This is a link to the baseball page at the New York Times. Today the top nine (9) stories are about the new stadiums stadia in New York. I don’t think V-J Day got this kind of coverage. My favorite one is “Two New Baseball Palaces, One Stoic, One Scrappy.” How can a building be […]

With the recent escalation in A’s relocation/ballpark news, it’s important to remember that generalists like me are dilettantes at best. Any time there’s an issue of any complexity, the blogosphere produces a focused star to really jam on it, and the star with respect to the A’s relocation drama is the New A’s Ballpark blog, […]

I’m not a big eater at ballgames. I almost always eat something elsewhere before going into the ballpark, so if I do get something during the game it’s usually a hot dog just for the hell of it or some peanuts to munch on or, if it’s really hot, maybe a small dish of ice […]

The New York Times has an overview of the retro-stadium craze of the past couple of decades, with particular attention paid to some of the parks’ unique particularities: The quirky signatures at older stadiums — like the Green Monster at Fenway Park in Boston — were adaptations to their narrow confines. But idiosyncrasies like Tal’s […]

Back when I was in private practice, I represented a park district that wanted to turn some old railroad lines in the middle of nowhere into a bike trail. They built about 85% of the trail, but the last little stretch was held up by this group of Mennonite farmers who lived next to the […]

The promise of the new stadium craze — at least from the fan’s perspective — was that it meant the end of seats behind I-beams and other viewing obstructions. In New York, well, not so much.

We don’t have HOK to kick around anymore. No, they didn’t go out of business. They just changed their name: HOK Sport Venue Event is no longer. The Kansas City-based sports architecture giant, now a stand-alone company, officially has changed its name to Populous. “Populous allows us to enthusiastically embrace the expertise we uniquely claim […]

Death. Taxes. Bud Selig putting a committee together to solve a sticky problem he doesn’t want to deal with: After meeting with ownership and management of the Oakland Athletics in Phoenix, Arizona on Saturday, Commissioner Allan H. (Bud) Selig announced today that he has appointed a committee to thoroughly analyze all of the ballpark proposals […]

Following up on deMause’s note about empty seats in Shea, Bob Raissman wonders how a less-than-capacity crowd at Yankee Stadium is going to look to the viewers at home: Ticket talk triggered a memory from long ago – Sept. 22, 1966. The Yankees would finish in 10th place that season and on that day, 413 […]

Neil deMause is pretty much awesome. His Field of Schemes book and blog have served as one of the primary inspirations for my criticism of public subsidies for professional sports, and rarely a day goes by when he doesn’t have something worth thinking about. Among the most interesting things from the past few days: based […]