fans of political satirist and The Colbert Report host Stephen Colbert (pronounced [kʰɔlˈbɛɹ], just like "coal bear"). Since the character often encourages these fans (known as the "Colbert Nation") to vote for things to be named after him, the team is hoping he'll give them some attention (similar to the Ontario Hockey League's Saginaw Spirit, whose mascot is named Steagle Colbeagle the Eagle and has gotten the team and league mentioned often on the show). [1] [2] In addition to the reference, Illinois (especially the west side of Bloomington-Normal) also has a strong heritage in coal mining, as reflected by future rival the Southern Illinois Miners. [3] Voting was originally set to take place until April 27. On the first day of voting, the Coal Bears had a significant 95% lead in the poll. However, that lead would significantly decline in the next two days to 24% with "Nutz" leading at 75%. Many fans suspected voting fraud, as "Nutz" had business ties and an "anti-Coal Bears" conspiracy was suggested by the fan-run normalcoalbears.com. On April 24, owner Steve Malliet announced that due to these allegations, he was starting the poll over again, this time requiring every voter to submit various information to enforce a "one fan, one vote" policy. This system was easily overcome by the same local hackers that had rigged the results of the earlier poll with a python script, and the name that had been last in the original round of voting was bumped to the top via another script that was able to leverage a flaw in the voting site's CAPTCHA mechanism. While "Nutz," "CornBelters," and "Coal Bears" were kept, "NightHawks" was dropped because of the term's other meaning as a position of responsibility in the Ku Klux Klan. In addition, two other choices were added:
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