OWH:

The College World Series could be headed for a new home at a downtown ballpark and the venerable Rosenblatt Stadium could be going, going, gone.

Mayor Mike Fahey is actively pursuing the option of building a $50 million-plus ballpark in the so-called NoDo area between the Creighton University campus and the Qwest Center Omaha.

A tentative decision to build a 9,000-seat stadium with the ability to expand to 25,000 seats for the CWS could come by the first pitch of this year’s series. The NCAA’s baseball committee will be in Omaha when the series opens June 15.

As a huge baseball fan, and someone who enjoys Rosenblatt, this worries me. Major league teams have often tried to hold cities hostage by threatening to move the team if the city doesn’t swindle its taxpayers out of several hundred million dollars to build a new stadium - often in the form of regressive taxes. And more often than not, these threats are empty and meaningless. Consider that the only team to move in the last quarter century has been the Montreal Expos - mostly because of a severe lack of interest by its fans. But still, cities are often more than willing to oblige when teams hold the threat over their heads - most recently both the Royals and the Chiefs attempted to do it to Kansas City, including the absurd demand of a roof over Arrowhead Stadium. That ballot measure failed, but not without predictions of doom from many within the Royals organization - and promises of a Super Bowl in Kansas City if only Arrowhead had a roof.

The point is, that the implied threat of unnamed cities taking the CWS away from Omaha is imaginary - a way for the NCAA to get improvements from the city without giving much back in return. And while renovating Rosenblatt is worthwhile, both to make sure that the existing fanbase is happy, and that the NCAA never has any reason to move it from Omaha, building an entirely new stadium to answer to this imaginary threat is an overreaction at best. It’s throwing away millions of dollars worth of investment in Rosenblatt, destroying a local (and national) institution, devastating the local economy, and very likely putting a significant burden on the taxpayers for such an endeavour.

I’m a huge supporter of Mike Fahey, and he’s done a great deal to help this city grow over the last six years. But in this respect, I worry that he’s overreacting, and I suspect the backlash to any such move (which, presumably, would have to be approved by the taxpayers), would be significant.

In the meantime, let’s enjoy another summer at beautiful Rosenblatt Stadium.