{"id":16347,"date":"2016-08-07T15:58:55","date_gmt":"2016-08-07T15:58:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=16347"},"modified":"2016-08-07T15:58:55","modified_gmt":"2016-08-07T15:58:55","slug":"hoping-for-actual-minor-league-baseball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=16347","title":{"rendered":"Hoping for actual minor-league baseball"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n

\"baseball\"<\/a><\/p>\n

My curiosity got the better of me this morning.<\/p>\n

I decided to look up the home page for the AirHogs, the team that passes for a minor-league baseball organization that plays some<\/em> of its home games in Amarillo.<\/p>\n

I discovered a serious travesty.<\/p>\n

The AirHogs are known as the Texas AirHogs, given that\u00a0the team\u00a0splits its “home schedule” between Amarillo and Grand Prairie, a community in the Metroplex.<\/p>\n

The home page lists its “home” game schedule by referring to the split between Amarillo and Grand Prairie.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/airhogsbaseball.com\/home\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Which brings me, I suppose, to the purpose of this blog post: the possibility of Amarillo getting an actual minor-league baseball franchise.<\/p>\n

City officials have announced a schedule for the knock-down of a vacated Coca-Cola distribution plant across the street from City Hall. It’s coming soon. The lot will be cleared off, scraped clean and then the city will await construction of a $45 million ballpark — once known as the multipurpose event venue.<\/p>\n

All the while, the city — or more specifically, the Local Government Corporation — is negotiating with a baseball franchise that currently plays ball in San Antonio. The hope here is that the San Antonio Missions, a Double A team affiliated with the National League San Diego Padres, will relocate to Amarillo once San Antonio lands a Triple A franchise.<\/p>\n

The LGC has a huge task before it. Indeed, the negotiation likely is a key reason that interim City Manager Terry Childers agreed to stay on the job a while longer as the City Council continues its search for a permanent chief city administrator.<\/p>\n

During the campaign prior to the November 2015 municipal referendum on the MPEV, retired Amarillo College President Paul Matney talked about Amarillo’s history as a “baseball town.” The voters agreed narrowly with Matney’s assessment and approved the referendum that gave the city the green light to proceed with the MPEV.<\/p>\n

That history, though, is not being honored by the ridiculous half-and-half home schedule the AirHogs are playing. Heck, they aren’t even playing all their Amarillo home games at that dump called Potter County Memorial Stadium; they are playing some of those games at West Texas A&M University’s home field.<\/p>\n

I am trying mightily to retain confidence that the LGC can pull this deal together and that Amarillo can get the kind of minor-league baseball that will make the city proud.<\/p>\n\n

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My curiosity got the better of me this morning. I decided to look up the home page for the AirHogs, the team that passes for a minor-league baseball organization that plays some of its home games in Amarillo. I discovered a serious travesty. The AirHogs are known as the Texas AirHogs, given that\u00a0the team\u00a0splits its … Continue reading Hoping for actual minor-league baseball<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,17],"tags":[288,290,1436,3153,6468],"class_list":["post-16347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","category-sports-news","tag-amarillo-city-council","tag-amarillo-city-hall","tag-downtown-amarillo","tag-mpev","tag-texas-airhogs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16347"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16349,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16347\/revisions\/16349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}