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The Boise Hawks have a problem with their home ballpark, Memorial Stadium, that conventional solutions will not address:

The sun.

Its glorious but caloric rays have been "broiling" fans sitting on the metal bleachers along the first-base line ever since Memorial opened in 1989. It's such a "deep-seated" problem for the Hawks that the team president says he's watched fans turn around and go home after coming up to the ticket window and finding that only first-base side tickets are available for that night's game.

The Hawks hope to debut a solution Friday for their second home game of the short Northwest League season:

A blimp.

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Welcome our new dirigible overlords! (@Jeff_Eiseman on Twitter)

The team plans to fly a 30-foot blimp, filled with helium, that is to be tied to the ground with ropes that can be lowered as the sun sets. If it works as a solution -- and we have landed astronauts on the moon, so maybe it will -- the cost will run perhaps $20,000 for the gas. 

This is real, this is happening, the Idaho Statesman reports:

Jeff Eiseman, the president of Agon Sports & Entertainment, the Hawks’ new owner, attended a game last June and sat in the first-base bleachers to see what the fuss was about. After a scorching day on the metal bleachers, he put in a call to the architects designing a new stadium for the Augusta GreenJackets, Agon’s other team, searching for what he calls “a $10 solution.”

His architects slept on the idea before coming back with an idea for a blimp. Eiseman knows it might not work, but he said it’s worth a shot.

“If it’s a colossal failure, it’s a colossal failure,” he said. “But at least we tried something. This park has been here for 30 years and nobody has done anything about it. Now, maybe nobody did anything about it because they’re all smarter than us and realized they couldn’t. But we’re at least trying.”

This is an artist's rendering of what the blimp will look like in flight:

'We come in peace!'
'We come in peace!' (Boise Hawks)

Kind of like a Martian spaceship in "War of the Worlds," not to get all sinister.

So, why not a permanent structure, such as tall sun-wall of some kind? Too expensive, because it would require Memorial Stadium to get up to code with the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Hawks, a Class A affiliate of the Rockies, can't afford it. The Rockies don't own the team, so it's not their responsibility. The Hawks have been trying to build a new ballpark, or improve the old one, without much success.

Other teams have been more conventional:

Looks great, right? Except:

Apparently that's a non-starter in Idaho, and it's under$tandable why not. So for now, it's time to release the blimp. Since blimps aren't (supposed to be) filled with hydrogen anymore, there's very little chance of it exploding by itself like our infamous zeppelin friend, the Hindenburg. But what about a "Black Sunday" scenario?

Still hard to believe the Steelers came back from that to win the Super Bowl.

No, the Boise blimp should be just fine. It's only a matter of, will it work? As The Statesman points out, the sun is undefeated since birth.