This is the end. My only friend, the end.

Knowing the end is coming, knowing why it must be the end . . . the knowing does not lessen the hurt when the end finally arrives.

The Grim Reaper is a giant mechanical shovel. The Grim Reaper would be more poetic if we still called him a steam shovel. The Grim Reaper is just as merciless by any name.

And the Grim Reaper came for Omaha's old Rosenblatt Stadium today.

I've spent a fair chunk of my adult life, seen amazing things, communed with amazing friends in a place soon to be but a memory. Thanks be to God, steam shovels can't touch the ballpark in my mind.

THE ONE where I was sitting high above the first-base line. 1996. College World Series championship game. Bottom of the ninth. LSU down 8-7 to Miami. Two out. Head in hands. Knee jumping. Praying that Warren Morris just doesn't strike out. That he just gets on base somehow.

"The stretch by Morrison, the pitch. Swung on and hit to right field. That's way back there, way back there . . . HOME RUN! TIGERS WIN! TIGERS WIN! WARREN MORRIS! IT'S A TWO-RUN HOME RUN, AND THE TIGERS ARE THE NATIONAL CHAMPS! I DON'T BELIEVE IT!"

STEAM SHOVEL can't take that away from me.

View from my personal space

At the last day of the College World Series.

Good night . . . and have a pleasant tomorrow.
In South Carolina, your mileage may vary.

View from my seat

This is the world, as seen from my seat at the College World Series tonight.

Didya ever wonder what a baseball game looked like through a plastic Diet Pepsi bottle, man? I did. Now I know.


Didya ever notice that kids are interested in pretty much everything except the ballgame?


Yep. Game still kid-boring.


Didya ever wonder about those shoes hanging over your head? Like, wouldn't it be bad if that dude just walked through pee, and his shoes are hanging over the ledge above your head?

You gotta think about these things, man!


At least someone's watching Florida State take out UCLA.


Dude! It's great when the people in front of you go home.

And for what it's worth, Mrs. Favog is an atheistic, Bolshevik communiss. She does not stand for the seventh-inning stretch, and she does not sing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame."

No peanuts for you! No Cracker Jack!

The end.

Flukes of CWS universe didn't get Big Ten memo

The baseball cards are marked.

The deck is stacked.

The fix is in.

The playing field tilts to the south. Or the South, as the case may be.

So how in the world does anybody expect the Big Ten to have a chance in hell of making the College World Series? Everybody knows Northern schools don't have a chance.

And in this June 2 story in the Omaha World-Herald, league coaches wonder why they shouldn't just take their gloves and . . . play in the summer and fall. Say to hell with the CWS and the whole crooked, Southern-fried, put-up deal that is college baseball:

Nebraska is now playing in a conference convinced that college baseball’s rules and structure prevent the Big Ten from fairly competing for the national spotlight.

The league-wide frustration has grown to the point that the conference’s most seasoned and respected voice, Minnesota’s John Anderson, is suggesting the Big Ten (and other northern schools) secede and form a new league that plays deeper into the summer.

Purdue’s having a milestone year, yet Boilermakers coach Doug Schreiber is still in full support of his own proposal to play a portion of the season in the fall. Most — if not all — league coaches want the NCAA to return to a true regional bracket for postseason play.

Radical? Yes. But the way Big Ten coaches see it, their squads are being forced to swing the bat with one arm, while everyone down south gets to use both.

“The current system that we have, we’ve learned, doesn’t produce the equity that it could,” Anderson said. “Part of the reason, people don’t want to change. The sport’s making money, there’s TV, growth, attendance — which kind of masks the problem.”

The problem is climate, and a mid-February season start date (still too early up north). It’s travel burdens (fiscal and physical). It’s academic concerns (Big Ten squads can miss no more than eight class days). It’s the NCAA tournament selection process and the overvalued RPI. It’s an investment in facilities (the Big Ten’s made recent strides), thus a lack of attendance and interest. It’s oversigning rules that Big Ten schools must abide by that most conferences don’t have; before finalizing annual rosters, the Big Ten allows its teams to commit one extra scholarship to no more than two players.

During multiple World-Herald interviews with several Big Ten coaches over the past month, the league veterans each presented this warning: Play baseball in this conference and you’ll be staring at an impassable uphill trek to the sport’s summit.

WITH THIS in mind -- this laundry list of injustice heaped upon the poor, beleaguered and put-upon Big Ten baseball programs . . . these disrespected Nanooks of the North in spikes -- we welcome to the 2012 College World Series a couple of schools from obviously tropical climes.

So, a subarctic Omaha greeting goes out to CWS contestants the Seawolves of New York's Stony Brook University and the Golden Flashes of Ohio's Kent State University. (NB: Kent is in the subtropical part of Ohio; Columbus, home of Big Ten member Ohio State, is in the tundra.)

On the other hand, though, maybe it's not the weather.

And maybe it's not a giant NCAA baseball-rigging scandal concocted by a nefarious cartel of Southern universities.

Maybe it's something else, Big Ten. Maybe, just maybe . . . it's you.

Ghost in the machine

There's a ghost at the College World Series.

That is, apart from all the phantom home runs still flying out of the ballyard and into some fifth dimension amid this brave new era where real baseballs -- the ones made of leather, twine, rubber and cork -- tend to stay well within the outfield walls of Omaha's brand-new TD Ameritrade Park.

