Baseball a minor obsession for Mandalay Entertainment. (Up Front).

There's no shortage of media companies scrambling to get out of the baseball business -- including Walt Disney Co.'s ongoing efforts to sell its World Champion Anaheim Angels.

But film executive Peter Guber's Mandalay Entertainment group of companies, which has had uneven success in its film and television ventures, is producing a hit with its baseball assets -- and has raised tens of millions to double its holdings.

Their secret? Shoot for the minors.

"Minor league baseball is not that far afield from the entertainment business in terms of creating unique properties," said Ken Stickney, a managing director and co-owner of Los Angeles-based Mandalay Sports Entertainment. "If you do it right, you can make a substantial business out of it."

Mandalay owns minor league clubs in Las Vegas, Dayton, Ohio, and Frisco, Texas. In December, the company signed an agreement to purchase a fourth team, in Hagerstown, Md.

Now, with $40 million in new financing finalized at the beginning of the year, Mandalay is looking to build a small empire of minor league teams.

"We're in advanced discussions in a couple different areas and we'll have something to announce in the next few months," Stickney said. "Our business plan calls for us to be up somewhere around eight or 10 teams within five years."

Mandalay Sports Entertainment was formed in 1996 as a four-way partnership made up of Stickey and his father Hank, veterans of the minor league business, and Guber, Mandalay's chairman, and Paul Schaeffer, its chief operating officer. Stickney would not say how much of the overall Mandalay business was comprised of minor league baseball operations, other than to say, "it is a substantial amount."

As a business proposition, minor league baseball makes sense because it is everything the majors are not. About 80 percent of a club's revenue is generated from ticket sales and advertising; the balance comes from concessions and parking. Mandalay executives are mum on providing specifics, other than their insistence that each of their teams is profitable.

An average Triple-A team (just one notch below the majors and generally the most expensive) costs $15 million, and can generate between a few hundred thousand to $3 million in annual income.

Player salaries, the primary cost of operating a major league team, are paid by affiliated major league teams. "The down side is you can't control how bad or good your team is," Stickney said.

To get fans into the stadium, owners rely on marketing and mid-game entertainment. Where a major league fan might go to see Barry Bonds crack a homer, minor league fans are wooed by karaoke contests and between inning go-kart races. "Really, it has nothing to do with baseball' said Dan Migala, executive editor of Team Marketing Report, a sports marketing publication in Chicago.

Minor league teams are also easily moved, giving owners more control over their financial destiny. Mandalay's Dayton Dragons (partly owned by Earvin "Magic" Johnson) relocated from Rockford, Ill. four years ago and has sold out every game in its new venue.

The Double-A Swamp Dragons from Shreveport, La. were purchased for $4.5 million in 2000, according to news reports, only to be moved to Frisco, Texas, a Houston suburb, where this April the team (now called the RoughRiders) will begin playing in a new $27 million stadium. (Mandalay owns the Swamp Dragons with Texas Rangers and Dallas Stars owner Tom Hicks' Southwest Sports Group.)

"What they've been able to do is buy teams that were in poor markets and identify a market that has greater revenue potential," Migala said. "They're not fooling anybody. They don't have relationships in those towns and so they've have no problem moving the teams."

Not everyone in the folksy world of minor league baseball has welcomed this bottom-line emphasis. "When you're dealing with a corporation it takes a lot more to get to the person that makes a decision," said Bobby Evans, director of minor league administration for the San Francisco Giants, which had been the Shreveport's affiliate team until Mandalay moved the club to Frisco. "Your point person is way down the list."

Asked what it was like working with Peter Guber, Evans replied "Who's that?"

Mandalay Sports was formed with two teams: the Las Vegas 51's, a Triple-A affiliate of the Dodgers, and the Lake Elsinore Storm, a Single-A affiliate of the Angels. (Baseball governing bodies have since forced Mandalay to sell the Lake Elsinore team because of a separate partnership between Hank Stickney and another team in Lake Elsinore's division.)

After snapping up two additional teams, Mandalay went looking for money. Last August, private equity firm Seaport Capital invested $20 million for a minority stake in a new partnership called Mandalay Baseball Properties. MBP secured a $20 million line of credit with Webster Bank in conjunction.

Steve McCall, a Seaport principal, emphasized the difference between investing in the major and minor leagues.

"When people leave our games they don't even know who has won or lost," Stickney said. "They don't care."