It's now official. The International Bowling Hall of Fame is going to pack up it's multi-colored shoes and hit the road for Texas.

The pattern here is a little too reminiscent of recent decades where big business has departed solid, Midwestern, union towns and bolted for the sun belt. This, obviously, is not a factory, but it is a shrine to the sport of the factory worker, and kind of a sad loss for all the true fans of the sport it leaves behind.

On the other hand, how many true fans does the sport have? I'm not talking about people who like to bowl. I love to go to an alley and bowl a few frames. I'm talking about people who watch bowling on TV. People who know the schedule of the Pro Bowlers Tour. People who can name the top bowlers right now. Are those folks still out there?

The museum reports hosting about 27-thousand people last year. That comes out to about 74 people a day. And of that number, how many were Cardinal fans coming to see the Cards memorabilia also housed in the building? How many were lost tourists who needed to use the john?

This clearly doesn't rank up there with a foreign purchase of Anheuser-Busch. This is a slight bruising of our collective civic ego. No one wants another town to be chosen over theirs. In this case, the bowling mecca will go from Cardinals' neighbor to Texas Rangers' neighbor. That seems a little bit like an affront to our far superior baseball team.

But we should all probably get over it. The hall will now be the property of Ballpark Village! At least now we'll be able to say there's actually a building on the site! And maybe, someday, we'll actually go walking down that street to find something with more mas appeal than the world's largest bowling pins.

Am I missing something here? Let me know in comments.