No, it seems to me the ghost haunting the College World Series this year -- haunting baseball's new digs in the River City -- is baseball's old digs in the River City. That old stadium perched atop a hill in south Omaha.

Johnny Rosenblatt Stadium.

OVER AND OVER, its specter appears out of nowhere. The Ghost of Rosenblatt Past horns into casual conversations in the new park.

Into announcers' remarks on ESPN.

Over and over into the pages of the Omaha World-Herald's sports section.

It even interrupts your regularly scheduled video-screen programming.

And even though the new digs compare more than favorably with the old in every way, the ancient, cobbled-together haunt still haunts our hearts and our memories. I wonder whether TD Ameritrade -- shiny and new and sexy in every way . . . all made up with a long future to go -- feels like its competing with an old flame.

I wonder whether that's any easier to take when the old flame is a ghost.

Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and gamma rays

The missus and I spent a wonderful Sunday night with friends at the College World Series.

The series' new home, TD Ameritrade Park, is beautiful. Awesome, even. And the downtown Omaha setting is a grand slam.

The night was wonderful, the company better, and the game between South Carolina and Texas A&M was a nail-biter. A late-spring night at the CWS always has a little bit of everything -- like the game itself (above).

And daddies and their babies.

And wacky team mascots. This is Cocky from South Carolina.

And, of course, wireless combination radiation and multigas detectors. Because it's dangerous out there.

If it's June, and they're playing baseball. . . .

If it's June, and if a College World Series night game is under way, you pretty much can expect this to happen. Repeat as necessary.

Usually, a slightly above-average outbreak of thunderstorms doesn't merit the tornado sirens going off -- not without a tornado warning -- but this one did because . . . see above. You had a lot of folks inside TD Ameritrade Park at just after 8 p.m. Monday, and even more outside all over downtown Omaha.

With a gust front with winds up to 70-plus m.p.h. headed their way.

Smart move.

In fact, cops were getting people out of their cars on 10th Street and herding them into the Qwest Center Omaha.


NOW, I'm no Jim Cantore (and I don't play him on television), but this is what it looked like in west-central Omaha.

This was just after the gust front went through. I don't know what the wind speed was but -- being that I was outside standing in it like an idiot -- it was strong enough to make it hard to catch your breath.

Back to you, Jim.

3 Chords & the Truth: A home run of a show

In the frozen north, you have Hockey Night in Canada.

Here on the somewhat-less-frozen Plains, we have Baseball Month in Omaha.

In honor of the advent of yet another College World Series -- this one at the brand-new TD Ameritrade Park, we'll be highlighting . . .

BAH! BAAAH! BAAAAAAAAH!

. . . on this week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth.

IN FACT, we'll start out the whole ballgame with . . .

SO GOOD!

SO GOOD!

SO GOOD!

. . . which I think you will find to be a real treat this time around on the Big Show.

And those hipsters down there about three rows -- the ones who are obviously here to be seen being here, even though baseball is usually so uncool -- would enjoy this week's 3 Chords & the Truth excursion into . . .

BAH! BAAAH! BAAAAAAAAH!

It's really going to be cool, even if it was put together by a balding guy well old enough to be their father. Especially when . . .

SO GOOD!

SO GOOD!

SO GOOD!

Aw, screw it. Ima watch the game now.

IT'S 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there . . .

BAH! BAAAH! BAAAAAAAAH!

Aloha.

Take me out to the . . . rain delay?

Take me out to the ball game,


Take me out with the crowd,


Let's buy some tickets -- we'll pass the hat,


'Cause after this year there's no more Rosenblatt,


And it's root, root, root for the strange birds,


If the weather don't break, it's a shame,


For it's one . . .


Two . . .


Three strikes he's out (infrontofthewrongrestroom) . . .




At the old (lastCollegeWorldSeriesatRosenblattStadiumever) . . .


Ball (Ithinkitgotlostinthemudsomewhereonthewarningtrack) . . .


GAME!

(Which, by the way, ended up with Oklahoma beating South Carolina 4-3 after 6 hours and 16 minutes of rain delays and just under three hours of actually playing ball.)

Don't let the sun go down on me

In about three weeks, Omaha's Rosenblatt Stadium will play host to its final College World Series, an event that has made its home there since 1950.

Next year, the CWS will move to the brand-new downtown TD Ameritrade Park, and the sun will set on South Omaha's old ballyard on the hill, which will give way to expansion of the Henry Doorly Zoo next door.

For now, though, the Memorial Day sun sets on the new stadium being built in NoDo -- Omaha speak for North Downtown.

Give me some peanuts and Cracker Jack

Old Rosenblatt Stadium ain't dead yet, but the family's thinking about the wake.

The wake, of course, will be the 2010 College World Series -- an oddity, being that the wake will precede the old baseball stadium's actual demise sometime in September, with the end of the Omaha Royals season.

MEANTIME, Omaha already can see the flashy downtown slickster that's going to replace the old girl in South O, starting with the 2011 CWS. At left is the view from 13th and Cuming streets of the new TD Ameritrade Park.

What's amazing -- at least to me -- is how quickly the site has gone from a Qwest Center Omaha parking lot to an excavation site . . . to this. "This thing really is gonna happen" quickly has gone from an intellectual exercise to a concrete-and-steel reality.


AND HERE'S the view from beyond what will be the right-field seats, while below is a close up of the work on the grandstands and luxury suites.

YOU KNOW, it's starting to look like a real city around these parts. Play ball!