Making a Pitch for Major League Baseball; William L. Collins Is Doing Groundwork to Get a Team
If he rode a horse, carried a spear and wore a helmet, you could call William L. Collins III a modern Don Quixote, tilting at windmills.</br></br>As it is, all he wants to do is invest $10 million of a hard-earned personal fortune to bring major league baseball to the Washington area, which has been one of the true hopeless causes of the past quarter-century. And he is trying to do it in the midst of a maddening strike that has soured untold numbers of fans on the game.</br></br>Entrepreneurs long to catch just good one wave in the marketplace. Collins, 44, has caught two -- cellular phones and paging services.</br></br>He and his partners were on the ground floor when the first cellular telephone franchises were handed out by the Federal Communications Commission in the early 1980s. They merged two of their franchises to form Vanguard Cellular Systems Inc., now based in Greensboro, N.C., which had 190,000 subscribers along the East Coast as of September. Revenue has risen just as steadily and although growth has eaten up profits in recent years, the stock has roughly tripled in value since 1988.</br></br>Collins took another flyer in 1988 into the paging industry, gambling that new frequencies made available to paging companies could provide better reception and a competitive edge.