Written by Thomas Moore

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Columbus Mayor Michael B. Coleman made headlines over the weekend by going public with his desire to bring an NBA team to Ohio’s capital city.

That’s all well and good and understandable. Franklin County recently purchased Nationwide Arena and the county needs people in the building, especially since the main tenant, the NHL’s Columbus Blue Jackets, are an afterthought in the town.

The question is where would this team come from? According to The Plain Dealer, NBA vice president of communications Tim Frank wrote in an e-mail that the league has no plans to expand the 30-team league and none of its members have applied for relocation.

We normally wouldn’t care about this – we don’t live in Columbus after all - but then we saw some chatter over the weekend on Twitter about an idea for the Blue Jackets to play 10 games a year in Cleveland and the Cavaliers to play a like number of games in Columbus.

We’re going to be nice here, so we’ll say that is one of the most unappealing ideas we’ve heard in a while. (Credit to Coleman, though, he’s not the one proposing that plan, he just wants to hijack a team from its current city).

Luckily Cavs owner Dan Gilbert took time away from his plan to further erode downtown Cleveland with his Horseshoe Casino to quash any idea of the Cavs playing their home games anywhere but in Cleveland.

There are several reasons why this kind of regional approach would never work, the first of which is the basic question of determining which games to move out of town.

It’s great if Columbus wants to have the games against the Timberwolves, Nets, Bucks, Bobcats and Kings. But why would those teams attract crowds? Fans in Columbus are going to want the Lakers, Celtics, Heat and Thunder. How would you go about selling that to Cavs fans in Cleveland?

On the flip side, hockey simply doesn’t work in Cleveland. It didn’t work with the Crusaders of the World Hockey Association and it didn’t work with the Barons in the NHL. Cleveland just isn’t a hockey town; it seems like it should be but the evidence is there that it’s not.

Plus, Cleveland is probably the last place you want to start talking about having a team play its home games elsewhere. From the late 1950s up until the 1980s fans had to deal with rumors of the Indians moving all over the country (more on this in a moment), the Cavs flirted with a move to Toronto during the dark years of Ted Stepien’s ownership, and we all know what happened with the Browns once Baltimore lifted its skirt and showed Art Modell a little bit of fleshy thigh.

Second, but just as important, is regionalization is bush league and has such a sepia-toned, 1950s vibe about it that doesn’t play in today’s sports world. The NBA was a regional league in its early days up to the 1960s – the most famous example is probably Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game on March 2, 1962. Chamberlain was playing for the Philadelphia Warriors but the game was played that night in Hershey, Pa., of all places.

Can you imagine if, while he was still with the Cavs, LeBron James had reached some historic milestone while playing a “home game” in Columbus?

Teams also tried the regional approach in the American Basketball Association, with Virginia, Florida, Dallas and Carolina trying to make it work. The Cougars, who split their home games between Greensboro (average attendance 12,000 a game), Charlotte (6,000) and Raleigh (3,000), were the only team of the bunch to have even moderate success with the plan.

“The feeling was the team belonged to Greensboro and when we played in Charlotte or Raleigh we were carpetbaggers,” former Carolina general manager Carl Scheer said in Terry Pluto’s 1990 book, Loose Balls. “Our expenses were high, because we had to maintain three offices in the three different cities and that meant three different staffs.”

“The regional franchise thing made travel a problem,” said former player Billy Cunningham. “We did a lot of busing to games in Raleigh and Charlotte, which made them feel like road games.”

Yep, sounds like a great plan to us.

This brings us to the Indians and their plan to play 25 “home games” a year in the New Orleans Superdome.

According to Jack Torry’s 1995 book, Endless Summers, the Tribe had flirted with moving to Minneapolis in 1958 and then Seattle in 1964. This led local businessman Vernon Stouffer, of Stouffer’s Food fame, to buy the team in 1966. At the time Stouffer had something that previous owners did not – money. He had built Stouffer Foods from a small restaurant at 9th Street and Euclid Avenue into a nationwide corporation that by 1966 had 46 restaurants, five motels, 8,000 employees and $79 million in gross sales.

Stouffer had plenty of big ideas and actually put money into the Indians, adding a fifth minor league team and increasing the scouting budget so the Indians could compete for talent – among them outfielder John Lowenstein, catcher Alan Ashby, and infielders Buddy Bell and Chris Chambliss.

The Indians also nearly signed future Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Seaver (and not after his prime, either). Baseball commissioner William Eckert had voided Atlanta’s attempt to sign Seaver out of USC and the Indians were one of just three teams to enter a special drawing for Seaver’s rights. The Tribe lost the drawing to the Mets - this was still Cleveland, after all - but things were finally looking up for the Wahoos.

The situation took a turn for the worse when Stouffer merged his company with Litton Industries, exchanging his own company’s stock for $21.5 million worth of stock in Litton, which made the microwaves used to heat Stouffer’s frozen foods.

The stock took a huge hit in the first quarter of 1968, dropping Stouffer’s personal stake below $9 million. With finances tight, Stouffer cut the team’s $1 million annual budget for player development by 30 percent, cut the scouting staff from 24 to nine, and started looking for new revenue streams (this might be a good time for the Dolans to stop reading less they get any ideas).

Enter David Dixon of New Orleans.

Dixon played a major role in bringing the NFL Saints to his hometown (he even came up with the name) and led efforts to have the Superdome built. Realizing the city would need tenants for the new arena, in 1971 Dixon began looking for baseball teams in financial trouble and offer the owner the chance to play 25 games a year in New Orleans.

His search led him to Cleveland and the troubled Stouffer. The two quickly reached a deal where, beginning in 1974, the Indians would play between 27 and 33 games each year in the Superdome, while keeping around 50 games at Cleveland Stadium. Dixon and his team of investors would pay Stouffer $2.5 million for 25 percent of the team.

Stouffer thought it was a dream come true, that it would solve all of his financial problems and that a regional approach “will be the coming thing in baseball. Fifty home games are enough.”

Luckily Hal Lebovitz of The Plain Dealer and Bob August of The Cleveland Press didn’t share Stouffer’s enthusiasm, correctly pointing out that losing home games would be the beginning of the end for the Indians in Cleveland.

Stouffer’s fellow American League owners were also not on board (Oakland owner Charlie Finley, being Charlie Finley, didn’t like the idea because “I might want to move to New Orleans myself”) and eventually the plan faded away.

So we’re sorry you have an arena to fill, Columbus, but that’s not our problem.

We like our teams just fine where they are.