Who gives a hoot?

Bush league.

That's a term with which baseball fans have been familiar since at least 1909. Broadly speaking, it refers to the minor leagues. More specifically, it is used to describe amateurish behavior.

Which is an apt description of how the Orem Owlz management has been acting about the name of the park in which it plays.

That name officially is Brent Brown Ballpark, a name that came courtesy of a $1 million arrangement between Utah Valley State College, where the stadium is located, and Brent Brown, the Provo auto dealer. But that name was negotiated without any involvement from the Orem Owlz, a short-season rookie-league baseball team.

For those of you unfamiliar with baseball's structure, short-season class A leagues are at the lowest rung of the ladder between amateurs and the major leagues. But you wouldn't know it from the way the team has been trying to flex its muscles.

The Owlz want local reporters to refer to the stadium as the Home of the Owlz. That isn't just a request. In an e-mail last week, the general manager threatened to pull the credentials of reporters who didn't comply with this mandate. The Deseret Morning News and the Provo Daily Herald said not to worry about it. They simply stopped covering the team's games on their own.

All of this is reminiscent of a spat a few years ago in Denver. Invesco paid millions of dollars to put its name on what used to be called Mile High Stadium, the city's NFL stadium. But the Denver Post refused to call it by the new name, insisting that Mile High was the name by which most people in Denver referred to the home of the Broncos. That controversy has now died away. Invesco is part of the Denver vocabulary today.

The greater issue, both there and here, has to do with journalistic independence. If the Post wanted to call the stadium Mile High, no one could force them to do otherwise. And if this paper wants to call the Owlz' home Brent Brown Ballpark or bush league field, that's up to the editors. The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees as much.

Frankly, this is an odd fight for a short-season rookie-league team to pick. Minor-league ball lives and dies with marketing, advertising and community good will. In the minors, there is little correlation between winning and attendance at games. It's all about selling the game as family entertainment.

That means teams need newspapers and the free advertising that accounts of the game provide. They need it a lot more than the newspapers need to take up space with game stories about which few people care.