The refrain over much of America this month is that it has been a rough winter, except we haven't yet even gotten to winter. It's actually been a harsh autumn, especially in November. We're only a month removed from the Boston Red Sox putting the finishing touches on a World Series romp over the Los Angeles Dodgers, yet those glorious summer afternoons at the ballpark seem so far away.
One of the great things about that Series matchup was that it played out in two of the three oldest venues in baseball, Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium, though the games in Boston gave us a glimpse of the cold November to come. Fenway is a classic jewel-box venue that opened way back before World War I, and Dodger Stadium is a prototype of modern stadium design that took hold before the plague of multipurpose venues in the 1970s. The latter opened to the public a full 50 years after the turnstiles at Fenway started churning, making them unlikely brethren. All across baseball, stadiums and entire cities have come and gone from the big league landscape, making the sustainability of places like Fenway, Dodger Stadium and Wrigley Field all the more remarkable.
Twenty-four of the 30 stadiums currently in use have opened since 1989. In fact, 17 of them opened during a 16-year frenzy between 1989 and 2004, and that doesn't include Atlanta's Turner Field, which opened in 1996 and lost the Braves after the 2016 season. Things calmed down a bit after the building frenzy of the '90s and 2000s. In fact, according to the ballparks database at Seamheads.com, the 1,836 days between the opening of Miami's Marlins Park in 2012 and suburban Atlanta's SunTrust Park in 2017 was the longest gap between venue openings since the 2,617-day gap between the opening of Minneapolis' Metrodome in 1982 and Toronto's SkyDome (now Rogers Centre) in 1989.
However, things are moving on the ballpark front once again, with some developments more solid than others. With that in mind, let's run through some of the news regarding baseball's cathedrals. To me, it all points toward a trend.
The Oakland Athletics made quite a splash on Wednesday by announcing their latest preferred site for a new, privately financed ballpark, selecting Howard Terminal along the bay in Oakland. The announcement was accompanied by some eye-popping renderings of what the fully realized project might look like. The highlights include redeveloping the Oakland Coliseum into a Circus Maximus-like baseball amphitheater and park, constructing a gondola system to ferry game-goers from transit hubs to the stadium and incorporating a rooftop park on top of the actual playing venue that would make it an attraction even at times when the A's aren't playing. The obstacles to fully realizing that vision are numerous, but you have to admire the imagination. The hope is to have the A's playing in the new park in the 2023 season.
Setting aside questions about site access, financing for infrastructure, environmental impact and such, let's focus on a couple of aspects. First is the architecture of the stadium itself. The rooftop park, with its immense, sloping, green curves, gives the venue a look that is at once futuristic, wide-open and connected to nature. For a team that has long donned green and gold, it's a visual feast. Beyond that, the design of the grandstands very much invokes the classic jewel-box design, with decks stacked one upon the other.
That gives the place the look of an old, closed-in ballpark when looking in from center field, with fans right on top of the action no matter where they are sitting. Gone are the acres of foul territory that have defined the Oakland Coliseum for so long. The outfield wall appears to meet in almost a right angle in center field, giving the playing surface a shape not unlike what the A's played on in their Philadelphia days. In fact, in some ways, it's almost like the designers are pulling Shibe Park out of history's dustbin and dropping it into some nifty, 21st century green space. The proposed capacity of the new place is just over 34,000, which would make it the second-smallest (or more intimate) ballpark in the majors, behind Tropicana Field, home of the Tampa Bay Rays. This follows a national trend toward downsizing sports venues.
Also, one of the mantras of the proposal was "bigger than baseball." The new ballpark is the linchpin of the project, but the A's also want to develop the area around it, adding new apartments, retail and office space, restaurants, etc. In effect, the A's are proposing to construct a new neighborhood of which the ballpark is but the centerpiece. This follows the direction of the Braves, who while building SunTrust Park concurrently developed the land around it into the mixed-use development known as The Battery. So far, the concept has proved to be a big hit.
You have to give kudos to the A's to fold in a proposal to redevelop the land around their existing venue, which is roughly 6 miles from Howard Terminal. Most of the time, when a team abandons a venue and a neighborhood, that's exactly what it is -- an abandonment. That Oakland's owners are being proactive in helping east Oakland transition to a new era is an excellent precedent to set.
