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Touching all the Bases

Random thoughts on a random Monday

Posted by: Jeff Huth

Monday, July 20, 2009 4:20 PM

Random thoughts and news during the unseasonably cool Dog Days of Summer:

No announcement yet from the Big Ten on the site of its 2010 baseball tournament, but I can’t imagine it will be anywhere other than Columbus, Ohio.
After years of being held at the campus venue of the regular-season champion, the tournament was moved in 2009 to neutral-site Huntington Park — home of the Class AAA minor league team in Columbus.
During its four-day run, the tournament drew 12,219 fans. According to the Big Ten, that was the event’s highest attendance in at least a decade. So fans showed up in numbers that would justify a return.
I also can’t imagine the Big Ten going back to the regular-season champ hosting the tournament now that the Big Ten Network exists.
The BTN is committed to carrying all of the tournament games live, and four Big Ten baseball stadiums — at Indiana, Michigan State, Northwestern and Purdue — still don’t have lights. For ratings purposes, the BTN will want to carry as many tournament games at night as possible. (For that matter, the Big Ten itself wants its tournament in prime time, too).
Ratings drive the attractiveness of any televised event with advertisers. It’s a tougher sell to advertisers when all games must be shown during daylight hours only. And that possibility would exist if the Hoosiers, Spartans, Wildcats or Boilermakers earned the right to host.

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Former Illini track and field standout Susanna Kallur has dropped out of next month’s IAAF World Championships. The native of Sweden is not fully recovered from surgery for a shin stress fracture. She is a three-time European Championships gold medalist in the hurdles.
Here’s a story with more on Kallur’s decision not to run.

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Last week, I wrote about Illini volleyball commitment Jennifer Bonilla and how she fared in an international tournament for USA Volleyball. Here’s a link to a blog she wrote on the early portion of the trip to Thailand.
Bonilla, a senior-to-be from Reseda, Calif., is the heir apparent to Ashley Edinger as Illini libero.