Marshall McLuhan likened the effect of being in places like the Astrodome to being in a pinball machine. Domes and Astroturf enter into the conversation of baseball lovers only in questions such as, Have they been worse for baseball than the designated hitter rule? But the sterility of places like the Astrodome, Three Rivers, and Riverfront turned the old stadiums that survived into shrines. Yearly, the converted make pilgrimages to these places much the way medieval pilgrims wound their way past a series of cathedrals in southern France and northern Spain on their way to Santiago de Compostela, where the body of Saint James was miraculously preserved. Baseball fans wind their way through Chicago to bear witness to the ivy of Wrigley, and this year, to attend funeral services at Comiskey Park. Then it's on to Detroit, to pay homage there, and finally to Boston, where the Green Monster presides like the rose window at Chartres, and Roger Clemens preaches fastballs from his pulpit.
People get funny about these old parks. Craig Pletenik, a Southern Californian who grew up, as he says, "between Dodger Stadium and Alameda County Stadium," now does publicity for the Phoenix Firebirds. "Nothing equaled the thrill I had when I went to Fenway," he'll tell you, and it is highly doubtful anyone has said that about Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.
Such heartfelt sentiment points up the importance of Phoenix's not repeating the mistakes cities made in the 1960s, although in its selection of sites it seems to be doing that already.
The site that would have given Phoenix the downtown revitalization it claims it wants was eliminated by the Maricopa County Sports Authority almost immediately. That was at Seventh Avenue and Jefferson Street. The only realistic choice left--realistic meaning centrally located for the Valley and close to bars and restaurants--is in Tempe. But Tempe is running a distant third to the odds-on favorite, the intersection of 40th Street and McDowell, an area graced by nothing but two unattractive apartment complexes. That's the spot the Sports Authority likes best, and Martin Stone seems willing to go along.
Still, the time may never be better for Phoenix to build a stadium that is truly a work of good architecture.
In the past two or three years, yet another shift has taken place as a new generation of stadiums has gone up. They have taken two directions. One could be called the ballpark-as-shopping-mall, and is exemplified by the Toronto Skydome, a retractable dome structure that comprises a hotel, luxury boxes with bars, a McDonald's, and oh yes, a field on which play the second-place finishers in the American League East.
The other direction may be called the ballpark-as-cathedral, and is exemplified by the yet-to-be built Camden Yards stadium in Baltimore. The park has already been hailed by architectural writers across the country, like Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Goldberger, who said it was "capable of wiping out fifty years of wretched stadium design." Self-consciously retardataire, it deliberately echos the structures of the 1910 decade, with its inner-city location, its friendly, prettily arcaded facade and its emphasis on intimacy. Camden Yards goes so far as to embrace eccentricity, in the form of a brick warehouse, 1,000 feet long and 55 feet wide, that abuts its right-field wall. The warehouse makes an inviting target for left-handed power hitters, and perhaps unconsciously echoes the sheer weirdness of the Green Monster.
"One thing is certain," brags Bob Miller, assistant public relations director for the Orioles, "when this ballpark is completed, it will be the prototype for stadiums of the future."
A chat with Janet Marie Smith, Orioles vice president for planning and development, reveals how Camden Yards came about, and the process has implications for what Phoenix is about to go through.
"The first design the architects came up with was something very similar to other stadiums, plunked down in the middle of a parking lot," Smith says. "When Eli Jacobs saw that, he said, `It just won't do. It's not good enough.'"
Jacobs, who with his partners bought the Orioles earlier this year, told New Yorker writer Roger Angell that his main contribution was simply saying no to the architects from Hellmuth Obata Kassabaum until they got the idea. HOK, let it be remembered, is also the firm that produced "Boardwalk and Baseball," a combination amusement park and spring training site in the middle of a large, damp expanse of central Florida grass that reduces the national pastime to an "attraction," like nearby Gatorland Zoo.
The lesson from Baltimore, Smith stresses, is that an architect is only as good as his client. Camden Yards proves, Smith thinks, not that all ballparks should look old-fashioned, but that certain values should dictate design.
One of these is intimacy. At tiny Ebbets, with its limited seats and minuscule foul territory, the fans were close enough to hear the infield chatter. As Clem Labine, pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers said, "When we went West, I knew it was a different game when I couldn't throw the ball into the stands because I couldn't reach it. We lost the closeness."
NOW, IN A CITY where tee shirts commemorating the 122-degree heat are sold, the question of weather does arise, and people can be forgiven for wondering whether a dome wouldn't be wiser. Stone, good baseball purist that he is, brushes that away as unthinkable.
If you take the question seriously, though, you can still brush it away, but with the large broom of evidence. It is, even in Phoenix, possible to be comfortable in an open-air stadium. Ask the people who have been attending Firebirds games.
