And for tonight’s act, Peter Guber pre­sents . . . the sixth season of the Class AA Frisco RoughRiders.

Yes, that Peter Guber, the movie producer behind blockbusters like Batman and Rain Man. The same Peter Guber who was booted from his job as chairman and C.E.O. of Sony Pictures Entertainment in 1994 for incurring the company’s biggest write-down ever. Since then, Guber has moved on from Hollywood to small-town America, refashioning himself as a mogul of a different kind: one who buys distressed minor-league baseball franchises and transplants them in second-tier cities looking for an economic boost. As he did at Sony, Guber has hooked up with deep-pocketed patrons, only this time around it’s local governments, which will foot the bill for pricey new stadiums. This is a standard yet perennially controversial arrangement, but it hasn’t prevented Guber from becoming one of the biggest owners of minor-league franchises today. He owns five teams, operates one, and is in the process of buying another, the Winston-Salem Warthogs.

Owning minor-league teams is not as sexy as moviemaking, he admits. “But there’s a sizable bottom line if you do things right,” he says, showing the same promotional savvy that made him famous a decade and a half ago.

Guber got into the minors almost by accident. After leaving Sony, he formed Mandalay Entertainment, a TV-and-film-production company (its most notable release is I Know What You Did Last Summer), and made a few bids on various major-league sports franchises, including the Oakland A’s and the N.B.A.’s Miami Heat. When those failed, Guber instead partnered with a father-son team that owned two successful minor-league franchises to form Mandalay Sports Entertainment.

Today, Guber relies on his own scouts to find cities that are in the market for a team. Back in 2002, for example, Frisco, Texas, a fast-growing town north of Dallas, was eager to acquire a club. Tom Hicks, owner of the major-league Texas Rangers, wanted to bring a team to Frisco to anchor a planned real estate development. He contacted Guber, who already had multiple teams in his stable, and they reached an agreement. Frisco would pay for a $22.7 million ballpark, while Hicks and Guber would reel in a team. Their quarry: the struggling Shreveport, Louisiana, Swamp Dragons, which they snapped up for just over $4 million, renamed the RoughRiders, and exported to Texas. Now Mandalay, which bought the bulk of Hicks’ interest in 2003, pays Frisco to lease the city-owned stadium, Dr. Pepper Ballpark. Attendance at RoughRiders games has increased dramatically as players’ on-field performance has improved. The team went from last in the league in 2001 to first in 2004.