The two-time defending Maine American Legion baseball champions are free agents.

Gayton Post 31 of Auburn has decided not to sponsor the Lewiston based team for the 2012 season. It will be the first time since its inception in the early 1970s that the post will not field a team.

Gayton commander Phil Nelson said the post can’t commit financially to the upcoming season due to renovation costs for its Washington Street headquarters.

“This year, we decided to revitalize the whole post, and financially we just can’t do it this year,” Nelson said. “If we could, we would have, but we just couldn’t do it.”

Nelson said the $30,000 remodeling project took precedence over continuing to support the baseball team, but the post hopes to sponsor the team again in the future.

“We are going to be able to recoup, but it’s going to take a little while,” he said.

Coach Todd Cifelli, who has coached Gayton for the past six years, said he learned of the decision from Chuck Berube, the state’s legion baseball director, at the Lewiston/Edward Little football game on Oct. 29.

“It’s unfortunate,” said Cifelli, who also coached Lewiston High School to an Eastern Class A title this year. “The parents and I know that financial times are hard, so we understand that from their point of view. We just wish that we had a chance to work something out.”

“The players always represented the post well by playing hard. They took their craft seriously. Attendance was always high,” Cifelli said. “Now we’re going to have to find some type of sponsor or multiple sponsors to have a team. If not, we’re going to have to fold.”

It costs between $3,500-$4,000 to operate a legion team each season. Factoring start-up costs such as new uniforms and equipment, that number can go as high as $6,000.

Cifelli said he will not ask players to pay a fee to play, and finding a business to make that type of financial commitment in a bad economy is difficult. So he is willing to be creative.

“We’re all ears,” he said. “We’re very open to how sponsors would want to be acknowledged. My goal is to acknowledge the sponsor, put a classy looking product on the field and have a successful baseball team.”

Made up of players from Lewiston High School, St. Dom’s, Lisbon and Edward Little, Gayton went undefeated en route to the Zone 3 championship last year. It went 5-1 in the state tournament to win its second consecutive state title, then lost its first two games in the double-elimination Northeast Regional in Old Orchard Beach to finish the season at 26-3.

In 2010, Gayton won Lewiston’s first state legion title since 1936 and finished with a 25-5 record after going 1-2 in the regional.

The number of legion teams has been declining around the state in recent years, due mostly to lack of player participation. According to Berube, Maine has gone from 70 to 66 teams, with some teams merging in order to have enough players. That number could continue to go down due to lack of sponsorship.

“We may lose one or two again this coming year,” Berube said. “I won’t mention the name, but we had one team last year that was post sponsored where the post said ‘We can’t sponsor the team this year’ and some guy came off the street and wrote a check. That doesn’t happen very often.”

Declining membership has made it increasingly difficult for legion posts to sponsor teams, or at least remain primary sponsors.

“We’ve only got about 50 members, and at one time we used to have 700 members,” Nelson said.