The mayor's idea to build a stadium in Far North Bicentennial Park and lure a minor-league baseball team to Anchorage deserves about as much consideration as sending a midget to the plate as a pinch-hitter.
Bill Veeck got away with the midget gimmick. Once. We shouldn't let George Wuerch get away with this field of misplaced dreams. Ever.
If the mayor is really interested in baseball in Anchorage, he should come up with the money to renovate Mulcahy Stadium. Mulcahy is the home of the Anchorage Bucs and Anchorage Glacier Pilots, a pair of amateur summer teams that stock up on college talent for a two-month season each year.
There's nothing wrong with Mulcahy that can't be fixed (here's one place to start: bathroom doors that actually close). It's a comfortable park with a nice backdrop, lots of parking and a central location.
And there is absolutely no reason why the city should jeopardize the Bucs or Pilots in order to bring in a minor-league team. Anchorage, especially Anchorage in the summer, isn't going to support three baseball teams. It barely supports two. The Bucs and Pilots are lucky to draw a thousand fans a night, so it's clear where the addition of a minor-league team would lead. Can you say contraction?
Even if the fans were plentiful, three teams simply can't share one park for a two-month season. Mulcahy had an open date maybe once or twice the entire ABL season this summer. When would a third team play?
As for the quality of entertainment, don't even try to argue that minor-league baseball would offer something better than the Alaska Baseball League.
OK, so minor league is professional and the ABL is amateur. Big deal. The most likely minor league to bring a team in Anchorage is the Northwest League, which has teams in Washington, Idaho, Oregon and British Columbia and plays from mid-June to early September.
The Northwest League is short-season A league, one of the lowest rungs on the baseball ladder. Tons of careers begin and end in A ball.
Many of the ABL's college players are all-stars and many have been drafted but stayed in school instead (and most of those get drafted higher the next time they're draft eligible). Tons of them never make it to the major leagues, either, but the number of Fairbanks Goldpanners who've made it to the bigs -- 180 and counting -- can surely rival those of most short-season A league teams.
The reasons why the Bucs and Pilots make more sense for Anchorage than a minor-league team are too numerous to recite. One worth noting, however, is the domino effect the possible demise of the Bucs and Pilots would have on the ABL's franchises in Palmer, Kenai and Fairbanks.
Yet I suspect that Wuerch's real agenda has little to do with baseball and a whole lot to do with dissecting Far North Bicentennial Park until backstops and soccer nets outnumber the trees.
One of the best legacies a politician can give a city is access to the natural world. Convention centers and six-lane highways are necessary and sometimes even nice. A coastal trail may not be necessary, but there's no denying how much better Anchorage is with it than without it. Can you say the same for the new interchange at Minnesota Drive and International Airport Road?
Once you pour the pavement, paradise is lost forever, and that's something everyone in a position of power needs to remember when developers begin to covet park land.
The mayor needs to give every attempt to develop Far North Bicentennial Park the same scrutiny he gives library exhibits.
When it comes the current proposal to chip away at the park -- baseball fields for the Simonian Little League -- there's a question Wuerch and everyone else should be asking. But for some reason, they aren't:
Earlier this year it was decided the Little Leaguers would play on the four fields that make up the Chuck Albrecht Softball Complex until 2007, when the fields would be turned over to the softball leagues.
A funny thing has happened to softball in Anchorage, though. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the city had almost 400 softball teams. This summer, it had 274 teams, not counting small, fringe leagues like the Petroleum and Lawyers leagues.
True fact: Softball participation has followed a downward trend for a decade. There are 25 percent fewer teams today than in 1992.
Logical question: Why does softball need more fields? Why can't the Little Leaguers keep the Albrecht fields?
Politician's answer: Because we promised the fields to the softball teams.
And politicians never break promises, right?
This column is the opinion of Daily News sports editor Beth Bragg. She can be reached at bbragg@adn.com.