Then again, as with the Howard Terminal project itself, there are challenges to pulling off that redevelopment, and hopefully, the voices of the people who live in east Oakland will be heard when it comes to shaping the plan. The A's have been disappointed in their pursuit of a new ballpark before, and as always, the devil will be in the details. But the vision laid out in Wednesday's announcement is fantastic.
Elsewhere, construction on the Texas Rangers' new ballpark is ongoing, with the team projected to move into the venue in time for the 2020 season. This week, the club released some updated details and renderings for the new Globe Life Field, which will be a retractable-roof facility located just south of the Rangers' current stadium. For me, who firmly believes that ballparks should be in or close to an urban center -- or at the very least easily reachable from city cores via reliable mass transit -- the location is problematic. But that was true of the old stadium, as well, which sits just north of the construction site. The new park is expected to seat about 42,000, making it smaller than the Rangers' current stadium.
The roof is a crucial aspect of the project, giving Rangers fans respite from the blistering Texas summer heat. Everything else about the current Globe Life Park (the former Ballpark in Arlington) seemed to be pretty good, at least from an aesthetic and feel standpoint for watching a game. The Rangers started playing in their current park in 1994, so it's another relatively short-lived venue. But, similar to Atlanta, the biggest motivation for the change is the development of an adjacent entertainment district that the Rangers are partnering on, this one called Texas Live. Best I can tell, this is strictly an entertainment and tourist destination, not really a new neighborhood. Still, it should open up new revenue channels for the Rangers, who are expected to repurpose their current stadium rather than tearing it down.
One key question remains: playing surface. The Rangers have yet to select one for the new ballpark.
Next up is the Tampa Bay Rays, who have targeted the Ybor City neighborhood not far from downtown Tampa for a new stadium. The Rays have a Dec. 31 deadline to decide whether to make the move from Pinellas County. Financing for the project, expected to cost upward of $900 million once infrastructure upgrades are taken into account, has not been locked in, so that's a pretty major obstacle. The proposed park would be the smallest in baseball, with fewer than 29,000 fixed seats.
Like the Braves and Rangers, the Rays are motivated by development opportunities around their new venue. However, Rays owner Stu Sternberg told the Tampa Bay Times, "I'm not a landowner. I'm not a developer. I own a baseball team, and I want to build a baseball stadium that's here for 50 to 100 years." That makes Sternberg's vision a little different from the visions in Oakland, Atlanta and Texas. But the fact remains: The days of ballparks being constructed in a void appear to be over.
We might be entering another busy era of stadium-related maneuvering. The Angels opted out of their lease after the 2018 season, mostly to give themselves the leeway to explore a better situation. The Diamondbacks seem to already be pushing for a replacement for 20-year-old Chase Field. On Thursday, a group in Portland announced it has reached an agreement in principle to acquire land north of the city for the construction of a big league ballpark, sans a team, of course. Whatever happens in the years to come, one thing seems clear: In the future, what is built around the stadium is going to be as important as the stadium itself.
Expansion on the horizon?
Weighing realignment possibilities
For a few years now, whenever the topic of expansion has been broached, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has prefaced any comments on the subject by saying the ballpark situations in Tampa Bay and Oakland have to be resolved before any talk of expanding can really gain momentum. There seems to be a lot of progress in those lingering ballpark discussions, but we remain a long way from resolution. And even if those teams are able to pull off new stadium projects, it's very unlikely Manfred will immediately switch into expansion mode. I think it will happen, but I don't know when it will happen.
Still, there is one spinoff to the expansion talk that I'd like to bring into the discussion regarding the structures of the leagues. The default assumption seems to be that when the leagues grow, the new structure will be for eight four-team divisions. That could make a lot of geographic sense and, as many have pointed out, it would give baseball the chance to get rid of postseason wild cards. Once again, it would be first place or nothing, just as it has been for most of baseball history. However, to me, it seems exceedingly unlikely the owners would want to reduce the number of playoff teams.
I see two alternatives. First, there is radical realignment. Even I am skeptical of such a thing, given my adulation of baseball history. Yet, given the regional nature of baseball, I can see the advantages. You can pull out a map and create easily four-team divisions that would be ripe with geographic rivalry. Think of them as four-team pods.
One pod: Cubs, Brewers, White Sox, Cardinals. Or maybe you cut out the Cardinals and go with the Twins. Another: Yankees, Red Sox, Mets and the new Expos. One more: Phillies, Orioles, Pirates and Nationals. There are a lot of ways to carve it up, and a lot depends on what the expansion cities turn out to be. But given a schedule heavy on division play, you would have fierce, intimate rivalries that fans could buy in to and even follow from ballpark to ballpark at crucial times of the season. The benefit could be enough to persuade the owners to cut back to four playoff teams per league -- all division champions.
