The Minnesota Vikings are getting a replacement for the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. All should be just fine in the Land of 10,000 Lakes (which are fewer than in Wisconsin), right?

Not so fast, min venn, reports the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

The football team wants its fans closer to the action. The baseball guys simply want a baseball field that’s not an embarrassment.

But in the fast-track exercise of designing a new Vikings football stadium, a dispute over 20 feet of baseball foul line has made mixing the two a tricky fit.

With the architect’s first schematic design only weeks away, Vikings officials and members of the public authority supervising the project are at odds over how to squeeze a baseball field into a stadium designed primarily for football.

The impasse not only threatens to delay a nearly-billion-dollar project already facing tight deadlines, but also appears to be an early test of just how accommodating the Vikings will prove in the development of a multipurpose “people’s stadium.”

“The problem is you can’t put a diamond in a rectangle,” said University of Minnesota baseball coach John Anderson. His team hopes to take advantage of playing in the new downtown Minneapolis facility that will replace the Metrodome, which for decades has served as a warm and dry venue for hundreds of college and high school teams seeking an early start to the baseball season and refuge from nature’s worst. “Something’s got to give,” Anderson said.

The Vikings, hoping to put ticket holders and stadium suites as close to the action as any team in the NFL, favor a preliminary design that places the first row of seats 44 feet from the football playing field. Only one other recently built NFL stadium — Lucas Oil in Indianapolis, designed by HKS Inc., the architect for the Vikings stadium — puts ticket holders that close.

But that design squeezes some baseball dimensions.

The most glaring — a right-field foul line that extends 285 feet from home plate and a right-field power alley 319 feet away. Both distances are short by college and professional standards, and both are about 20 feet shorter than the design, already scaled back, favored by baseball coaches and the public stadium authority.

The Strib graphically demonstrates the issue, with the blue showing the “perfered” Vikings option:

You may have thought the replacement of the Metrodome with a domed football stadium ended indoor baseball in Minnesota as soon as the Metrodome deflates itself for the last time. After all, the Twins wanted and got an outdoor stadium.

For those unfamiliar, this is what outdoor football looked like in the state of Minnesota:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFsb4vIvLzI

I hate to be on the Vikings’ side of anything, but the baseball coaches are conveniently forgetting some history. In days of old, baseball parks were built shaped on city blocks. That was how Fenway Park has the Green Monster, the previous Yankee Stadium had its short right-field corner and deep left-center-field power alley, and the Polo Grounds, where the New York Giants played, had short fences but deep power alleys and center field. For that matter, before Dodger Stadium was built, the Los Angeles Dodgers played their first four seasons at the Los Angeles Coliseum, whose left field foul line was 251 feet east of home plate. (The joke was that the Coliseum was the only ballpark in the world that could seat 100,000 people and two outfielders.)

On the other hand, the state of Minnesota and/or its baseball and NFL teams got it reversed. Irrespective of the fact the Vikings played more games at the Metrodome than Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, football is meant to be played outdoors. It’d be nice to play baseball outdoors, but the spring doesn’t often cooperate when your stadium is as close to the North Pole as the Equator.

Meanwhile, on the other side of Interstate 94 (from WTMJ):

Could the Cubs new home be in Milwaukee (at least temporarily)? According to Gordon Wittenmeyer with the Chicago Sun-Times, the possibility may be closer to reality than many realize.

According to Wittenmeyer, the owners of the Cubs have always denied the possibility of having the team play at U.S. Cellular Field, where the White Sox play, temporarily during renovations of Wrigley Field.

“Cubs spokesman Julian Green said the plan — which called for all home games in April and May in 2014 and 2015 to be moved to Miller Park in Milwaukee — was just one of ‘a number of different options’ being considered and is now ‘off the table,’” said Wittenmeyer.

But they did say that playing at Miller Park have been considered “seriously” and the Brewers had been consulted.

“For now, the Cubs say they’ll play all their home games at Wrigley Field while the anticipated work is completed,” said Wittenmeyer.

“For now.”