Midwest League OKs sale

MARION, Ill. -- Minor-league baseball's Midwest League agreed Monday to the sale of one of its Indiana teams to a group headed by a prominent Illinois attorney but took no action on the group's possible push to move the club to southern Illinois.\nThe Midwest League's board of directors last month tabled the possible sale of the South Bend Silver Hawks to John Simmons' Chautauqua Heights LLC, saying it needed more details from Simmons and offering him a chance to resubmit his proposal for the Class A team.\nDuring a meeting Monday in Chicago, the board of the 14-team league signed off on the Simmons group's application of a "control interest transfer" but "took no action to approve or disapprove the relocation (of the team) at this time," the league said in a brief news release.\nSimmons, who attended Monday's meeting, deferred immediate comment about its outcome, citing the sensitivity of the still-unfinished talks.\nGeorge Spelius, commissioner of the Beloit, Wis.-based Midwest League, did not immediately return messages seeking comment.\nMonday's development comes as Simmons presses on with construction of a $16 million Marion ballpark he has said he hopes to have opened by the start of the 2007 season, with a Midwest League team in place there.\nIn shelving Simmons' initial request, the Midwest League's board last month found Marion -- located more than 500 miles from some of the league's communities -- to be unreasonably far and costly for teams to reach by bus, the league's attorney, Richard Nussbaum, has said.\nLast summer, Simmons' group said it had entered into a definitive purchase and sale agreement for the Silver Hawks, an Arizona Diamondbacks Class A affiliate that has been in South Bend since 1988.\nMike Thiessen, Simmons' consultant, said then that no decision on whether the team would be moved to Marion would be made until Simmons' group took ownership of the club.\nSimmons secured a loan covering most of the ballpark's expected price tag. Marion has raised its sales tax on most items by one-quarter of 1 percent, with half of that increase earmarked to help repay the loan.\nSimmons already owns the South Atlantic League's Savannah (Ga.) Sand Gnats of Class A, though he has said he has no plans to bring them to Illinois.\nMarion's mayor, Bob Butler, called Monday's action "a big step in the right direction."\n"Of course, we're exhilarated," he said, confident that the Silver Hawks' relocation to Marion eventually will go through. "I think Simmons is a first-class operator, I think Marion is a logical place for such a facility, and all the elements necessary to make for a successful undertaking are just about in place"