MLB Stadium Saga: Oakland/Tampa Bay/Southside

[bosrs1]

On 6/1/2021 at 3:00 PM, GDAWG said:

 

Oracle Park is a beautiful stadium.  Better than that monstrosity the Rangers are playing.  

 

Honestly I've always felt Oracle is overrated. If it hadn't been built on the water it's an otherwise cramped and somewhat pedestrian park. I went to Coors Field for the first time recently and was shocked how similar they feel, just with Coors being bigger, better sightlined and more spacious (and thus better IMO). That said, Oracle is still a nice park, and it's far and away better than it's nearest competitor across the Bay. 

 

And yes it's better than the Rangers new Paul Bunyan sized grill. 

[bosrs1]

2 hours ago, TBGKon said:

True, but Inter Miami build this on the site of old Lockhart Stadium in Fort Lauderdale, but still wants their own stadium in Miami proper.

 

 

What's wrong with that stadium that they want to bail on it already?

[Ferdinand Cesarano]

4 hours ago, SFGiants58 said:

That stadium (financed privately and with back door subsidies) made the domination of the Giants possible in that market, since the stadium was now a destination instead of a monument to Horace Stoneham’s immense stupidity.

 

Hold on, there.  

Candlestick Park was highly flawed, and pales in comparison to the current park.  But if the old stadium was a monument to anything regarding Stoneham, it would be a monument to his wisdom at having taken Walter O'Malley's advice and moving the Giants to San Francisco, thereby preserving one of baseball's great rivalries, rather than moving the club to Minneapolis as he had originally intended to do.  Every fan of baseball history thus owes Stoneham a debt of gratitude.

There is a new book on Stoneham out that I will soon pick up; it is called Forty Years a Giant, by Steve Treder.  I am very disappointed that no audio book seems to exist.  However, I hope to listen in the coming days to an interview with the author on Tim Hanlon's "Good Seats Still Available" podcast.

[GDAWG]

36 minutes ago, bosrs1 said:

 

What's wrong with that stadium that they want to bail on it already?

 

They want their permanent home to be in Miami proper, not Fort Lauderdale.  

[Ferdinand Cesarano]

3 hours ago, SFGiants58 said:

MLS in general should remove the SSS requirement from the league. 

 

It's not a requirement.

 

- signed, the Seattle Sounders and NYCFC

[waltere]

I may be wrong, but isn't the case with MLS that their preferred option is an SSS, but they'll allow otherwise as long as there's ownership crossover between the team and the stadium, because it's about not having their teams be tenants of somebody else. Hence how Arthur Blank's Atlanta FC are allowed to share Megatron's butthole with the Falcons, NYCFC sharing with the Yankees, and I assume the Sounders must therefore share owners with the Seahawks.

[Red Comet]

15 minutes ago, Ferdinand Cesarano said:

 

It's not a requirement.

 

- signed, the Seattle Sounders and NYCFC

NYCFC isn’t for lack of trying, though. Just a cursory look into the situation tells me I really need to look into that whole saga because it looks like one hell of a doozy. I don’t think NYCFC is in any danger of moving at all but it really is reminiscent of the DC United situation with RFK and that team’s near 2 decade long fight for a stadium site.

[SFGiants58]

1 hour ago, Ferdinand Cesarano said:

 

Hold on, there.  

Candlestick Park was highly flawed, and pales in comparison to the current park.  But if the old stadium was a monument to anything regarding Stoneham, it would be a monument to his wisdom at having taken Walter O'Malley's advice and moving the Giants to San Francisco, thereby preserving one of baseball's great rivalries, rather than moving the club to Minneapolis as he had originally intended to do.  Every fan of baseball history thus owes Stoneham a debt of gratitude.

 

That's not the stupid part. That was incredibly intelligent of him to do. His stupidity comes from not doing his due diligence when it came to scouting a proper stadium site and finding a better patch of land for such a venture.  That's why I called it a "monument to his stupidity." Maybe "monument to his naivete" would be more appropriate. 

 

1 hour ago, Ferdinand Cesarano said:

There is a new book on Stoneham out that I will soon pick up; it is called Forty Years a Giant, by Steve Treder.  I am very disappointed that no audio book seems to exist.  However, I hope to listen in the coming days to an interview with the author on Tim Hanlon's "Good Seats Still Available" podcast.

 

I'd recommend Home Team by Robert F. Garratt (emeritus professor of English and humanities at the University of Puget Sound) for a Giants-centered perspective. There's an audiobook available, which should be fun. 

[Sec19Row53]

On 5/31/2021 at 5:18 PM, the admiral said:

Plenty of daylight between "it's gonna take time to leave" and "insufficient infrastructure and the folly of only having one way to reach the premises." Any mass gathering takes time to leave. Getting out of a Brewers game is like eating crap for dessert.  I don't know to what extent they could fix it. There's not a transit culture in Wisconsin.

You're not wrong, but that doesn't mean you're all right.

 

I've been to Nationals Park 4-5 times. have you ever walked from Nats park to downtown DC? I have twice. Once because the game went to extras and the train didn't run when it was over, and once when we decided we didn't want to wait in the lines to get on board with everyone else, who coincidentally left at the same time as us because any mass gathering will take time to leave.

 

Anyway, my views have been made. I'm only making my horse deader. Where mass transit works, fantastic. Where it doesn't work, fantastic as well. I like more grey and less black/white.

