The closure of Yankees Stadium, the Ravens dominating the Browns with a trip to Pittsburgh provides pause to reflect on how the face of sports has changed, Pittsburgh was title town with the Bradshaw-era Steelers, World Champs in baseball with the Pirates beating the Orioles in 1979. Yankee Stadium was the greatest palace in all of sports while Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh appeared to be the standard for other cities. Who would ever imagine years later, Baltimore would face Cleveland in football, but the Ravens were the Browns and the Browns were a brand new team. Baltimore would start a revolution in stadium design that would bring NFL football back to Baltimore, temporarily out of Cleveland, and that all four NFL AFC North cities (a new division too) would have brand new stadia with separate stadia for each sport. All of these developments helped lead to the unthinkable, the demise of Yankee Stadium.
The Ravens’ victory over the Cleveland Browns showed not only what a strong performance the Ravens demonstrated never letting mistakes getting them in trouble but taking advantage of every little break the Browns gave them culminating with defensive playmaker, Ed Reed, returning an interception for a touchdown. Jim Leonard filling in as kick returner and free safety stepped up and played spectacular football including a couple of opportunistic returns and a sack. Rookie QB, Joe Flacco, showed he’s not in the same league as the Manning Brothers yet, but he’s sure got it in his gut to get there. The craziest irony of all might be that Mr. “For Certain,” Matt Stover, missed a routine field goal attempt after a spectacular opening drive on offense which temporarily tilted the game advantage to the archrival guys from Cleveland.
Another factor was the “twelfth man,” the Raven fan who showed “purple passion” from start to finish. A number of times during the CBS telecast, their announcing team commented about how raucous the Baltimore fans were and that M&T Bank Stadium is clearly the loudest of all outdoors facilities. Folks can say what they will about the passion of the Redskins’ fans right down I-95 a few exits. They’re a powerful breed too, but even with a substantially larger number of fans in an arena with lots more seats, they’re rather polite compared to their noisy neighbors. What town better screams “football town” better than our Northern Division rivals, the Pittsburgh Steelers?
Well, hop in your gas guzzler and drive east on I-70. Baltimore is on the town. Baltimore and Pittsburgh have much in common as sports cities in 2008. Both cities have a rich baseball history, but have suffered miserably with pathetic losing teams for years. In fact, the Pirates futility goes all the way back to when they bid bye-bye to Barry Bonds in the early 1990’s. As the 2008 season comes to a close, at least the Orioles look like a team with a future though last night when the Yankees turned out the lights at Yankee Stadium; our O’s had to understand what it feels like to be the Washington Generals playing the Harlem Globetrotters in their glory days. Watching the game on ESPN, you might have caught Jon Miller, the baseball blabbermeister himself, just barely announced the Orioles at bat, on the mound, or who made the plays on the field. No real gripes, this was a night for the fellows in pinstripes, but it was typical of the lack of notice the guys in black and orange get these days.
Think back to 1979 when the Orioles lost to the Pirates in the World Series. Both teams had fine baseball teams. The Orioles went from the classic championship team with Brooks, Frank, and Boog to the Orioles’ magic gang. The Pirates were led by the legendary (and long string of Howard Cossell adjectives) Wilbur Stargell. Both teams were key players each year in their divisions. Both cities had every right to be hot baseball cities like St. Louis or Boston. Pittsburgh had become football heaven. This was the team of guys like Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, and Mean Joe Green, the “Steel Curtain” and so much more. The Baltimore fans were still under the illusion the Colts were a great team. After all, they won the Eastern Division three years in a row from 1975 under the new-look Colts with QB Bert Jones. Crab City fans were still too innocent to know just what the hard reality was that had just started to play out. The 1979 Colts sucked. They would never see another good Colts team in Baltimore (at least as the home team.) During the World Series coverage, we ignored constant suggestions about the marvelous modern arena, Three Rivers Stadium, represented. We stuck to our guns that baseball should be played on real grass and for football, for god’s sake, Baltimore was home to the world’s largest outdoors insane asylum. Talking down the “old lady” on 33rd street was trash talking our home. We didn’t like it at all.
