A couple of relatively recent stories deserve a little blog mention - first up, a brief update about our friends in Richmond, Virginia. Most followers of MiLB are aware that the Richmond Braves will be relocating to Gwinnett County, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, for the 2009 season. As per the immediate speculation, there appear to be no shortage of teams lining up to fill the void at The Diamond.
Richmond is the hot market available in the minor leagues, with plans for the Braves and the International League to release the territory when the R-Braves move to Gwinnett County in surburban Atlanta. One source said High Desert had the inside track to moving to Richmond, and that Bakersfield would end up in Fayetteville, N.C.; another source said more markets within the Carolina League footprint were under consideration.
Nice to see that the good people of Richmond likely won’t be without professional baseball next year.
This story in the Citizen also caught my eye - “Ottawans pick “urban oasis” over football for Lansdowne Park”.
Ottawa residents are juiced by the idea of turning Lansdowne Park into an “urban oasis.” But they’re decidedly unenthusiastic about maintaining Frank Clair Stadium as the home base for a new Canadian Football League franchise.
The findings come from a wide-ranging new “state of the city” survey conducted for the Citizen by the public opinion firm COMPAS Inc.
I’m decidedly on the fence when it comes to football; I don’t really care one way or the other whether the CFL plays at Lansdowne Park. I do think that given the choice, Ottawa with a CFL franchise is better than Ottawa without one. Unfortunately, unless the team can manage to own its own facility (aka Frank Clair Stadium) outright, they’re going to have to deal with the City, and this latest poll will give the opponents of football on City council all the ammo they’ll need. Less than half of the respondents (41%) were in favor of fixing up Frank Clair Stadium, and rather than attacking the fundamentals of the poll (e.g. a relatively small sample size of 405 respondents), a member of the group already awarded the conditional franchise elected to put lipstick on the pig instead.
“Assuming that the poll is representative of the entire city, I would say it appears to be very favourable,” Mr. Hunt said. “At 41 per cent of the population, that is almost 400,000 people who want to see CFL football back in Ottawa.
” If that were true, that would represent an outstanding amount of support.”
That clunking sound was the wheels falling off the argument - a scant couple of lines later, the Citizen characterizes the number as “the low level of support for fixing up the stadium for football”. It’s too bad, but people in Ottawa often view development and profit cynically and with suspicion.
The other number of interest in the poll concerns baseball:
Another question in the survey confirms Ottawa is first and foremost a hockey town.
- 84 per cent say the Ottawa Senators are important to the community
- 77 per cent say the same of the Ottawa 67’s
- 44 per cent say a new CFL team would be important
- 37 per cent say the Ottawa Fury soccer franchise is important
- 33 per cent say the Ottawa Rapidz baseball team is important
© The Ottawa Citizen 2008
By the math (and assuming the level of support was roughly the same for the Lynx), this means that support for the Lynx should have been around 300-330,000 people. Sadly, “support” doesn’t necessarily translate into ticket sales - if it did, baseball should have averaged around 4,500 people per game.
