The Pecan Park Eagle

Getting the Buff Stadium home plate out of its original ballpark site within the Finger’s museum is proving to be a technological challenge. It apparently doesn’t want to go.

An e-mail from Houston Sports Museum curator Tom Kennedy and an article by David Barron on page 2 C of this morning’s Aug. 15th Houston Chronicle sports section have essentially confirmed some better, if still incomplete news about the future of the Finger family’s Houston Sports Museum.

Owner Rodney Finger is committed to resurrecting the museum in some form through either or both of his remaining stores at Willowbrook or Clute, Texas, but clear decisions on the exact form this will take are down the line of priorities in the company’s business of closing the current Gulf Freeway location and dealing with a number of other transition issues tied into the store and current museum site closing.

The really good news here is simply a confirmation that the Finger family caring about our local baseball and other sports history continues as a multi-generational commitment in some form. At some point, the museum will open again as either a one or two store site and probably reach more interested fans than it ever saw in recent years at the Gulf Freeway location.

It’s too bad that we are losing our direct connection to the site of Buffalo Stadium, the home of Houston professional baseball from 1928 to 1961, but we are grateful that the Finger family cared enough to keep it alive as long as they did.

Whatever the Finger’s interests decides still falls short of the goal of building either a Houston Baseball Museum, or a Greater Houston History Museum that incorporates baseball into its list of deserving and influential local institutions that have helped make Houston who it became over time. Isn’t either of those historical preservation goals germane to the question: What could we do with some or all of that presently rotting away space at the soul-vacated Astrodome?

For the umpteen-hundredth time, just thought I’d ask.