Why Is The SEC Baseball Tourney in Birmingham

I hope this post doesn't lead to Mike Slive tracking me down or denying Powe's case to spite me. Question I have that's been bothering me since the SEC Baseball Tournament. Why is it at the Hoover Met, err excuse me, Regions Park every year?

The place is a dump by minor league standards. Trust me I've been to a Baron's game. Its horribly out dated. It looks like a large high school stadium. (Oh wait, Hoover high actually plays their football games there.) The number of nicer single A parks is astonishing.

Meanwhile as tons of nice minor league parks have opened around the south. But instead they keep the tournament in one of the worst parks in the South. It makes as much since as Ole Miss and Mississippi State continuing to play the Mayor's trophy game in Smith Wills instead of a governor's cup in Trustmark Park. Oh wait, they switched that one up two years ago. So SEC you're officially less progressive than the state of Mississippi. That's awesome.

Its not like this is some grand tradition. The game moved around like the basketball tournament every year before 1998. Its also not like they don't have other neutral site options. I understand in football the only other domed stadium in the area was the Superdome so it made since to just go ahead and lock one location up. Granted domed stadiums suck and are pointless in the South but that's another rant for the fall.

It's also not like they are that concerned with driving since Atlanta is on one of the far sides of the conference geographically. Birmingham is centralized, but not anymore than other parts of Alabama or even Tennessee and Mississippi. But you have double AA sized stadiums in Huntsville, AL; Jackson, TN; Pearl, MS; Chattanooga, TN; Montgomery, AL. You also have triple AAA stadiums that are nicer and hold as many people in New Orleans, LA; and Nashville, TN; and one that holds three thousand more people in Memphis, TN. Autozone park is actually one of the nicest ball parks in the country that's not a MLB park.

The logical choice is to move the game around to a number of parks or permanently host it at Autozone Park. But then acting logically is asking a lot of the SEC office and their rampant Bama homerism.