Benjamin Hill travels the nation collecting stories about what makes Minor League Baseball unique. This excerpt from the Baseball Traveler newsletter, presented by Circle K, is a mere taste of the smorgasbord of delights he offers every week. Read the full newsletter here, and subscribe to his newsletter here.
Few Minor League Baseball executives have been in the game longer than Iowa Cubs president Sam Bernabe, who has enjoyed a 42-year tenure with the Des Moines-based Triple-A franchise.
Following the final I-Cubs game of the 2025 season, it was announced that Bernabe is “stepping back from his role in daily operations as he eases into retirement.” He retains his team president title, but the International League club will now be led on a day-to-day basis by general manager Randy Wehofer.
Thus marks a new and presumably less hectic chapter in Bernabe’s career, which started at the 1983 Baseball Winter Meetings in Nashville, Tenn.
“I was from Des Moines and I knew the [Iowa Cubs] owners. They didn’t know me,” said Bernabe, speaking with me at Principal Park earlier this season. “They were coming out of the [Gaylord Opryland] Jack Daniels Bar and I was walking in. I introduced myself, said ‘I’m looking for a job.'”
Ken Grandquist, who owned the team until his death in 1999, gave him one. Bernabe said that it “worked out really good. I could live with my dad and save some rent money, and [Grandquist] paid me $300 a month.”
Bernabe quickly worked his way up the ranks, becoming director of operations and then, in November of 1986, general manager. The I-Cubs, and Minor League Baseball in general, operated differently in those days. The front office consisted of just five full-time employees, working out of Sec Taylor Stadium. This facility, constructed in 1947, had fallen into a severe state of disrepair by the time Bernabe arrived.
“Every once in a while I get somebody that’ll say, ‘Don’t you just kind of miss the old Sec Taylor Stadium?'” said Bernabe. “I just emphatically say, ‘Hell no.’ I couldn’t get out of it fast enough. There was no real qualified groundskeeper at the time, so we were doing everything — cooking hot dogs to washing the umpire’s towels to dragging the diamond to cleaning the park to selling the tickets. … Even in the smallest markets and in the smallest operations, you couldn’t get away with that now. The business of the game is just way too big.”
The I-Cubs’ operation grew a lot bigger during the ’91-92 offseason. Sec Taylor Stadium was torn down and replaced with Principal Park at the same location, in downtown Des Moines at the confluence of the Des Moines and Raccoon Rivers.
“We knocked the old one down and built a new one in 208 days, and that was in the dead of winter in Des Moines, Iowa. Included 10 days of asbestos removal on top of that,” said Bernabe. “Earl Santee was the principal architect of HOK, [now] Populous, and he always hated it when he heard me touting that fact. … Because he had to listen to everybody feel like they could do it in their market as well. But, I mean, we were battling. It was bolting seats and doing all we could to get ready to go for April 16, and we made it. It was a crummy night and was raining. We had 11,000 people in the ballpark, and it was the new jewel.”
Hard as it is to believe, that jewel is now among the oldest of Triple-A baseball’s 30 ballparks.
“I think that would be more surreal if the park was in worse shape than it’s in,” said Bernabe. “Our partnership with the city is just as important as our partnership with the [Chicago] Cubs, and that’s all related to how [Principal Park] has held up for being 35 years old.”
After Grandquist’s death in April of ’99, Bernabe became part of a new I-Cubs ownership group led by attorney and journalist Michael Gartner. The team was sold to Diamond Baseball Holdings (DBH) in 2021, the first entry in a portfolio that now includes 45 teams. Bernabe will remain a consultant for DBH, still working out of Principal Park.
After all these years, it’s hard to walk away from the game entirely.
“The thing I like most about what I do is the noise,” he said. “When everybody’s having a good time. You know, we hit a walk-off home run, or after the fireworks are finished, or somebody’s hit a triple in the corner. It’s the noise that goes with all that. I thrive on it.”
For more on the I-Cubs’ Principal Park and every Minor League Baseball stadium, check out our Ballpark Guides, presented by Wyndham.
