21st of May | Story

First Person: Tony Ensor

BY MATT LaWELL

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado | Tony Ensor is in the middle of his eighth full season as the president and general manager of the Colorado Springs Sky Sox, and almost three decades into a career in the game that might well last another three decades. 

Like so many in baseball now at the top, Ensor started at the bottom, a college kid in search of a job who wound up the fourth man in on the grounds crew for the 1985 Chattanooga Lookouts. How has he climbed his ladder? How else? Lots of hard work.

I was literally the low man on the totem pole. You heard of breaking in on the ground floor? I swept the ground floor. And it was dirt.

The first job I ever did, I had to sickle this field that was behind the leftfield bleachers and I’ll never forget, this grass was as tall as I was and I had bloody, blistered hands, and I hit something hard. It turned out to be the restrooms for African-Americans back when.

I think I was three or four months into the job and our general manager and the groundskeeper had a falling out, and the general manager looked around and said, ‘Ensor, you’re now the head groundskeeper.’ I was like, ‘Uhhhh, really?’ I knew how to rake a field, I knew how to cut grass, whatever a kid knows, and I was a ballplayer at the time, so we had to do our own field. Within about a year, we won the Southern League field of the year.

I had a John Deere tractor that smoked so bad I had to wear a mask. I had a KMart mower with plastic wheels. I can remember numerous times mowing the sides with a push mower, and it would take me several hours to mow the sides. I would mow the outfield during batting practice. One time, a ball hit out of the cage and I was probably 50 feet from the cage, mowing from the outfield, just doing my thing. Ball comes lined out of the cage and just flicks my ear. There’s not a whole lot you can do other than just keep mowing.

"I had three sprinkler heads and they were all in the infield, so I would take fire hoses out after the game and start watering the outfield probably around 11 o’clock and finish up around 4 in the morning. I would just flood different areas of the field. Take a six-pack of beer and sit out there and water the field for three, four, five hours. That was the way you had to do it." — Tony Ensor, Colorado Springs general manager and president

It was that kind of world back then, when you didn’t really have equipment. I had three sprinkler heads and they were all in the infield, so I would take fire hoses out after the game and start watering the outfield probably around 11 o’clock and finish up around 4 in the morning. I would just flood different areas of the field. Take a six-pack of beer and sit out there and water the field for three, four, five hours. That was the way you had to do it.

In ’89, I had four or five job offers in grounds, which I loved doing — I would still do it today if I had better knees — and I had one job offer to go into the front office, and that was in Birmingham. I actually had gotten pretty good at grounds and I really enjoyed it, and I was up for the Atlanta Braves head job, and I just missed that, came in second. So I said, ‘I’m going to go this other way.’ My first season in the front office was ’90. I just happened to have a knack for sales and the operational side.

Ninety-four, of course, was the Michael Jordan year. I ran the day-to-day operations — the facilities, Michael and everything else. People don’t give him credit for what he did for minor league baseball. He put us on the national stage — the world stage, really. We were under the microscope of the world. I think we had 25 different countries represented opening day in terms of media credentials. Every celebrity in the world came in at some point during that year. Charles Barkley was in all the time. 

He tried to be great at baseball. He was the greatest athlete in the world at the time, and the most recognized athlete in the world at the time, but going from not being a baseball player since he was 14 to Double-A baseball, it’s a huge jump.

I’ll never forget his first home run. He hits this ball, and it goes out over the leftfield fence. Behind the fence, there was a maintenance area and then a parking lot. He hit the ball really well and my boss said, ‘We have to get that ball.’ So I sent one of my assistants back to get the ball, and I went back there with him. We didn’t know there would be 150 other people looking for the ball, too. I’ll never forget my young assistant, we’re all back there looking for it, and this guy yells, ‘I’ve got it! I’ve got it!’ and he starts running. My assistant goes and tackles the guy to get the ball, literally clotheslines him to get the ball, and I go, ‘No! That’s not what I meant!’ He comes up with all these scrapes, and he says, ‘I’ve got the ball! I’ve still got the ball!’ Of course, it was an old batting practice ball that was ratty and wasn’t even really a ball. We’re still looking, and I’m back there by the fence and it’s dark. I step in a hole and I feel pings and my leg is hurting. I have 12, 13 stings, because I had stepped in a yellow jackets nest. I’m running around, it’s dark, I don’t even know then what I’m running away from. All this is going on, tackling and stinging, and we get a call from the stadium and they say, ‘A kid brought the ball up about three or four minutes ago. He’s down there with Michael right now.’

I had been in Birmingham for 16 years, I had run it for the last seven or eight and we had achieved a lot of success in Birmingham. I never thought about leaving Birmingham, to be quite honest with you, but it was the same ownership group and there were a lot of similarities there thanks to Dave Elmore — Elmore Sports Group is the best sports ownership group in the country, by far, in my mind — and I asked myself if I saw the end in Birmingham. I was 40, and I said, ‘I don’t know when a Triple-A opportunity will ever come open again. This is a new challenge, and I want to see if I can do this at the Triple-A level.’ So I jumped at it.

Every year, we try to reinvent ourselves, try to create another reason for people to come visit us, something for people to talk about. If you can create that, you never know what the team’s going to be like until they get off the plane, but you can control your approach to the community, your promotions, what you’re doing new in the facility. 

You bring in new people with fresh ideas. That’s how you innovate. That’s how you reinvent yourself every single year. That’s what makes it fun.

The craziest ideas are the ones that work. 

I had knee surgery four or five years ago, and was about two weeks into my rehab, and the tarp was blowing up. It was crazy. I was still on crutches and my staff was out there pulling it and I was watching them do their thing and I was literally clenching my fist because it was bothering me so much. I threw the crutches down, got down on the field and helped pull the tarp. Then I stepped in a drain hole and hurt my other knee.

I don’t want a job. I’d rather work in baseball.

Matt@AMinorLeagueSeason.com ♦ @MattLaWell ♦ @AMinorLgSeason

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