Greensboro can own ACC Baseball Tournament

The College World Series has a home in Omaha, but the ACC Baseball Tournament, by comparison, is a nomad.

The ACC event deserves better. It spent the 2006, ’07 and ’08 years in Jacksonville, Fla., a nice place to play baseball but a long way most parts of the league.

Then the event was scheduled to be in Fenway Park in 2009. But – whoops! – the Red Sox realized the Green Monster was booked that weekend, and had to ask for this year instead. Once the economy tanked, the ACC moved the 2010 tournament to Greensboro for financial reasons while saying that some day, some day it will play the event in Fenway.

The allure of Fenway is obvious, but there’s no way the tournament will draw much interest in New England. Finding a community that can support it – and maybe Greensboro will – makes more sense.

The Triangle should be a great fit, with three teams here and two fine minor league parks. But the event gets overlooked in the market when the Carolina Hurricanes are in the playoffs, as they were last year. The event still drew 36,639 at Durham Bulls Athletic Park, the ninth-highest total in the event’s history, but there just wasn’t much buzz with the Canes dominating sports talk.

Greensboro makes more sense. The city has now a great minor league park in NewBridge Bank Park and it has a chance to claim this event as its own. That’s what happened with the CWS, with Omaha showing such enthusiasm for the event that others don’t have a chance.

This is Greensboro’s turn to make this an annual affair, which opens Wednesday. And if the city can show the tournament the love it deserves, it should keep it.