Will baseball strike out in San Antonio?
This week, the AA San Antonio Missions played their last regular season game, as the owners of the team are moving the franchise to Amarillo.But the plan is to move a AAA team from Colorado Springs to San Antonio, but the big question is...where will the new team play?
Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, a baseball fan who the current Missions stadium is named for, would like to see a downtown ballpark for the new AAA team, complete with housing, restaurants, and bars.
"We all know Wrigley Field is the 'cathedral of baseball' with all those neighborhoods around it, and hopefully, someday, they'll come up with a plan to do that," Wolff said.
The key word being 'someday.'
Wolff says support for public funding for stadiums for wealthy baseball team owners is souring across the country, and there is even less support in Bexar County for public funding for another minor league stadium.
"The only way might be if UTSA became the primary owner of a stadium, and the Missions were a tenant," he said.
The problem is, the AAA franchise plans to open in San Antonio in 2019, but with no site selected for a stadium and no way to pay for one, those plans may be short circuited.
Wolff Stadium, Wolff said, was built in the early 1990s to be expandable to AAA standards if the situation developed, and he says that could be done a lot easier than building an entirely new stadium.
He says the concerns that have been raised over the last two decades that Wolff Stadium is 'too far away' are now being alleviated by the growth of the west and south sides, thanks to Port San Antonio, the growth of Lackland Air Force Base, Texas A&M San Antonio and other features which have been added to the region's landscape.