Promoters who build tournaments around the historic field and charge individuals to participate will see their cost jump from $400 per game to $1,000 per game next year.

Village trustee Jeff Katz, who now chairs the Doubleday Field committee, said, ``It’s an attempt to find out what the market value of the field is. Doubleday Field should be run strictly as a business.’’

Katz said he was struck by the fact there are 1,700 applications for what works out to be approximately 350 games each year on the field. And as many as a third of those slots are filled by tournaments.

If there are that many applications, Katz reasoned it was unlikely they were at the market rate for the field and if tournament promoters decide the price is too high and do not rent the field, the time slots will be taken up by teams wanting to play single games and the village will have lost no money.

Katz may be right, but some of his numbers are wrong.

According to Deputy Village Clerk Deanna Ashurst, who handles the Doubleday Field applications and reservations, the village sent out about 1,200 applications to prospective renters this year. Ashurst said that without actually hand counting all the applications, she wasn’t sure exactly how many applications were returned, but she believes it is about three-quarters, or 900.

If tournament promoters, like the Legends of Baseball which has been coming to Cooperstown for 15 years, were to drop out, the number of applications would be more in the range of 750, or about 2 applications for each time slot. The likelihood the village could fill all those time slots, given requests for duplicate dates, may not be as certain as Katz would have us believe.

We would agree that village needs to maximize its revenue and demand for time on the field warrants a hike in the fee, but singling out tournament games for a 250 percent increase is not the best way.

A reasonable argument can be made that tournament players stay in local accommodations and spend money with local businesses while they are here _ probably to a greater degree than those who show up in the morning, play a game, visit the Hall of Fame, have a meal and head back home.

We believe a more fair way to approach the fee structure would be an across the board increase as has been the policy in the past, rather than to single out one group.

An increase of $100 for all games would bring in an additional $35,000 _ a guaranteed increase in revenue rather than Katz’s bottom line guarantee that the village would lose nothing.

It’s time for the village board to take another hard look at the numbers and reconsider its earlier decision.