June 25, 2007

Will it still be here tomorrow?

FRANK MICKADEIT
Register columnist

OMAHA–Oregon State, the team that sent UC Irvine home disappointed last week, did the same to North Carolina last night, completing a sweep of the Tar Heels and winning a second straight NCAA baseball title.

As the College World Series wound down, I wondered how much longer we'll see this event in its unadulterated form. I've been emailing and phoning friends: Don't wait for "someday" to come to Omaha. Book for next yearnow. Rosenblatt Stadium is dangerously close to becoming a parking lot. Or a panda enclosure.

Rosenblatt and its environs in south Omaha might be the best and purest baseball experience in America. The eight top amateur teams. Ten (or 11) days of baseball. When I look at this stadium, I see a shrine. When the NCAA looks, it sees problems: substandard parking (only 1,800 spaces), outdated locker rooms and restrooms, a lack of sky boxes and entertainment features.

I finally got my interview with Omaha Mayor Mike Fahey. He made it clear Rosenblatt, home of the CWS since 1950, is expendable if the NCAA and the minor league baseball team that uses Rosenblatt want a new ballpark. "Nobody thought Yankee Stadium would be torn down and it's being torn down," Fahey told me, as if the fact George Steinbrenner made a dumb move gives everybody that right.

Here's Fahey's story. Omaha has the CWS locked up only through 2010. In the ongoing negotiations for the next contract, the NCAA asked for certain improvements to Rosenblatt. The city came back with a $25 million renovation plan. The NCAA said, fine, but for "only" twice that, you could build a whole new ballpark. Please consider.

Meanwhile, the Kansas City Royals farm club here desperately wants what successful minor league parks all over the country have – play areas for the kids, interactive games, outfield berms for picnics, and wide and shady pavilions where you can easily roll a stroller, wheelchair or drunken fan. Yesterday, the front page of the Omaha World Herald featured a picture of a family of five playing in a hot tub just beyond the leftfield fence at a minor-league park in Iowa.

Why not just run baseball videos on a big-screen at a Chuck E. Cheese and add helmet sundaes to the menu?

I asked Fahey about Omaha's favorite roadside attraction, the menagerie of pens and air-cargo crates they call the Henry Doorly Zoo. The zoo wants the space now occupied by Rosenblatt. The city is begging the Chinese for some giant pandas to dress up its little cluster of animal enclosures. We promise to feed and walk and clean up after them every day. Oh, can we have them? Please?

One reader emailed me to say that pandas not only eat a lot of bamboo – 84 pounds per day – but they'll only eat a few varieties. I asked Fahey about this, and he replied enthusiastically: "They grow it down in Louisiana now!" And added that Omaha hasn't decided whether to import it or grow it locally in hothouses.

"I can't believe he knowsthat," Kirk said when I relayed him the quote – Kirk's point being that having this level of minutia at his fingertips means either Fahey is veryserious about this panda thing or being mayor of Omaha doesn't take a lot of time.

Not only would Rosenblatt go, but also gone – or rendered irrelevant – would be the 13th Street houses and businesses that cater to the CWS crowd. Those include the Titan and 'Eater Nation houses, Zestos malt-and-burger stand and one very special business called Stadium View Sports Cards.

I figured it for just another card shop. But I walked in one day and was greeted by a gray-bearded man named Greg Pivovar. "Would you like a beer?" he asked. "They're free." I took a soda instead and started looking around. Worn hardwood floors. Twelve-foot ceilings of stamped tin. Broad display windows in front. "It was a grocery store. Built in 1898."

Pivovar is a criminal defense attorney but sports memorabilia is his passion. The shop is more museum than store. Sports cards are perhaps the least of it. Walls are covered in old posters and magazine covers. Bins are full of old baseball mitts. Shelves are stacked with sports books. A Willie McCovey first baseman's glove. A 12-inch LP of Stan Musial giving batting tips. Pennants from the Negro Leagues. Street and Smith's football previews since the beginning of time.

I wandered into the storage room and found it floor-to-ceiling with books. Four copies of Jerry Kramer's Instant Replay, which I read five times as a kid. Pivovar took me down to the basement. It, too, is jammed almost to capacity with boxes. More gloves, more cards, more everything.

He has given away 29,000 beers since he opened his shop almost two decades ago. If someone wants to make a donation, he asks they put a contribution in one of the jars for his daughter's college fund. She would be Harper Lee, a 7-year-old brown-haired beauty who sits on a stool near her daddy. "My wife said I reminded her of Atticus Finch," Pivovar explained. I contributed to jars marked UC Irvine and Cal State Fullerton.

I also bought the NCAA's 1974 Collegiate Baseball Guide, which Pivovar had dug out for this year's CWS. Why? Because it featured UCI outfielder Rod Spence on the cover. I have since learned Spence died, but I hope to get it to his brother.

You can have your hot tubs and pandas. You could spend millions and never create something like Rosenblatt Stadium and Pivovar's shop.