The Orioles and Pirates were enjoying a little bit of a bump with their team’s success. Baltimore benefitted from the absence of baseball in DC and better marketing. Still once the pregame season got started and the scars of grinding it out on the grid iron took its toll on Pat Santerone’s meticulously landscaped baseball lawn, all interest went to the glory of the blue and gray. Watch the Orioles in the playoffs and World Series on the tube or a Colts game; it’s the Colts, baby.
In 1979, the future of both cities’ sports would have been hard to imagine. For a blue collar town, Pittsburgh appeared to have it all, but it would be years before the Pirates would contend again. In fact, aside for a couple years where the Pirates with Barry Bonds and Bobby Bonilla played lapdog in the playoffs to the beginnings of the Atlanta Braves dynasty, Pittsburgh baseball would be a gloom affair. The Orioles would continue to be a major power in the AL East through 1983 winning it all in 1983 against the Phillies. It was all downhill for the Colts. They were becoming the laughing stock of the NFL. Every major talent left either being fired or quitting in anger. A hated and drunken owner was seen passing through the airport heading to one city after another shopping his franchise for a more suitable stadium. Baltimore fans in their hometown, blue collar sensibility just didn’t get it. Memorial Stadium was plenty good enough for them! Pretty it up a little and it will be fine. By the fall of 1983, the team was so miserable, even the most loyal fans were starting to stay home on Sundays. With a hometown hero starting to emerge in Cal Ripken, Baltimore was starting to sound like a baseball town, and yes, there were a lot more butts in the bleachers too.
Then came that snowy night in March of 1984, just as the eleven o’clock news was airing on the local channels, something was rumbling out in Owings Mills. Mayflower vans were loading up and the Colts were off to Indianapolis. That fat stinking old drunk, Robert Irsay, surgically removed the heart of the City, the legends of Johnny Unitas, Raymond Berry, Lenny Moore, Artie Donovan, Gino Marchetti, and even recent dudes like Bert Jones, their trophies, their legacies were heading to Hoosier country where sports was all about college hoops and the Indy 500. Could their be a worse nightmare?
Meanwhile, the glory days of the Steelers were over, but they were still a competitive team worthy of fanatic hometown support. They’d be back as one of the NFL’s elite in the 90’s for sure. However, the Steelers of the mid-to-late 70’s are spoken of in the same most distinguished Football teams of all-time like the Johnny Unitas Colts.
Add insult to injury, who was the stellar football team of the 1980’s, the Washington Redskins! As the Colts’ absence grew longer, the power elites were beginning to talk the talk that the Baltimore-Washington region was one sports market. Baltimore has the baseball team and Washington had the football team. Never mind that Washington had a waiting list for generations for tickets and the Baltimore football culture was nothing like that of DC’s. Still, every Sunday, the Redskins was the game of choice selected by the NFL for Baltimore. The Washington media was all over the Orioles. Beloved Orioles hometown owner, Jerald Hoffberger even sold the team to Washington lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams, a fellow with a huge stake in the Redskins, making Baltimore fans even more paranoid the O’s would be heading down I-95 to the DC domain.
By the mid 80’s, Memorial Stadium was even getting the talk about being an inferior baseball stadium. That was hard to swallow as finally the O’s were drawing lots of fans, but it was hard for local folks who felt there was no place like home, we had become very out of step with cities like Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and St. Louis. Meanwhile, the DC crowd had much the same attitude about RFK Stadium in DC, but Jack Kent Cooke wasn’t going to move the Redskins anywhere far from DC, but just how far was far?
Soon proposals for new stadia were on the drawing board in both Baltimore and Washington, but the notion of a baseball or football only field seemed a little too exotic. Pittsburgh had the answer, a multipurpose stadium that was designed to house both sports and with artificial turf, the field could be easily converted without the landscaping nightmares of natural sod. The fix was in, the shotgun wedding, the Orioles and the Redskins should be brought together in one home ideally somewhere around Laurel exactly halfway between the two cities. The Orioles could still whisper they were the “Baltimore” Orioles though many local fans were incensed that since the early 70’s, “Baltimore” had been erased from the local jerseys. Naturally, the Redskins would be the Washington Redskins. For the tiny amount of territory the District represents, there’s one hell of a lot of Maryland and Virginia that gets called “Washington.”
Officials were actively looking for land. The locals in Laurel said “no dice.” There was a strong effort to build in the Halethorpe area near the I-95 and Baltimore Beltway intersection still just 20 minutes from the Washington Beltway, but again, the community stood firm. The situation had reached an impasse while both the deficiencies of the two regional stadia became more apparent. Meanwhile, Pittsburgh had the model stadium at Three Rivers.
