Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
May 16, 2005
Throw Back Stadium

Two stadium travelers liked RFK:

RFK Stadium could hardly be further removed from the brick-encrusted, sushi-serving, retro-crazed baseball venues currently in vogue. Pete Farrell thinks that's a good thing.

"After you've seen [retro stadiums] for the 83rd time, when you walk in there with the musty concourse and the paint peeling, it's like 'Ahhhhh, this feels right,' " Farrell said.

I'll echo that. It's not a perfect baseball stadium, but there's nothing wrong with it as a major league facility. It's easy to reach by both car and train. There are no obstructed seats. There were plenty of consessions, even though there wasn't enough food sold in the stands (I just saw beer vendors in the seats.

Washington may want to take a lesson from the Red Sox. Forced to stay in their aging park, the Red Sox ownership has remodeled and done a marvelous job of it. Why not do the same with RFK? It has to be a lot cheaper than building a new park, and as the Red Sox have shown, you can remodel and still play ball. Now that football is no longer played there, DC United can be moved to the Redskins Stadium, and the lower deck seats can be rearranged to give fans better sight lines. The field can have a state of the art drainage system installed, and I'm sure you can stick luxury boxes in somewhere. They just need a creative architect.

There may be other reasons to build a new field, such as better training facilities for the players. But it's not a bad park, and with a little work could be a very good one.



Posted by David Pinto at 02:57 PM | Stadiums | TrackBack (0)
Comments

I don't know why anyone buys a new car...just keep fixin gup the old piece of crap to make it less sucky.

It's time to bravely move into the new century and stop wanting success to occur. A new park will mean thousands of suites and thousands more quality seats, of which RFK has very few, only a few thousand 1st level seats between 1B and 3B.

RFK is much better than 5000 a night in Montreal, but it's a joke of a park in 2005. Tonight versus the Crew, they look to have about 10-15K empty seats in the upper deck of the OF. Other than the atrocious seats, it's probably 80% full.

Posted by: Al at May 16, 2005 08:32 PM

Never been there and probably never will be. But television makes RFK look as sterile, nondescript, generic and boring as any ballpark can. The team has tried its best, with a lot of famous names on the outfield wall and a field that looks to be in decent condition. But RFK is one of those multipurpose monstrosities that puts fans far far away and looks as attractive as a paper bag on TV.

Of course, it was very predictable that sportswriters would suddenly discover the virtues of those multipurpose monstrosities...as soon as they disappeared. Just as they would badmouth the new all-baseball parks...after they'd been around for a while.

Posted by: Casey Abell at May 17, 2005 09:25 AM

Amen to RFK. It's a STADIUM. You go there to watch BASEBALL. The last thing the DC team needs are fans who go to the ballpark to eat sushi, sit in air conditioned suites and talk on their cell phones in the front rows.

Look what happened in Baltimore. They got their trendy, sterile stadium. It's quite lovely. But the new breed of O's fans that attend the park need the freakin scoreboard to tell them when to cheer. The fans drink their $8 microbrews while looking like Dockers models. Same thing happened at FedEx Field, and all the other overpriced monstrosities that have popped up over the last decade.

Trendy expensive stadium + corporate suites = loss of homefield advantage.

Posted by: Ben Volin at May 17, 2005 10:01 AM

So far this season the Nationals are 3 games over .500 at home. Small sample and all, but six other teams in the NL are further over breakeven at home, one is tied with the Nats, and eight are worse.

Maybe we better wait for a while before we start confering extra-special homefield advantage on RFK.

Meanwhile, the stadium still looks generic on TV. And the Orioles are 13-9 in their lovely "montrosity."

Posted by: Casey Abell at May 17, 2005 02:16 PM

Oops, that should be lovely "monstrosity."

Posted by: Casey Abell at May 17, 2005 02:20 PM
Post a comment









Remember personal info?