Amid all the frantic sandbagging and levee building, Davenport's minor league baseball team has been forced out of town by high water for the third time in the past decade. The Quad-City River Bandits, a Class A Midwest League team, are playing their home games on higher, drier ground in Illinois, across the swollen Mississippi River.
Teams hate the locker rooms and the drainage well, the drainage is lousy.
Home plate was floating along the first base line yesterday, slowly moving with the current. Only the tip of the white cover on the pitching mound could be seen through the brown floodwaters. Colorful ads on the outfield wall Blue Bunny ice cream, AC Delco auto parts and Iowa-American Water Co. were reflected in about 3 feet of water. Now he and six other team employees are looking for new jobs. The current flooding has fueled debate over whether Davenport should build permanent flood protection.