[The_Admiral]

Yeah, no situation is perfect, especially in an early-to-bed town like DC, where everything shuts down at 11 so that people can get up bright and early to go do evil. I still find crowded public transit much less enervating than trying to get out of a bottlenecked parking lot. That's just me.

[The_Admiral]

2 hours ago, bosrs1 said:

Honestly I've always felt Oracle is overrated. If it hadn't been built on the water it's an otherwise cramped and somewhat pedestrian park.

 

If my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle. It wouldn't be cramped if they hadn't built it where they built it, but the waterfront was the point. It's great. I just wish the team could give up the ghost on trying to sell the naming rights and call it Willie Mays Field. 

 

Candlestick was bad for the Giants but a lot better for the 49ers than Lego Stadium has been. They really should have built a new stadium on that parcel and barnstormed around the Bay for a few years till it was ready (Stanford, Berkeley, Oakland, aforementioned Willie Mays Field). 

[SFGiants58]

24 minutes ago, the admiral said:

Yeah, no situation is perfect, especially in an early-to-bed town like DC, where everything shuts down at 11 so that people can get up bright and early to go do evil. I still find crowded public transit much less enervating than trying to get out of a bottlenecked parking lot. That's just me.

You think that’s bad? Imagine if they’d been forced to build the stadium near Dulles or at one of the NoVa sites.

[Red Comet]

If Horace Stoneham taught us anything, it’s that you should visit stadium sites day and night. 

[DG_ThenNowForever]

41 minutes ago, Sec19Row53 said:

 

Anyway, my views have been made. I'm only making my horse deader. Where mass transit works, fantastic. Where it doesn't work, fantastic as well. I like more grey and less black/white.

 

I don't think this is a unique viewpoint. Yes, things that are good are good.

 

All else being equal, we're better served by investments in transit than highways. Especially in 2021, but would have been nice in 1950-2000.

[Digby]

I enjoy drinking a lot so mass transit is always preferable to me. This as much as anything is why I have historically been lukewarm on MLS. But there are like barely 10-15 markets in North America where public transit is even a realistic option and Tampa is not one as far as I know? 

[bosrs1]

50 minutes ago, the admiral said:

 

If my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle. It wouldn't be cramped if they hadn't built it where they built it, but the waterfront was the point. It's great. I just wish the team could give up the ghost on trying to sell the naming rights and call it Willie Mays Field. 

 

Candlestick was bad for the Giants but a lot better for the 49ers than Lego Stadium has been. They really should have built a new stadium on that parcel and barnstormed around the Bay for a few years till it was ready (Stanford, Berkeley, Oakland, aforementioned Willie Mays Field). 

 

Nah, the Candlestick site sucked. Coldest place in California in mid-summer you could ever watch a night game. That was the one thing that's ok with the move. Yes they hemmed themselves in and built a tiny, cramped and dreary ballpark by modern standards. But the location alone was miles better than Candlestick, and about 15 degrees warmer any given summer night. 

[Ferdinand Cesarano]

1 hour ago, SFGiants58 said:

That's not the stupid part. That was incredibly intelligent of him to do. His stupidity comes from not doing his due diligence when it came to scouting a proper stadium site and finding a better patch of land for such a venture.  That's why I called it a "monument to his stupidity." Maybe "monument to his naivete" would be more appropriate. 

 

That's a good point.  (Unlike Candlestick Point, which was not a good point for a ballpark.)

 

 

1 hour ago, SFGiants58 said:

I'd recommend Home Team by Robert F. Garratt (emeritus professor of English and humanities at the University of Puget Sound) for a Giants-centered perspective. There's an audiobook available, which should be fun. 

 

Wow, great!  Thanks for the tip on that.  I have just bought in in Audible.

 

 

Edit: In the podcast interview, Treder says that Garratt encouraged him to write his Stoneham book.

[TBGKon]

14 hours ago, bosrs1 said:

 

What's wrong with that stadium that they want to bail on it already?

It was never intended to be their home.  They intended it to house their lower tier squad plus their academy.  Its aluminum and modular, so its cheap, but looks nice.

 

This was the former Lockhart Stadium on that site, home to the original NASL Fort Lauderdale Strikers, MLS Miami Fusion, and countless high school football games.  Needless to say it's a nice upgrade.

 

[bosrs1]

18 hours ago, waltere said:

I may be wrong, but isn't the case with MLS that their preferred option is an SSS, but they'll allow otherwise as long as there's ownership crossover between the team and the stadium, because it's about not having their teams be tenants of somebody else. Hence how Arthur Blank's Atlanta FC are allowed to share Megatron's butthole with the Falcons, NYCFC sharing with the Yankees, and I assume the Sounders must therefore share owners with the Seahawks.

 

I'm not even sure it's ownership cross over so much as its control of their revenues. In so many rental situations the team has to split revenue with the landlord which is why rentals are usually not preferred.  But there are exceptions.

 

Also shocked no one remembered the longest such non-SSS situation in the league up in New England. 

[Red Comet]

49 minutes ago, bosrs1 said:

Also shocked no one remembered the longest such non-SSS situation in the league up in New England. 

Robert Kraft owns the New England Revolution. My guess for having them still play at Gillette is so he can fill dates where the stadium would otherwise sit empty. After all, he did fund Gillette Stadium entirely out of his own pocket so it makes sense he’d want as many dates filled as possible.