Monday, November 12, 2007

Brave New World

By now we've all heard about the Devil Rays' plan (hope) to build themselves a new ballpark on the waterfront where their spring training stadium, Al Lang Field, currently sits.
Anybody reading this who's known me for any amount of time knows what an absolutely horrible place I think the Tropicana Dome is as the home of a major league baseball team. It is an embarrassment and needs to be abadonded as soon as possible. And yet there have always been people around here who insist on defending it, and who look at me like I'm crazy when I suggest that the team needs to and wants to get a nicer place. You know, one that actually takes advantage of and accentuates some of the many reasons we live in this beautiful place to begin with.
That is why it was so rewarding when I first heard the news about this.
We can go round and round about the feasibility of this entire project, how it will get paid for even if it is feasible, and if it is truly reasonable to expect it to happen at all. In fact, in the coming year or so, baseball fans and non-baseball fans in this area alike are going to do all of those things.
But how can you at least not get a little bit excited about the possibility?
No one is more of a Tampa > St. Petersburg than me, or more of a Hillsborough > Pinellas guy than me. But that's really no longer the point. Even though I beleive the owners would love to be in Tampa, which makes the most geographical sense, at least there's some forward thinking here. Those who came before painted the team into a corner and anchored the team down in the wrong place, which has led to a situation today that seemingly makes staying on the Pinellas side the first option. That's unfortunate, but within those parameters, isn't this pretty much the ideal scenrio? You've got waterfront views. You've got open air, with a sort of "saillike" canvas used as a covering for the seats. You've got AMBIENCE.
So parking may be a little leaner. I couldn't be any less concerned. It has been my ballpark experience at other places that there is an inverse relationship between available parking and the ballpark's level of charm. The less parking available, the more charming the ballpark. Public transit and other issues will have to be addressed if this were to get past the voter approval stage, but for now, for the first time, I'm actually a little impressed with this ballclub's foresight.
For those of you who insist it can never happen, or those of you who like the team playing at the Trop just the way it is, I honestly don't even know what to tell you.