Baseball is back – its 70th season – and Eugene Emeralds’ days are numbered. The request for the stadium is what did them in.

The Ems are very active in the community year-round but community members would not support them.

Did you know, you could be asked to vote on another stadium? A group strongly against the multiuse stadium proposed for the Ems wants an indoor multiuse sports facility. This group had the billboard saying a stadium for the Ems would cost taxpayers $100 million, proven false. It said that $15 million would come from city services. Once again, false.

In short, this indoor multiuse sports facility is for regional tournaments to fill hotel rooms during the winter months.

Andy Vobora, who works for Travel Lane County, wrote in an email: “These are activity centers, which provide opportunities for kids and adults to participate in sports, get exercise and be healthier people. Watching baseball doesn’t provide physical health benefits.”

This center would have seating for up to 4,000. Why? Watching doesn’t provide physical health benefits. Learn for yourself what the facility is about.

I’m a season ticket holder and enjoy what once was called the American game.

I just finished reading Will Bardenwerper’s book “Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America,” about a town that lost a minor league team and what came next. Bardenwerper called small town baseball “a place for people to go to enjoy a sense of fraternity in an otherwise increasingly partisan, digitally connected world, a world accelerating toward physical and psychic isolation, seductive screens replacing lively bleachers.”

Apparently, $22 a year was too much. But the 2018 Parks and Recreation Bond attached the River Front Project, with a cost to the taxpayer of $50 a year with no time frame. Did you know?

The Ems are back – family affordable entertainment – and it is all coming to an end.

Steven E. Hunnicutt
Eugene