"There's only one thing more depressing come October than the end of baseball season: the sight of an empty ballpark," Emily Badger writes for The Atlantic. "It's a bitter scene for baseball lovers. But it’s an economic conundrum for cities, too."

Noting that most cities with both pro baseball and football teams now possess separate stadiums for each, the article points out the economic imprudence of multimillion dollar structures that attract tourists just 81 days out of the year.

But what to do with an open-air baseball stadium in the Midwest in mid-winter? the writer asks rhetorically.

"Progressive Field in Cleveland may have come up with the best solution yet to the empty ballpark. Last year for the first time, the team converted the field into a vast winter playground," says the writer, referring to Snow Days.

“When you have lemons, you make lemonade,” says the Cleveland Indians' Kurt Schloss. “In our particular case, we wanted to embrace the cold, embrace Northeast Ohio, because that’s what it is. You can’t put up palm trees and hope for sand.”

New this year is an ice rink that will host youth hockey tournaments and the Jan. 15 marquee matchup between Ohio State and the University of Michigan, which is expected to sell-out of the stadium.

"This is really kind of a brand new concept, it’s taking it into a wholly new dimension,” says Joe Marinucci from Downtown Cleveland Alliance. “I can’t imagine why a franchise would not want to use a facility like this,” he says, “when normally it would be dormant for four or five months.”

Read the rest of the report here.