While Big League fans stay home in record numbers, they're packing 'em in down on the farm.

"This stadium has so much character," says Andy Anderson, with a bite of a sausage sandwich in his mouth. He should know a little about stadiums — he built the roof on shiny new Waterfront Park, home of the minor leagues' Trenton Thunder.

But it's not the Trenton ballpark Anderson is musing about on this night. It is Reading Municipal Stadium, home of the Phillies double-A affiliate. Walking along the concourse beneath the grandstands of the 8,000-seat ballpark, a carnival midway comes to mind. A brightly painted mural depicts children playing ball. Signs hang over concession windows: funnel cakes $2, hatful of fries $3.50. To the right of homeplate, on a wall along the walkway, is the Reading Phillies Hall of Fame. The two dozenish plaques bear some famous names. Andy Seminick (manager, 1970). Mike Schmidt (player, 1971). They also call to mind what might have been: Ryne Sandberg (player, 1980). And then there's Joe Buzas.

On this beautiful night in early September, the Reading Phillies and Trenton Thunder are playing the opening game of the Eastern League semi-final playoff series. Andy Anderson, the stadium roofbuilder who lives in Yardley, PA. (and claims he can see the Trenton stadium from his home across the Delaware River), fell in love with minor league ball when the Thunder arrived in 1994. He is one of several dozen Trenton fans who've traveled 90 minutes by bus to Reading to see tonight's game. And he is one of thousands of Delaware Valley residents who, in rapidly increasing numbers, are hitting the road to experience baseball in a new old-fashioned orientation.

Minor league baseball, especially in the Northeast, is experiencing a renaissance, and nowhere can the rebirth of the minors be better witnessed than within 60 miles of Philadelphia. In Reading, an hour and ten minutes to the Northwest, 384,000 fans turned out to watch the Phillies play this year, the eighth consecutive year the team has set an attendance record. That's an average of more than 5,700 fans per home date.

To the east, in just their second year, the Trenton Thunder drew more than 450,000, ending the regular season with 30 straight sellouts. And 40 minutes from Philly, down I-95, the Wilmington Blue Rocks are another success story. Playing in the single-A Carolina league, the Blue Rocks have drawn more than 1 million fans in their first three years. All this while major league baseball attendance has dropped more than 20 percent this post-strike season.

The minor leagues have come a long way in a short time. The Reading ballclub has drawn more fans to the park in the last three years than it did in the entire decade of the '80s. Nonetheless, in the early '80s, Reading was considered one of the more stable franchises in minor league ball, when putting a thousand fans in the stands on a weeknight was considered good. "In those days, it was: '3,000 fans on a Saturday? Wow! Where do we put 'em?','" says Dave Bauman, Reading's public address announcer for 18 years.

In fact, the story of the Reading franchise may be a paradigm of what's happened to the minor league game in the last 15 to 20 years. In the late '70s, the team was broke and its owner deep in dept. The franchise was sold, the story goes, for the price of one dollar to a man who was even then considered a minor league legend.

"Joe Buzas was thought to be the only guy who could save the team," says Ken Tuckey, veteran sportswriter for the Reading Eagle/Times, "because he had a reputation for paying his bills. And that's the one thing you can't do in Berks County — not pay your bills."

Buzas not only paid his bills, but he could frequently be seen around the stadium working the grounds, or strapping on an apron to serve up hot dogs (best in the minor leagues, by the way). In many ways, Buzas exemplified the successful minor league owner of his day, Tuckey says: a hardworking, reliable man who breathed baseball.

But Buzas never advertised, and was content to let the product sell itself. His greatest feat may have been finding a way to turn a buck — indeed, to become wealthy — by putting 800 people in the stands. By contrast, what's happening in minor league ball today might make Buzas roll over in his grave. (Except that he's not dead. Well into his 70s, Buzas still owns baseball teams: the Eastern League's Hardware City Rock Cats of New Britain, CT, and the triple-A Salt Lake City Buzz.)

The resurgence of minor league baseball is plainly evident from just a cursory look at attendance figures for the Eastern League. Last year (when the league expanded from eight teams to 10), attendance topped 2 million for the first time. This year, league attendance topped 3 million, without any expansion. (In addition to Reading and Trenton, Eastern League teams within striking distance of Philadelphia include the Harrisburg Senators and the Bowie, Md., Baysox.)

What was the catalyst for this awakening? Ask a dozen people, you may get as many answers.

Bauman, the Reading public address announcer, thinks it was the first great baseball strike in 1981, when fans had no choice but to turn to the minors for a professional baseball fix. John Levenda, the president of the Eastern League, thinks it can all be traced back to the movie Bull Durham.

"The year that came out, people realized what minor league baseball was... minor league baseball was exposed to a lot more people that had never attended minor league baseball games before," Levenda says. (It also exposed a lot of Susan Sarandon, but that's another story.)

To borrow a phrase from another baseball movie: if you build it, they will come. That is, Levenda believes that the Eastern League's growth has much to do with its teams playing in newer, more fan-friendly stadiums, such as the much-publicized facility in Trenton.

But the bottom line may be the bottom line. As the cost of attending a major league game has exploded, fans — especially those with families — are finding the minor leagues to be the best way they can take the kids to a ball game without floating a municipal stadium bond issue.

