The new Huntington Park, being built in Columbus, will more than likely be far and away the nicest and obviously more state-of-the-art facility in all of the Big 10 as the home field for the Ohio State Buckeyes. According to reports, the officials at THE Ohio State university feel so strongly about it that they are prepped to make an offer to Big 10 officials to permanently host the conference baseball tournament there.

This would do a couple of things–first, it would really get past the always-present panic that normally ensues when the conference regular season champ hosts the event–which gives the schools less than a week to prepare. By having it in a static location, that opens up for more chances to gain sponsors for the tournament and also give fans a chance to plan and therefore increasing attendance likelihoods.

But does it? I mean, I am sure this will be a great park, but it is not exactly central to the Big 10 schools. The closest teams basically to it would be Indiana and maybe Purdue and Michigan, but all others would have quite a hike to get there every year. It’s been the central reason why the Big 10 tournament for baseball has shifted back and forth from Indianapolis and Chicago due to the central nature of the cities (ok, Indy is only like 2.5 hours from Columbus, but still). My vote is that they award the regular season champ from the proceeding year with the tournament the following year or they just have a static rotation so that every university gets to host it on a round robin basis. The current model is definitely broken, but I don’t know that Huntington Park is the answer.