However, there is another way to do it that would be less disruptive to the current order, would reward division champs in a similar way to the current system and would actually grow the playoff field: Go back to four divisions. In each league, the division champs would be guaranteed a spot and a bye, while four wild-card teams in each league would battle in best-of-three series, played out in the four days after the end of the regular season. That way, the division champs' layoff wouldn't be too long, and the reward for finishing first would be considerable, as it should be. You could do a significant realignment with this format, but you also could get there by just tweaking the leagues as they are.
League structure is an oft-overlooked aspect in sports, but it has a major effect on generating interest. Just this season, as an example, the feelings around the Rays, Mariners and Indians were all very different at the end of the campaign, though they all finished within two wins of one another. That is the byproduct of structure. While the Rays and Mariners finished well out of the chase in their divisions, the Indians ran away with the AL Central. In any season in baseball history, you can construct a very different narrative by simply rearranging the teams. If and when baseball expands, the powers that be will have to be very careful about what kind of narrative they'd like to write.
Judging the judges
Did awards end up in right hands?
This season, I introduced a formula for rating players for postseason honors called the Awards Index. Now that the major awards have all been decided, I thought I'd check in to see how the voters did. Or, if you want to look at it from a different perspective, how the Awards Index did. One thing to keep in mind is that the index is meant as a measure of worthiness for a player's performance in a season. It's not an awards predictor, per se.
AL MVP
Awards Index: 1. Mookie Betts; 2. Mike Trout; 3. Alex Bregman; 4. Jose Ramirez; 5. J.D. Martinez.
Voters: 1. Betts; 2. Trout; 3. Ramirez; 4. Martinez; 5. Bregman.
Same five players but in a slightly different order. I still think Bregman was a bit overlooked.
NL MVP
Awards Index: 1. Christian Yelich; 2. Jacob deGrom; 3. Max Scherzer; 4. Aaron Nola; 5. Paul Goldschmidt.
Voters: 1. Yelich; 2. Javier Baez; 3. Nolan Arenado; 4. Freddie Freeman; 5. deGrom.
As a mathematical formula, the Index doesn't have any qualms about injecting pitchers into the MVP mix, so that's the biggest difference. Even reducing it just to position players, the Index had a different look after Yelich, ranking Goldschmidt second, followed by Freeman, Lorenzo Cain, Baez and Arenado. The NL MVP race this year was mostly a muddle, but at least Yelich emerged during the last month to become a non-controversial winner. On that, the stats and the voters can agree.
AL CY YOUNG
Awards Index: 1. Justin Verlander; 2. Chris Sale; 3. Blake Treinen; 4. Blake Snell; 5. Trevor Bauer.
Voters: 1. Snell; 2. Verlander; 3. Corey Kluber; 4. Sale; 5. Gerrit Cole.
This is one for which I think the voters whiffed a little bit, but of course I would think that. Either way, I suspect the difficulty in rating pitchers is only going to increase as roles continue to evolve.
NL CY YOUNG
Awards Index: 1. Jacob deGrom; 2. Max Scherzer; 3. Aaron Nola; 4. Kyle Freeland; 5. Patrick Corbin.
Voters: 1. deGrom; 2. Scherzer; 3. Nola; Freeland; 5. Corbin.
What was I saying about the voters?
AL ROOKIE
Awards Index: 1. Shohei Ohtani; 2. Joey Wendle; 3. Gleyber Torres; 4. Miguel Andujar; 5. Brad Keller.
Voters: 1. Ohtani; 2. Andujar; 3. Torres; 4. Wendle; 5. Daniel Palka.
Man, Yankees fans were rabid about Andujar not winning the actual vote. The Awards Index might have to go into hiding.
NL ROOKIE
Awards Index: 1. Walker Buehler; 2. Ronald Acuna Jr.; 3. Juan Soto; 4. Brian Anderson; 5. Harrison Bader.
Voters: 1. Acuna; 2. Soto; 3. Buehler; 4. Anderson; 5. Jack Flaherty.
Buehler overtook Acuna in the Index right at the end of the season. I would have voted for Acuna anyway if I had a vote, and I would have voted for Soto No. 2. However, I do think Buehler's rookie season was a bit overlooked. He was the Dodgers' best pitcher from Labor Day on.