"You don't have to spend a lot here, and you get a lot for what you spend," says Mark Wallace in a matter-of-fact style. Wallace, the Reading Phillies manager of media relations/ community relations, is a bit distracted, and with good reason. On game nights, he runs the stadium sound system and the message board on the scoreboard down the leftfield line. Value for the dollar is key, Wallace believes, not just in terms of lower ticket prices and two-dollar beers. Promotion, he says, is part of the minor league in ways it may never have been before.

"Last year, we won the Larry MacPhail award for the best promotions in the minors," he says with obvious pride. To his left, at eye level, is a computer keyboard and screen that controls the message center. The crowd is singing "Take Me Out To The Ball Game" during the seventh inning stretch. He taps a key, and the words 'ONE, TWO, THREE' (as in 'three strikes you're out') appear on the message board as the crowd groans along.

"We had 71 home dates this year, and two-thirds of them featured promotions of some kind," Wallace adds. Those promotions include everything from traditional hat and cap giveaways to a "Fireworks Celebration with the Dynamite Lady" on July 4th. Don't try this at home, kids.

Whatever the reason, owning a minor league franchise has become almost as glamorous as owning a major league team, and every bit the status symbol for communities that have one or want one. The competition for and value of franchises in the Eastern League is commensurate with the burgeoning attendance. And there's no town around with a better story to tell than Harrisburg and its near-death experience with the Senators.

Bought in 1982 for just $85,000, the Senators were moved to Harrisburg in 1987 from Nashua, NH. In the years that followed, the team became one of the most successful franchises in minor league ball, both on the field and in the stands, never drawing fewer than 200,000 fans each year. Last spring, the team was sold for more than $4 million to a group of investors, and that's when Harrisburg's headaches began.

The first community to express interest in snaring the Senators was the Lehigh Valley (Allentown/ Bethlehem/ Easton area). Needing a stadium, the Lehigh Valley folks asked for (and got) a $5 million redevelopment assistance grant from the state. But there was a hitch: the money was contingent upon an agreement not to lure a team from elsewhere in Pennsylvania. Thwarted in their attempt to lure the Senators, the Lehigh Valley's problems have since been complicated by the major league Phillies, who have expressed their "territorial" concerns, citing a saturation of baseball in eastern Pennsylvania: the Reading and Trenton Eastern League franchises, plus the Phillies' triple-A affiliate in Scranton/ Wilkes Barre.

But back to Harrisburg, whose troubles were not over. The new owners of the Senators had now been offered a new stadium and a sweetheart lease deal in another city hungry for baseball — Springfield, MA. The deal was done, the shocked citizens of Harrisburg were told shortly after the season began; the team would move to Springfield when its lease expired at the end of the 1996 season.

The city had a lot to lose. Not only was the team a focal point of civic pride and quality of life, but it had become the centerpiece of economic development on long-neglected City Island, the strip of land in the middle of the Susquehanna where sits the Senators' home field, RiverSide Stadium. While the owners of the Eastern League narrowly okayed the move of the team, approval was held up by the president of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, the governing body of the minors. This was done quietly at the request of the city, to buy time.

Then, in July, came an even more stunning announcement: the city of Harrisburg would buy the team, at a price of $6.7 million. That's a 6 and 7 followed by five zeroes, for a team worth a mere five figures a baker's dozen years ago. Eastern League President John Levenda downplays the significance of the price, saying it is "completely off skew" compared to what other ballclubs at the double-A level are going for.

"It's supply and demand. At least four other cities have publicly expressed an interest in double-A ball in the Eastern League's territory," says Reed, who insists that industry insiders place the value of the team at $8 million.

Of course, the warning signs are all there. With cities stealing each other's franchises, with the value of those franchises escalating, with people who hold marketing degrees coming up with promotions like "Hall of Fame Night With Elvis," with small-town baseball generally becoming big business, the minor leagues run the risk of becoming more and more like major league ball.

But the hubris spawned by guaranteed contracts the size of Guatemala's gross national product has yet to filter down to the players at the minor league level, and therein lies the biggest reason more fans are seeking refuge in places like Wilmington and Harrisburg.

The Dynamite Lady notwithstanding, there is the lure of experiencing the intimacy of 7,000-seat (as opposed to 70,000-seat) stadiums and the joy of watching a ballgame played by young men who are not slowed down by wads of $100 bills bursting out of their pockets.

Decked out in his blue and green Thunder T-shirt, Fordyce is sipping a brew along the rightfield line as he stands between the bleachers and the grandstand at Reading Stadium. The smell of hamburgers beeing cooked over an open flame fills the air as Fordyce, a 60-year-old computer operator for the state of New Jersey, boasts that he's been to more minor league games in the last two years than all the major league games he's attended in the last eight years.

"Major leaguers don't care about the fans," Fordyce says. "I'm not giving them my money so they can go out and buy drugs."

And Andy Anderson, whose sausage sandwich has grown cold as he prattles enthusiastically about his newfound love of minor league ball, says ultimately, the success of the minor leagues is a lesson for those who believe baseball is dying, based on the foibles of the major leagues.

"Go to any level where there's no big money involved, and you'll see the game is still great," he says. "Fans are desperately looking for purity of the game. It's alive here — in Reading, in Trenton — and the fans know it. They come here for massive doses."

The 3 million fans who've spun the Eastern League's turnstiles this year would seem to drive home that point.