The Triad home-team advantage.

• Position: North Carolina; Piedmont Triad

What's the name going to be for North Carolina's first Major League Baseball team? The Tar Heels? No, some school's already snagged that one. The Barbecue Barons? No. Wouldn't make a fierce-enough logo. The Carolina Kudzu?

The Carolina Kudzu might just work.

Where to locate the franchise? Charlotte? After all, Charlotte is the biggest city in the state. It's the headquarters of two of the nation's largest banks, and it has the NFL Panthers and the NBA Hornets drawing good crowds. Charlotte's a natural, right?

Think again, banker boys.

The business leaders of the Piedmont Triad think it's high time their region got some recognition. And they've got the stats to prove it. The 1.3 million population of the Piedmont Triad's 12-county region is close to the 14-county Charlotte area's 1.8 million population.

Because it is closer to Raleigh and Roanoke, Va., a Triad-based team could expect to draw fans from a pool of 6.5 million people within a 100-mile radius. That would rank it No. 2 among baseball's small markets, just behind Cincinnati and ahead of Minnesota, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, San Diego and Kansas City.

Winning a Major League Baseball franchise might be a long shot, but boosters from the 12 counties surrounding the Triad cities of Greensboro, Winston-Salem and High Point are optimistic. After all, they have done virtually everything else necessary to catch up with Charlotte and Raleigh over the last 15 years.

When the 1980s dawned, Charlotte's bankers were gearing up for expansion, builders were putting up skyscrapers and the national media were finally learning there was a difference between Charlotte and Charlottesville. Outside Raleigh and Durham, the high-tech companies that filled Research Triangle Park were spilling over its boundaries. Duke University, N.C. State University and UNC Chapel Hill were fielding good sports teams and building national reputations for quality undergraduate and postgraduate programs.

The Triad continued to do what it had done for years - manufacture cigarettes, socks and chairs. In fact, as the 1980s passed, some nationally known, home-grown companies such as Piedmont Airlines, R.J. Reynolds and Blue Bell sold themselves out or moved their headquarters to big cities.

This economic upheaval drew the region's business and government leaders together. They formed a cooperative public/private organization called the Piedmont Triad Partnership to promote the region. They started talking about regionalism, trying to move beyond the provincialism that had always separated the cities and towns.

The term "Piedmont Triad" became an official identity painted on the city-limits signs of all the municipalities. Economic developers, paid to bring jobs to their own towns, started cooperating with their neighboring competitors to make sure that prospects were sold on the region first before they ever saw an individual site.

Fifteen years after the need for Triad regionalism dawned, it is apparent that the cooperation is working. The region's unemployment rate is below 4%, lower than the state average. Dozens of new companies relocate or expand there every year.

Many of the newcomers have no connection to the region's traditional tobacco, textiles, apparel and furniture industries. New industrial office parks are now home to companies employing thousands. Many of those jobs involve operating high-tech, computer-controlled equipment.

In another 15 years or less, those employees may be watching the Carolina Kudzu play the New York Yankees. And they won't drive to Charlotte to see the game. If enthusiasm among the region's business power players has anything to do with it, baseball fans will travel to either Guilford or Forsyth.

Walter McDowell, president of Wachovia Bank of North Carolina in Winston-Salem, and David Stonecipher, CEO of Jefferson-Pilot Corp. in Greensboro, spearheaded the formation of the 15-member North Carolina Baseball Committee. In January, it appointed the chairman of the N.C. Sports Development Commission, Mike Solomon, as its executive director.

"This is an economic-development effort where the industry just happens to be baseball," McDowell says. "We've talked to the captains of private industry in North Carolina, and they are all enthusiastic about the effort." McDowell is so dedicated to this goal that he hints he may give up his...