To be released November 1, 2010:

Rice President David Leebron announced today that the Rice Board of Trustees has approved a long-term lease of Recking Park to West University Little League for $10 million, beginning in 2012. Rice will discontinue its Division 1 baseball program.

“Many at Rice have enjoyed our baseball program, but in these challenging economic times, we must make hard decisions. The baseball program was outside our core mission as a university. Other universities do quite well without baseball programs. SMU discontinued its baseball program many years ago.”

Rice plans to use the $10 million to improve faculty parking and on-campus dining options for students and staff. Rice was unable to allocate even 1 per cent from the $1 billion capital fund campaign currently underway for these needed improvements, or support them through user fees.

President Leebron explained, “Our recent experience with the sale of KTRU’s transmitter and license led us to look for additional opportunities to liquidate underutilized assets, and leasing Reckling Park and discontinuing the baseball program compared favorably to the KTRU transaction. In fact, we wondered why we didn’t think of it first.”

KTRU was created by students, and operated almost entirely with a volunteer student staff, plus one paid administrator. In contrast, Rice had baseball for purely historical reasons, and had to support it with scholarships for athletes, 3 full-time paid coaches, plus much administrative staff.

KTRU cost Rice nothing to operate. The baseball program had significant operating costs beyond salaries.

As for the impact on the Rice community and the city at large, Leebron pointed out, “KTRU reached thousands of Houstonians every single day. The baseball team played typically less than 60 dates a year, only half of them at Reckling Park, and typically before crowds of only a couple of thousand fans. And it was always underutilized in terms of making an impact on the community. It rarely received more than a few column inches of coverage in the back pages of the Houston Chronicle sports section. Most students were indifferent to the games; rarely more than 100 of them attended a single game. Now seemed the right time to lease the stadium, as baseball is suffering from competition with video games and the internet as entertainment, particularly among young adults. Our alumni can always go watch the Astros, which occasionally employ former Rice baseball players.”

The Board of West University Little League expressed its great pleasure in acquiring the lease. “We are getting a first-rate facility that we can use almost year round. We will be able to better accommodate the over 1,200 children who play baseball in our program with this facility, forty times the number of baseball players at Rice.”

President Leebron noted, “I regret that we had to negotiate this deal in secret. I know it will irritate longtime fans of the Rice baseball program who were not given an opportunity to express their views on the wisdom of this decision. But frankly, we determined there just aren’t that many of them. And with the sale of KTRU, we couldn’t even broadcast the baseball games to those fans. Small as the number of fans may be, we knew that if they were allowed to express their views, the sale might not go through.”

(As you may have guessed, this is a parody). Original source »