The Redskins reigned supreme further making life hell in Baltimore as the Orioles Dynasty collapsed reaching total futility as the 1988 season began where the Orioles lost 21 games to start the season and future Hall-of-Famer, Eddie Murray, received lusty boos as if it was his fault. However, right at the bottom of the low point, an ailing Edward Bennett Williams, dying from cancer stood arm-in-arm, with Maryland Governor, William Donald Schaeffer, a deal had been struck, not only would the Orioles stay in Baltimore, but they would move to downtown Baltimore. Just a few blocks west of the rapidly growing inner harbor area was a decrepit old railroad yard, “Camden Yards” with a long huge warehouse that could be demolished to not only build a new baseball only park but also have ample room for a football stadium. Hmm, the Redskins in downtown Baltimore, well there was some talk of it! Meanwhile, it Pittsburgh, the Steelers were getting better and, a lean, trim Barry Bonds was swatting the hell out of the ball for the Pirates.
Baltimore sports fans were reassured, but why all the fuss, Memorial Stadium was still good enough for everybody except that “wine and cheese” DC crowd. Football fans had adopted other teams around the NFL. Some would trek to Philadelphia to follow the Eagles. Some adopted the Steelers, yes those Steelers. Others would secretly adopt the Redskins with a good excuse like, “my wife works in the DC area” or “I do business down there a lot and hear all the talk.” The Redskins, quite honestly, were an easy team to love when Joe Gibbs ruled the roost before the Danny-Boy era.
April, 2002, who would realize that what happened in Baltimore would change the face of both baseball and football in perhaps the most radical way since the NFL/AFL merger and baseball expansion in the late 1960’s. Orioles Park in Camden Yards opened. It was humble in its simplicity. They didn’t even bother to tear down the massive warehouse. Instead, it was incorporated into the right field area of the stadium complex housing stores and eateries for the fans on concourse level and team offices above. There was nothing about Orioles Park that had anything to do with the “modern” stadia like Three Rivers in Pittsburgh. It was new because it looked old. The outfield boundaries weren’t a consistent symmetrically proportioned padded fence. There was an open grassy area beyond dead center, the left field area wrapped around from the main part of the stadium, right-center field had bleachers, and then right field around to the foul line featured a field level out-of-town scoreboard, above which was a flag court, the main concourse, and the warehouse that perhaps a mighty slugger might hit with a power blast some day. The park had a timeless feel to it. In fact, Babe Ruth’s uncle had even operated a tavern that once stood somewhere in the outfield area. It was just a leisurely stroll to all the goodies at Harbor Place. There was even a light rail train that would make getting to the field so easy for fans from the rich northern suburbs and later Glen Burnie to the south. Oh, there was one more thing, a commuter train that went right to Union Station in Washington, DC. Yes, the Capitol dome itself, was just minutes away.
Within weeks, echoes were heard all around the sports world. If any city had a miserable sports facility, it was Cleveland, Ohio. There was talk about the Indians moving elsewhere for years, but avuncular Cleveland Browns owner, Art Modell, a lovable almost philanthropic figure, in the Lake Erie region, accommodated the Indians allowing them to play on the field he owned for the football Browns for years. Eventually, ownership went to the city that cared for “the Mistake by the Lake” miserably. The Cleveland Browns, of course, were the most hated rival of the Pittsburgh Steelers too. The state of Ohio took a clue from their brethren in Annapolis, and promptly sought to build Jacobs Field, a stadium constructed in the spitting image of Camden Yards, and guess what? The miserable forgotten Cleveland Indians became one of the top teams in the American League in the 1990’s once they moved to Jacobs Field. Heck, for good measure, the state even provided money to help build the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame, just a few steps away from Municipal Stadium. Arlington, Texas under the leadership of some fellow named George W. Bush built a fancy new baseball stadium for the Rangers. Meanwhile, in Denver, Colorado, baseball finally expanded to the Rocky Mountain region, and Coors Field would be one of the loveliest of what were rapidly being called, “Camden Clones.”
