Not going to happen. The UBC people are adamant about having a ballpark on Point Grey, for several good reasons. The main one has to do with time: when they have to go to a game or practice at The Nat, it ends up taking a huge chunk out of the day. This, of course, would be the case for a waterfront ballpark, too.

In case you haven’t heard, the U. of Oregon is (with Phil Knight’s money) putting up a ballpark in Eugene that will also be used by the Emeralds. If you could figure out a way to locate a AAA-class ballpark in Point Grey…

2) Build anything around the railway station and you’re going to have to do a whole lot of environmental clean-up - and I don’t just mean the the Cobalt Hotel crowd.

3) What isn’t already developed, as I hear it, is actually land that is claimed by native folks of various description, which is why so much land around Granville Island is industrial, even though it’d be worth a fortune to develop.

That’s why the Caps are so keen to build on the other side of the waterfront - no native claims, nobody to kick out, and though it’s an environmental nightmare around the railyards at Waterfront Station, they wouldn’t necessarily have to dig into it to lay a stadium down.

In all honesty, I think a combined baseball/soccer stadium makes a lot of sense. Just make the seats at one section of the stadium movable (a la BC Place), and you’d have a AAA-ready ballpark, right where people get off work by the thousands, right on numerous transit lines - and UBC Baseball could slide right in there during the spring, thus giving the team an NCAA-worthy ballpark.

The NIMBYs can keep a soccer team at bay for years, but can they keep baseball (and the very politically-connected UBC crowd) at bay as well?
I doubt it.