VISIT THE OFFICIAL NORTH SHORE NAVIGATORS BLOG
HTTP://NSNAVS.BLOGSPOT.COM

Sunday, December 09, 2007

Ottawa,Grays Set For 2008 Can-Am Season

FROM CAN-AMLEAGUE.COM:
With a unanimous vote of the Ottawa City Council and a unanimous vote of the Board of Directors of the Canadian American Association, the Can-Am League welcomes Ottawa as the eighth team for the 2008 season. The league had been set to operate again with the Grays as a road team, but a strong push by fans and baseball supporters in the Canadian capital, led to a lease being available for the Can-Am League.

The Ottawa Stadium seats 10,000 which will make it the largest in the Can-Am League. A Canadian ownership group is being developed, and initially a two-year lease will be signed. A name for the new team will be chosen through a name the team contest. Front office and a field staff will be selected in the coming weeks.

Commented Can-Am Commissioner Miles Wolff, "Ottawa is a great addition to our league. With a great stadium and an area population of over 1 million, the city has the potential to be one of the top members of the league. We are excited about Ottawa."

====================================
So the talks from way back when have finally come true. Good for them.

ALSO: I pick the Grays as my 2nd favorite team next year ^_^

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Okay guys-- help me out. What do you get a 9-year-old who wrote to Santa and asked only for season tickets to the Boston Red Sox & for the North Shore Spirit to come back for Christmas?
Anon #1

Bah Humbug!

DaveCo said...

ummmmm..........tell her santa is a yankees fan and that the spirit changed their name to the navigators and switched leagues and players?

Wooden U. Lykteneau said...

Dave - The Grays have been put back on the shelf, with the Ottawa team replacing them for next season, at the very least. So far, though, there's no local ownership, so it's essentially a league-owned team in a league-leased stadium.

So team names might be...

Ottawa Squatters
Ottawa Placeholders
Ottawa Subletters
Ottawa Roundouts
Ottawa Oughtabes
Ottawa Cannon Fodder

;-0

Anonymous said...

LMAO@Dave--
She might fall for the Santa is a Yankees fan
But then she's hate Santa for life and would never write him again--
hmm... that could be a good thing. It's take pressure off :)
ANON #1

Joe Grav said...

They might still have some Sox Pax (6 games) for sale

DaveCo said...

lol,i read/wrote thast like RIGHT after I woke up--my bad. XD
and true,i wonder who will step up and actually buy the team.

ALSO: anon #1--do it! do it!

Wooden U. Lykteneau said...

FWIW, the 2008 sked has been released.

Anonymous said...

The Ottawa team will be run by the Can-Am League, but unlike the Grays, it will have a home field and there will be real-live Ottawa fans. So it will omit the worst part of the Grays: that no one wanted the Grays to win and that, if they started winning, you knew the "real" teams would raid the roster of all the best players.

The new schedule does more than replace "Grays" with "Ottawa." It rejiggers everyone else's schedule so that everyone now plays an equal number of home and away games. In a year with the Grays, the real teams play more home than away. Tom King writes in the Telegraph that, when the original schedule was released, teams were warned to await word on the 8th team. Some did wait.

--Spike

Wooden U. Lykteneau said...

For the most part, that's true, though with 94 games and 7 opponents there are going to be some exceptions. The Rox, for example, play 49 at home and 45 away. Looking over the skeds of Worcester, New Jersey, Sussex (Quebec and Nashua don't have the new schedule posted yet) it's 47/47, so I'm willing to bet that Ottawa may have been given more home dates to help it establish its presence. I also noticed that the Tornadoes, Pride and Rox have split series, which is probably a "make good" as well as a means of giving teams a few more Fri-Sun gates, not to mention saving on a night's stay.

To tag onto Spike's insight further, this also puts more "Can" into the league, which has always been slightly embarrassing.

Anonymous said...

The split series may be a result of individual teams trading off specific dates based on who thinks he can sell more tickets when. In a series such as the former Nashua-Lynn rivalry, no one spends the night at the host club's city, so there's no need to play all four games at the same site.

I am surprised to hear about the 49/45 case. A team (say, Nashua before school lets out) might be so convinced that a given weeknight will sell poorly that it might give away the date for some other consideration. In these cases, though, wouldn't you want a "visitors bat last" situation to preserve league parity?

--Spike

Wooden U. Lykteneau said...

Spike -- What I did for the Rox was cut & paste their sked into Excel then do some sorts. Brockton & Nashua, as it so happens, play each other 15 times -- 10 times at Holman and only five times at Campanelli!

I remember from years past that there were always some teams that you ended up playing more -- some teams 12 games, some 13 and usually one team 14 times. Last year, they took great pains to ensure the shortest distances possible for the Grays, which led to some funky situations and similar uneven splits. The Spirit, for example, only played Quebec six times this past season.

I'm actually more intrigued that they chose to stick to 94 games rather than go back to 92 games, but perhaps that's a concession to the newer playoff format?

Perhaps when I have some down time, I can do a similar team-by-team anaylsis as I did last year. Lord knows, there's not much else to talk about in the offseason.