That's what Greg Corns, the go-get-'em general manager of the Triple A club has done, while attracting a record attendance this year. Sixty percent of the folks who answered his totally unscientific poll said the air temperature was all right by them. They were probably more concerned that the Firebirds finished 63-76, eighth in the Pacific Coast League. Corns also keeps a chart of temperatures at game time, and there is no correlation between heat and low attendance. More than 9,000 turned out July 21, when the Giants played here in the midst of the summer's worst heat wave, and it was 115 degrees at the start.
Phoenix Municipal Stadium has actively combatted the heat with a misting system, although it is hung from a concrete canopy that works against it by holding in the heat.
There are a couple of things that would work better in the proposed major league ballpark. While it puts some seats farther from the field, a single-deck stadium would be immeasurably easier to cool, open as it would be to the night sky.
"Any time you can see the stars, it's cold up there," says ASU baseball fan and stadium visionary John Meunier. Anyone who has ever driven a convertible in Phoenix at night knows how efficiently heat is trapped in underpasses. The lower level of a two-level stadium would be just as toasty after a hot day.
But you would also want to keep the sun off the seats during the day. To demonstrate the kind of material that could do this, Meunier leads the way to the courtyard of the Social Sciences building, where green agricultural screening cuts out 75 percent of the sun, and green plants moderate the air. Students lounge on benches near fountains in the cool shade, achieved at no energy cost. Outside, the sun of an August afternoon is frying.
Some more specific suggestions come from David Schaetzle, an associate professor in the architecture department at Arizona State University, who has spent the past few years thinking about how to be comfortable in the desert.
Sink the stadium into the ground. Run water pipes through the risers the seats rest on. The circulating water will cut down the amount of heat the risers absorb from the sun. Make the risers of Cool Deck, a surface that reflects the heat. Ring the stadium with cooling towers, which will tumble cool air down across the fans and out onto the field like a Slinky walking downstairs. Or hang a misting system from the struts that hold up the shading material. Maybe even hang electric fans from the struts, their blades moving slowly and sensuously.
Play the games at night. That's hardly a problem. Wrigley Field waged a campaign in order to be able to do precisely this. The Texas Rangers play only five day games at home, and they've set attendance records for the past two seasons that way.
The technology for what these men are suggesting exists. A water cooling tower such as the one Schaetzle describes is already in use at ASU, and restaurants all over Phoenix use mist with varying degrees of success. But never has the technology been used on the scale required for a 40,000-seat structure. It would require some daring, even a leap of faith to build a stadium that would work within the desert that surrounds us, rather than shutting itself off from it.
There is a danger here in protesting too much. It is brought on, perhaps, by the persistence of the dome concept among people who apparently believe it is to court death to attend an outdoor event in the summer in the city that is one's home. That's why it's refreshing to talk to Duane Espy, manager of the Firebirds for the past two years. He's also managed in Shreveport, Louisiana, which qualifies him as an expert on heat.
"There's too much made of the heat here because it's the desert, and they think people are baking and people are dying, and there are lizards running around," says Espy about Phoenix in the summertime.
He scratches his head. "It's almost to me, pleasant. In baseball, you want to sweat."
WHILE IT'S ALL very fine for a bunch of pointy-headed academics to talk about beautiful architecture, more practical types want to talk about the bottom line. And the bottom line, in the form of a feasibility study by Deloitte and Touche, has certainly been slanted toward a dome. The study makes the point that, while Phoenix can build whatever Phoenix damn well pleases, a dome could earn $1.6 million more a year. What would you decide?
The problem is, this additional income is spurious. It is arrived at by applying to projected attendance figures a "dome factor" of 28 percent, meaning 28 percent more people will come out to the ballpark if it's a dome. But statistically, the dome factor is nonexistent.
Two analysts--Pat Kenney, assistant professor of political science at ASU, and Tom Rex, research manager of the Center for Business Research at ASU, looked at the survey independently and spotted this same flaw.
The survey, done via random telephone calls in July, found that 5.0 percent of the population of greater Phoenix would buy tickets to one or more games in an open-air stadium. The survey also found that 6.4 percent would buy tickets to one or more games in a domed stadium.
The trouble is, since the survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percent, the actual figures range from 1.0 to 9.0 percent at an open-air stadium, and 2.4 to 10.4 at a domed stadium. You will notice that there is an overlap here. That means the figures are not statistically significant.
Now Kenney can be accused of being biased because he once played semipro baseball, but Tom Rex neither knows nor cares who won the 1986 World Series. In fact, he thinks he might prefer to see a ball game in a dome. But he still thinks the feasibility study stinks.
"The dome adjustment factor of 28 percent came from the difference between 5.0 and 6.4," Rex says. "But there is no difference between 5.0 and 6.4. It just floors me. This does not begin to justify having a dome."
In other words, the pages upon pages of numbers that purport to show that a dome could earn $1.6 million more every year than an open-air stadium, are based on figures that, in a statistician's eyes, are exactly the same.
