#OnDeck: The apparently inevitable inconvenience of an MLB stadium
Building new stadiums, or renovating old ones, is hard. They're huge, they're expensive, some of them are hiding a huge rodent population, taxpayers don't necessarily want to pay for them, and it can be difficult and time consuming to then trick taxpayers into paying for them.
*Sigh*
Still, it's a process that is going on somewhere in Major League Baseball, seemingly at all times. At the moment, multiple major American cities (and their surrounding suburbs) are facing the aggravations of the process for the sake of more aesthetically pleasing and/or functional baseball stadiums, with varying levels of outcry.
Chicago is a terrible city to experience winter. A warning of snow in Pennsylvania likely means people have been shuttered in their dwellings for days in the midwest, food supplies running low and packs of coyotes wandering the streets. On top of that, the annual spring greeting that is baseball has not successfully counteracted winter's misery, given the Cubs' ineptitude of the last many, many years. This season, though, things seem different – Joe Maddon is there, Jon Lester heads the rotation, and Theo Epstein is about to hit the kill switch on his master plan.
But some of the differences will be structural, in the form of historic Wrigley Field. The team wasn't the only aspect of Cubs baseball ownership wanted to revamp, as the over 100-year-old baseball icon is getting a few adjustments made this offseason.
This has led to questions from fans and other locals; how long will the renovations take to complete? Will the team be able to play in the stadium by opening day? Where's everybody going to park with construction crews taking up all the spots in the surrounding neighborhood? Will the legions of rats pouring out of the construction site be at war or join forces with the coyotes?
One of the biggest problems with the renovations began when the Cubs renovated the green lot near the intersection of Racine Avenue and Grace Street. Shortly after construction there began, [local resident Terie] Kata said, rats began overrunning her neighborhood. .
"The rats have been running rampant. I'm not kidding you," Kata said. "There are people in the alley and there are still rats running around and it's daylight."
To be fair, no one could verify that the rats were a direct result of renovations at Wrigley Field, but the timing of their emergence was highly suspect. Someday, when the construction is complete (circa 2018), fans will hopefully be able to take in a game on the north side without having to tuck their pants into their socks.
The Braves caught a lot of people off guard with the announcement of their planned move to a new stadium in 2017. Mixed reviews tended to lean toward negative, with objections raised by local taxpayers who would pay for it, street vendors who have already faced a temporary ban, and Braves fans who've realized that the team's surprise decision to rebuild this winter means the last two years at The Ted aren't going to feature a contender.
It'll likely still say "Atlanta" on the Braves' jerseys in 2017, but they'll be playing half an hour north of the city in Cobb County. But the name most central to the Braves' fleeing from downtown Turner Field to the Atlanta suburbs has become Cobb County commissioner Tim Lee's.
The team claims the new location is more central to their true fans, and a recent council vote gave the green light to preliminary work on a trolley system that will allow all those true fans to get to the stadium with ease. But Lee - after being rather quiet about the $400 million stadium agreement - blamed the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for being too recusant in its coverage, and refused them any interviews moving forward.
A compromise was reached in that Lee agreed to an email interview, which instantly enraged him when a question was asked regarding a lawyer Lee had hired without consulting anyone else involved, from the other comissioners to the residents of his district (this is illegal). Lee had denied hiring the attorney, a denial that was made questionable when an email surfaced proving that he had hired the lawyer in question.
Lee explained it all away by claiming the guy had worked for free. This was deemed unlikely by at least one former member of the field, and tension grew even more palpable in Atlanta and its surrounding counties. The AJC wrote when the situation worsened that Cobb County used to be "a model of competent, lean government," and all it seems to have taken to turn it into a body of suspicions and half-truths is a baseball stadium.
But the Braves' SunTrust Stadium is only a blueprint at this point, whereas some troublesome monuments have already stood for decades. Everyone knows the almost 50-year-old Oakland Coliseum is a collapsing monolith that is occasionally flooded with raw sewage. It's a problem that the team has attempted to repair for years; here's Jim Edmonds in 1996, who as an opposing player was apparently put on "coliseum tarp duty:"
The Athletics still have a lot of work to do on the Coliseum; so much that they'd rather just leave it behind and start over somewhere else, on sites in Fremont or Port of Oakland.
But with that not happening, Oakland and the Coliseum Joint Powers Authority decided to face some of their complaints - the tarped-over upper seats, the obscured view of the Oakland hills by Mount Davis, the sewage problem - by installing a brand new score board.
Granted, it's a very big LED scoreboard - and there are two of them, each 36 feet by 145 feet. They will be futuristic, glowing crowns on top of a fading relic that may indeed improve the fan experience. It's just that not a lot of fans will see it, given the repelling nature of the stadium's many other problems and Oakland is, like Atlanta, rebuilding. Sort of. It's hard to tell with Billy Beane.
Speaking of reading people, the Rays' stadium issues are caught up in human emotions. Long considered the most toilet-like facility in professional baseball, rumors of the Rays leaving Tropicana Field, or Florida in general, have become routine - the Rays are Expos fans' number one source of hope.
St. Petersburg mayor Rick Kriseman has had trouble rattling his city council into action when it comes to the city vs. team debate. The Rays wanted permission to check out potential moving sites in the area, and the council wanted to know if they would still want a share in revenue of the Tropicana Field site, even after they leave. Team president Brian Auld said that per their agreement with the city, yes, they would still share in those revenues, but maybe that could be discussed later?
The council didn't like his tone.
"Council members were irritated by the Rays' response to a question about whether the team would retain rights to share proceeds from development on the Trop site even after it decided to leave. Rays president Brian Auld accurately answered that the Rays' use agreement for the dome calls for those proceeds to be shared and said the issue could be resolved later. But he spoke like a hard negotiator when council members wanted a warmer, more accommodating response."
Auld's tone of voice has caused the St. Petersburg city council to rethink the lease that keeps the Rays in Tropicana Field until 2027.
Is there anywhere that the stadium construction process is not thwarted by rat swarms or hitting the wrong tonal pitch? In Cleveland, Progressive Field is getting some work done to add fan entertainment, a new entrance, and reconstructed bullpens. But the region is getting hammered by relentless snow - surely some atrocity has occurred that has put the crew far behind? Have they all frozen in place and executives have been forced to wait until April for them to thaw? Has an intrusive backhoe accidentally unearthed a cursed ancient burial ground?
Nope. Everything's fine, reports team president Mark Shapiro at the team's winter festival. Some would argue it's sort of weird that the team refuses to disclose the total cost of the work, but they are satiated by Shapiro's assurance that the project is privately funded and will not impose on the organization's payroll.
I'm fairly certain that organizing a massive construction project in a crowded city in the middle of winter isn't as simple as it is in SimCity, and perhaps that's why these ventures seem so disastrous before their conclusion. Walking into a new facility fresh off the blueprints is a draw for fans, and the excitement that perhaps the dawning of a new era will translate onto the field as well is undeniable (if far from assured). Hopefully, a town is able to forget something inadvertent and terrible, like a plague of rats, that results from a stadium's work, but is able to remember the more purposeful malfeasances in the process so that people don't keep getting away with them.