Columbus needs new minor league park on Golden Park site

You don’t realize how much you miss something until you get another taste of it.

That happened last week when I went to three different minor league baseball games in different states. It was kind of strange because three blocks from my home is a minor league baseball park rich in history and as empty as Wrigley Field in October.

So, I got my fix in Lansing, Mich.; Dayton, Ohio; and Montgomery, Ala. I saw the Lansing Lugnuts play Fort Wayne in a Tuesday matinee inside a stadium filled with kids enjoying a day in the sun. I saw Military Appreciation Night in Dayton as the home-standing Dragons ripped the South Bend Cubs with a lot of Air Force folks enjoying the game.

Then, thanks to the connections of a friend, I saw the Montgomery Biscuits play the Mobile Bay Bears in an old train depot converted into a fine, functional baseball facility.

Good trip.

But the takeaway, at least for me, is as Golden Park sits empty for another season, folks in Columbus are thinking about minor league baseball in the wrong way. The three stadiums I visited — Cooley Law School Stadium in Lansing, Fifth Third Field in Dayton and Riverwalk Stadium in Montgomery — were all different, but they were alive.

There were eating and drinking establishments around them. In Lansing, there were apartments, complete with decks overlooking the field, lining the outfield wall. All three of the parks were downtown.

It was all food for thought.

Looking for someone to help me process it all, I reached out to John Dittrich, who spent 42 years as an executive in professional baseball, with the bulk of that in the minors. He was in Columbus from 1991-1995 and knows the city well.

“The common denominators for the vast majority of today’s minor league success stories are three things,” he said. “First, a reasonably lengthy absence of minor league baseball. Second, a state-of-the-art new ballpark built as a part of urban redevelopment — residential-retail-entertainment district.”

The third piece is game-day operations, which will take care of itself if the right stadium is in the right place, Dittrich said.

He’s right about the new park. You will never get minor league baseball of any kind into Golden Park, even if you spend millions on a facelift. Its day is done. All you had to do was drive down Madison Avenue in Montgomery on the way to Riverwalk Stadium deeper into downtown. You will see Paterson Field, Golden Park’s long lost sister (the two stadiums were built a year apart in the 1950s by the same construction company using the same plans), to know the Columbus park is obsolete.

Like Columbus, minor league baseball left Montgomery. The difference is, it returned when the new stadium was constructed 12 years ago. That is what it is going to take in Columbus. And that takes money.

This city has benefited more than most from public-private partnerships. That is what it will take to bring pro baseball back.

“The community leaders have to see and believe that a ballpark can be a community centerpiece as it has been in the places you mention,” said Dittrich, now retired and living in Arizona. “During our time in Columbus, we fought hard and long to try to get people to see Golden Park in a new light, but for the most part it was viewed as something that has pretty much always been there for the hardcore fans but not the trendy thing to do. Really, nothing short of a new park in Columbus would really light it up.”

He’s right.

The conventional wisdom was that a new park would have to be built on the north end of town. That is not the case anymore. The entertainment district is downtown and the redevelopment of the Golden Park site makes sense. Think about apartments just outside the outfield fence and a restaurant or two open year-round, not just when the home team was playing.

You keep the historical use of the site, but you make it fit with what works today. It’s a long shot, but it’s worth the dream.

Anyone got a blank check?

This story was originally published August 17, 2016 at 6:19 PM with the headline "Columbus needs new minor league park on Golden Park site."