Lamar Whitmer, president of the Maricopa County Sports Authority answers this criticism by saying, "I've had enough statistics classes to know that any time you do a survey you're going to have some latitude. I would definitely say there is an attendance premium in a dome." Stewart Rog, a principal at Deloitte and Touche at the firm's New Jersey office, had no comment.
Now everyone knows there are lies, damned lies and statistics. The fact is, if you want to know how to get fans in the seats, you should probably call up baseball people and ask them.
"It's very simple business--put talent on the field that's good enough to win," says Bob Di Biasio, vice president of public relations for the Cleveland Indians. "People are not going to come back night after night if you have a losing team. Believe me, we know." You can practically hear the poor man putting his head in his hands over his club's performances during the past few, well, decades.
It's hot at Arlington, Texas, too--close to 100 at game time--and humid to boot. But that's where you'll see Nolan Ryan, and that's where the Texas Rangers have been drawing record crowds by playing well for a change.
This year, the Toronto Blue Jays broke all attendance records at their new retractable-domed stadium, and while it's fun to come out to the Skydome, an equal factor may be that the Jays were in a pennant race for the entire season. There's a pretty good chance they would have broken attendance records if they'd been playing in somebody's basement.
The Mariners have drawn bigger crowds this year than any since their first season in 1977, but not because the Kingdome is any less rackety and unpleasant. It's because Ken Griffey Jr. has been the most exciting thing to hit Seattle since salmon. Think of the attendance if the Mariners ever played .500 ball! If there's a lesson here for Phoenix, it's this: Put a good team on the field.
But there's another lesson for Phoenix, too. There are a couple of clubs, and we all know who they are, that have not won a World Series since the days of the Model T. And yet, when you look not at total attendance (because stadium sizes vary) but at the percentage of seats that are filled every season, the Chicago Cubs and the Boston Red Sox consistently draw the best. Major league teams on a whole average about 50 percent of stadium capacity. Since 1986, the Cubs and the Sox have averaged 70 and 86 percent respectively, and this year the Sox were well over 90 percent.
A lot of factors come into play here: Both are in large urban areas with a long--if ineffective--history of baseball. Boston also has an enormous number of college students, as well as the populations of Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Maine within a couple of hours' drive. But what certainly has not hurt is the fact that both teams play in gloriously quirky, intimate, old-style ballparks that are just plain fun to come out to, even if it's the end of the season, and there's nothing on the field but a bunch of guys called up from Triple A.
WHETHER PHOENIX GETS a domed stadium or an open-air playing field could come down to who gets his way, Martin Stone or the Maricopa County Sports Authority. Until now, few things have been certain in a fluid situation. The Sports Authority is building the stadium with a countywide quarter-cent sales tax. Stone is leasing it. Over the next two months, the two will hammer out what the stadium will look like, and expect to submit a proposal to the County Board of Supervisors in December.
Through all this haggling about the stadium, there's been an undercurrent of feeling that Martin Stone is some kind of flake, with his reluctance to ante up the $95 million franchise fee, and his insistence on an old-fashioned park. Yet Stone is a sophisticate--his inspiration for the grass terraces came from the Tanglewood Music Festival--who enjoys baseball with the kind of intelligence Bart Giamatti brought to it. He is is a man of some thoughtfulness, with an eye for a quality.
But he is also a successful businessman with a feel for the bottom line, a businessman with vision in a wilderness of surveys, reports and projections. He has ideas, the kind that harken back to owners like Bill Veeck, who invented the exploding scoreboard, and once sent a midget up to bat, in the days before baseball was taken over by pencil-pushers in suits.
And Martin Stone is the only one who has known what he wants. The Maricopa County Sports Authority has waffled in the name of open- mindedness, and even stadium architect Mike Hallmark has been taking the politic stance of saying he would design whatever he's told, and be happy about it. What Hallmark's told is going to be important. Ballfields are important, in a way that surpasses understanding.
A thousand people a week visit the romantic expanse of grass carved out of an Iowa cornfield that was the real star of Field of Dreams. It has become one of the shrines. There's even a guestbook for believers to sign, and a healthy business is done in such relics as a sweat shirt reading, "Is this heaven?"
"It's like being at Fenway Park or Wrigley Field," said a fifteen-year-old boy there last summer on a family pilgrimage, being indoctrinated into the religious mysteries of baseball. And in Blue Ash, Ohio, the city manager built a replica of the Red Stockings' Crosley Field--the same odd angles of the outfield walls, the same rising terrace instead of a warning track. He even got 300 seats from the original Crosley, donated by people who believed in what he was doing. The park has been used by local school teams since it opened in 1988.
The Cincinnati Reds, though, have paid the place the ultimate tribute by scheduling a National League oldtimers game there every summer. Jim Greengrass, a Reds left fielder in the 1950s, was there last year with Johnny Temple, the Reds second baseman of the same era. Greengrass almost wept.
