The inaugural blog from Evans on Sports:

Cal State Bakersfield's baseball program gets going in two seasons. I expect a fall program will be in place in 2008, although I haven't seen any confirmation on that. The university says it will begin the program in the spring of 2009. It would be nice to get some game-action in for those players in the previous fall.

I thought CSUB would hire a young, up-and-coming coach, someone in his 30s who has been an assistant at a top program, to get the baseball program off the ground. But Bill Kernen's hiring is not a surprise in retrospect.

He's a little older, at 59. But CSUB is trying to get into the Big West Conference. Kernen was successful at Cal State Northridge, a Big West school. Baseball is probably second only to men's basketball in importance to Big West administrators (no one, of course, would admit that) because the Big West has teams that have won College World Series in the past. The Big West is one of the weakest men's basketball conferences in the nation. Kernen gives CSUB the intangible of having a successful (and well-respected) Big West coach from the past starting a new program.

George Culver, who coordinated much of the fundraising to get the baseball program off the ground, wanted that job. But one of the requirements was a college degree, which Culver doesn't have.

CSUB President Horace Mitchell could have waived that requirement. Coaches in the Cal State University system and elsewhere see "adjustments" to hiring requirements all the time. But there are some faculty at CSUB that fear the move to Division I will hurt academics and will make CSUB a sports factory that sacrifices academics for athletics. Mitchell didn't need to put gasoline on that fire, so he wasn't about to waive the college degree requirement.

The talk of having a new ball park in town, located at CSUB that will house both the CSUB and the Blaze: Don't see it happening. I don't see the city and the Blaze kicking in the millions of dollars it will take to get the ball park off the ground. Mitchell has said he thinks the university's involvement in such a park is solely the donation of the on-campus land. That's a sizeable donation: avoiding the purchase of land. But the construction costs aren't cheap.

What I expect: CSUB will eventually start a fundraiser to get the money to build a college-level park. It won't be up to the standards set by Major League Baseball for it's High Class A level of play, so the Blaze won't be a part of this and won't play any games at this park.

Sam Lynn Ball Park, which opened in 1941, will continue to house a Cal League team until some city builds a new ball park and lures the team away. Once that happens, as as our city continues to grow, perhaps a movement will get going to support the building of a pro ball park-caliber stadium.

Fresno built a Triple-A stadium after John Euless Park, the former home of Fresno's Cal League team, was condemned. Bakersfield officials have not shown they're that motivated to get a new stadium.  It will probably take the loss of the pro baseball team to get it done. And even then, there's no guarantee. Somebody's still got to pay for it, and there'd be too much flack for it to be tax dollars.