You saw this coming

The Oakland County Cruisers will not have a ballpark to call their own this season. That's no surprise to the people who follow the Frontier League.

The Cruisers announced Saturday – one day before league meetings in Avon, Ohio – that funding for a ballpark in Waterford Township, Mich., has fallen through.

The Cruisers planned to open a new 4,000 seat stadium – called Diamond at The Summit – behind the Summit Place Mall. The team held a groundbreaking ceremony last December and Rob Hilliard, pictured, one of the owners, said earlier this year that construction would start by mid-April. The Cruisers had arranged to play at Eastern Michigan University until a July 16 series against the Wild Things, which was was to be Oakland County's home opener in the new temporary ballpark. The final phase of the ballpark's construction was to be completed after the 2010 season.

According to the Cruisers, they have rescheduled all but one of their home series. They will use the ballparks at Eastern Michigan, Oakland University and something called Ford Field in Livonia, Mich. I haven't seen an updated scheduled to tell you where the Wild Things will be playing the Cruisers July 16-18 and July 31-Aug. 2.

The ballpark's original $9 million funding plan consisted of a combined Small Business Administration/U.S. Department of Agriculture hybrid financing system. When that fell through, the Cruisers hooked up with a Southern California private lending group, working on a construction loan and takeout financing package.

Hilliard told the Oakland Press that the ballpark could be ready for the 2011 season.

“Clearly, we hope and believe this is the case given the timing,” Hilliard said, “but we’ve been at this for three years, so I don’t think we could honestly say anything at this point other than the people we’re dealing with now are very committed to getting this done and they understand what our time frame is.”

Money from sales of 2010 tickets and corporate sponsorships has been kept in an escrow account. All interest earned on those funds will be applied to the full cost of tickets and sponsorships for the 2011 season.

For the Frontier League, this is bad P.R. The league had to know that you can't build a ballpark in three months, so it should have stepped in months ago and made the Cruisers schedule their home games at another location or make them (again) a traveling team. The warning signs were apparent last winter, when the Cruisers started selling home games to opponents. They did talk to the Wild Things about purchasing home dates but, according to one source, the Cruisers found the Wild Things' owners too troublesome to deal with, so the idea was dropped.

The Cruisers' ownership has been shabby at best, shady at worst. It has likely killed the Detroit market for the Frontier League.

According to the Oakland Press, the Cruisers are likely to be sold. Remember, the Frontier league has a new team in Woodstock, Ill., coming into the league in 2011.

Read the story here.