Who could imagine that Baltimore would be the nation’s leader in the vanguard of what a new stadium is supposed to be? Just like that, Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh became old over night. Baseball and football owners alike were talking about “new stadium or else.” The NFL had already seen teams hopping from city to city, the Raiders from Oakland to Los Angeles (and then back again), the Colts to Indy, and the Cardinals from St. Louis to Arizona. Baseball added two teams in the early 90’s bringing a team to Miami to play in the established manner, a multipurpose stadium, afforded by the Dolphins stadium which was hastily reconfigured to form a baseball diamond every March to play a couple preseason exhibition games to help lure a team, and as just mentioned, a team as added to Denver. Does anyone remember how awkward it was when the Rockies played their first two years in the old Mile High Stadium?
Everywhere there was an NFL team, the stands were almost assured of sellouts every Sunday from New England to Florida to out west. It was long past time to expand. Empowered by the glory of Orioles Park in Camden Yards, Baltimore was the city that knew how to build a beautiful new stadium the right way. Besides that, the city felt a sense of entitlement. Robert Irsay had run “our” team into the ground and scurried it out of town. Folks in St. Louis were feeling much the same way, in fact they even went as far to start construction of a new warehouse-style indoor stadium with all the modern doo-dads. Still, there were new markets anxious to obtain an NFL franchise and open up new territory for the NFL. Charlotte, North Carolina was growing like crazy with lots of big bank money ready to provide that rich skybox revenue that was becoming a new “must have” for all baseball and football franchises. It was hard to imagine the NFL expanding without Charlotte being one of the two cities. The conventional wisdom was that the second team would be either Baltimore or St. Louis. The expansion committee met and was poised to make their announcement, as expected, Charlotte got the first award. The team would play in a beautiful, new football only stadium in downtown. They’d be called the Charlotte Panthers. The committee announced its second announcement would be delayed. All reports were that the owners were absolutely enamored by the Baltimore presentation. The only real factor against them was being so close to Washington, DC and of course, Jack Kent Cooke wanted better surroundings for the Redskins. Cleveland owner, Art Modell was on the committee and thought to be very sympathetic to Baltimore. When the second franchise was awarded a few weeks later, the folks in Baltimore and St. Louis stood in shock at Paul Tagliabue announced the second team would go to Jacksonville, Florida. Jacksonville, Florida, another pussy cat team, the Jaguars, how could this be?
Baltimore was devastated. The future looked pretty bleak, but Baltimore patted itself on its back for having played the game the right way, putting up an honest good presentation, but that the NFL “commish” was a Washington lawyer and Cooke’s lust for a new field for his own, Baltimore saw that the fix was in. Washington was throwing its weight around to keep the NFL out of Baltimore. The city was still smarting over the way the Colts left town. That was up until then, the wrong way to lure a team. Having been shutdown playing the good boys in the expansion process, the attitude changed. Let us steal a team! Cynics suggested that the Baltimore proposal was so good that the greedy owners would hold it out as a bargaining chip to get better facilities for their own teams. “Pay up or we’ll move to Baltimore.” Rumors surfaced of various teams that were checking out Baltimore including the Redskins. The ultimate insult was leveled by the Commissioner himself, when Tagliabue was asked to comment on what Baltimore should do after raising the funds to lure an NFL team, he suggested the city could “build a museum!”
Meanwhile in Pittsburgh, with the blueprint for a glorious new football only stadium was turning into a reality in Charlotte and the Orioles selling out every night with Jacobs Field coming to nearby Cleveland, Three Rivers Stadium turned old over night. Likewise, across the state, Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia was evoking just as much anger as structurally it was even worse for both sports. With expansion settled, a new game was in play, and all kinds of seemingly unthinkable things happened. Los Angeles, California, the nation’s second largest region, the huge media market, couldn’t possibly lose NFL football, or could they?
Almost overnight, BOTH LA teams packed up and moved. The Raiders left the Coliseum behind for USC alone returning to a prefabricated Oakland field with a hideous new grandstand erected in centerfield to bring in all the modern goodies required for NFL football. Gone was the glorious view of mountains in the distance for baseball fans but nobody went to Oakland A’s games anyway. The Rams split for St. Louis. Who’d be next?
