Winter Ball Never Sleeps or Shivers at Metrodome

By PAT BORZI
NYT

MINNEAPOLIS — As winter in the Midwest trudged on, with mounting snow and unrelenting cold, a former baseball coach at Augsburg College proved remarkably popular among his ex-peers.

Ron Petrich, now an assistant professor of education at Augsburg, a small Minneapolis college, doubles as the scheduler and matchmaker for college baseball games at the Metrodome. Since 1984, he has kept the Dome humming with games, practices and scrimmages almost around the clock from February through April, when winter finally eases. The Metrodome may have said goodbye to major league baseball, but for now, it remains a Teflon-roofed lifesaver for more than 100 college, high school and other amateur teams throughout the upper Midwest.

And no more so than this winter. In February, Petrich said, he was receiving five or six calls a day from coaches with snow-covered fields as far away as Kansas and Illinois. That made for some creative scheduling.

Nebraska-Kearney, where the Yankees’ Joba Chamberlain once pitched, played two doubleheaders in 17 hours over two days. Valley City State, an N.A.I.A. program from North Dakota, scheduled two doubleheaders on one day — at 7:30 a.m. and 9:45 p.m. Kansas and Eastern Michigan shifted their Feb. 22 doubleheader to the Metrodome from Lawrence, Kan., to avoid a snowstorm.

(More here.)