Road to Omaha - How the MCWS became a town's pride and joy - ESPN

OMAHA, Neb. — The true spirit of the Men's College World Series in Omaha is not found in a ballpark. Or a history museum. Or in the words of some bronze marker commemorating some amazing college baseball moment that took place on some amazing college baseball day, unleashed by some amazing college baseball player. Nor is it in a bar.

Anyone who comes to Omaha over the next two weeks for the 75th edition of the MCWS in its great and rightful home, seeking to dip themselves into the waters of what makes it one of America's greatest sports marriages, need only visit a place that combines all of the above: a well-worn red, white and blue baseball card shop on the south side of 13th Street.

Stadium View Sports Cards, owned and operated by local attorney-turned-de facto MCWS commissioner Greg Pivovar, contains pieces of ballparks, literal stacks of history worthy of any baseball museum: ticket stubs, baseballs, ball caps and posters of Series long gone. If you can catch the man himself behind the counter sifting through it all, he'll offer you a cold beer. So, yeah, it's a bar, too.

And, yes, Stadium View once had a view of a stadium. The stadium. Johnny Rosenblatt Stadium, built in 1949 and dangled as a lure to convince the NCAA's struggling baseball tournament to come to town one year later.

It has never left. Even though it did leave this neighborhood, originally built by Omaha's meatpacking community more than a century ago, and moved 2 miles away in 2011 to downtown Charles Schwab Field.

«We've tried to become a bigger event city, with more NCAA stuff, but this is still us,» Pivovar, or the man better called «Piv,» explained in April, as he cleaned out Stadium View's cobwebs ahead of this year's MCWS. «It is what defines