Stadium talk once again put on hold

Friday, April 28, 2006 | 9:07 a.m.

As soon as the talk died down of relocating a Major League Baseball franchise to Las Vegas, Las Vegas 51s President Don Logan was hoping he could rekindle interest among civic leaders in building a new baseball stadium for his triple-A team.

At least that was the hope until those same civic leaders decided this week that the valley needs another arena more than it needs another ballpark.

"The talk now about an arena ... kind of tells you where you stand in the minds of some of the political leaders in the community when they would rather build a brand-new arena where we already have four of them," Logan said, referring to the Thomas & Mack Center and venues at Mandalay Bay, MGM Grand and the Orleans.

City and county officials on Wednesday announced the formation of a task force to study whether Las Vegas needs a new arena - and in the same breath stated that the area needs a new 20,000-seat arena to replace the 23-year-old Thomas & Mack.

"That's kind of a tacit way of letting you know where you stand in their minds in terms of what's a priority - and we're just not a priority," Logan said.

Momentum for a new triple-A stadium had been in the 51s' favor until a private group's attempt in 2004 to bring the Montreal Expos to Las Vegas pushed the 51s to the back burner. Talk last winter of the Florida Marlins expressing an interest in moving further dashed the 51s' hopes of resurrecting the discussion of a new stadium.

In the meantime, Logan and the 51s will have to be content with playing their games at 23-year-old Cashman Field, the fourth-oldest stadium among the 30 triple-A ballparks; only the stadiums in Tacoma, Wash.; Columbus, Ohio; and Nashville, Tenn., are older.

Cashman Field, Logan said, is out of date from both a player development and a spectator's perspective because it lacks many of the amenities of newer stadiums.

"When I go on the road and see some of the other facilities (in the Pacific Coast League) and see what it's done for the economies in those cities, what it's done for the areas of the towns that they're in, what it does for the player development process ... it reaffirms that (building a new stadium) is the right thing to do for us.

"But it's got to have cooperation, and the appetite's just not there."