The 1995 NFL season began with a new look. New teams took the field with the Charlotte Panthers in the NFC West and the Jacksonville Jaguars in the AFC Central. The Rams took the field in St. Louis and the Raiders returned to Oakland. Meanwhile, there were restless owners with cities ready to erect a new football stadium built to order, not just Baltimore, but also Nashville, TN, Birmingham, AL, San Antoine, TX, or maybe even a trip up to Skydome in Toronto. The baseball strike had ended and suddenly the Cleveland Indians were the hottest team in baseball in their new “Camden Clone” stadium. Also, right at the beginning of that football season, Cal Ripken had broken Lou Gehrig’s “Iron Man” record bringing even more national attention to Baltimore’s beautiful baseball field plus sports big-wigs from around the nation saw just how serious Baltimore was to be able to act as the host of nationally prominent sporting events. No longer was Baltimore that cheesy little town where the locals talked funny and called yah “hon,” a miserable traffic jam on I-95 from the big powerful cities of Philadelphia and New York heading south to do business in the Nation’s Capital.
On an unusually hot, humid rainy night in Baltimore, November 1st, local TV station broke a story on the 11 o’clock news, the Cleveland Browns were heading to Baltimore. The next morning in a hastily arranged news conference in the parking lot of Orioles Park, stood Art Modell, the Cleveland Browns owner, the governor of Maryland, mayor of Baltimore, and chairman of the Maryland stadium authority with a display board behind them. The Cleveland Browns would begin play in Baltimore in 1996. They’d play two years at old Memorial Stadium before moving into the ultimate open air stadium just across the lot from Orioles Park.
The entire sports world trembled. Baltimore was indignant that it should have received that treatment a decade earlier when the Colts, the great Colts, the team of Johnny Unitas and all that, left town. What the Colts’ fans forget was that by 1983, they weren’t coming out to Memorial Stadium any longer with often crowds around just 22,000 watching NFL football. The 1995 Browns were a lousy team, but had just been in the playoffs recently, and the Cleveland fans still packed the “Mistake by the Lake.” In fact, their was one section of end zone bleachers, infamous through out the league, as the “Dawg Pound” where fans dressed up like dogs and fueled with lots of beer in their bellies pelted the opposing team and officials with dog biscuits. For some, that was what being a “blue collar fan” was all about. That’s an argument for another day, but clearly that kind of fan, the average guy who purchased season tickets was a secondary concern to having corporate big shots luxuriating in their elegant suites, all of the new NFL venues having well over 100 such suites with all the money going right to the team. The shock of Cleveland losing its team and media attention it drew did provide for something that Baltimore fans would envy. Cleveland would only be without football for three years. All the Browns legacy would remain in Cleveland. The Baltimore team would begin operations with a fresh slate, essentially as an expansion team, with a new name, colors, and a clean slate for future team records. Thus the Browns became the Baltimore Ravens. The old “Mistake by the Lake” was demolished and on that site a new Browns stadium would be built complete with plenty of those corporate luxury suites but also an area that would be dubbed once again, “The Dawg Pound.” The new Browns would play in the AFC Central against their former arch-rival Steelers and the hated Ravens, their former team in new clothes.
Now, back in Pittsburgh, and across the NFL and Major League baseball, any city that did not have stadia to rival what Baltimore had accomplished was put on notice, work out a deal for a new house or it’s farewell. Pittsburgh got its deal. The Steelers would play in a beautiful new waterfront stadium, Heinz field. A few blocks away, the Pirates would play in one of the most interesting of all the post-Camden yards fields, PNC park, with distinctly Western Pennsylvania architecture and a location where a strong lefty swinger could splash balls in the river, Pittsburgh became one city who could truly rival Baltimore for its lovely new sports palaces. In between the two, the stadium that seemed so modern when the two cities last met in the World Series in 1979 was blown to pits to provide parking and open space between the two new facilities.
The NFL still had an open spot for NFL expansion while existing cities were scurrying about building their new palatial coliseums. Assuredly that would give the NFL what it needed, a team in Los Angeles. With supreme interest from the television industry and the league itself, every effort was made to put a team back in Los Angeles but the locals couldn’t come up with a stadium site. The old Coliseum simply was not acceptable any longer except perhaps on a temporary basis. The stadium in Anaheim which hosted the Rams was already being reconstructed as what it was designed to be to begin with, a baseball only field. Houston, Texas yet another city victimized by the game of team owners’ high-stakes game of musical chairs had lost its team to Nashville, Tennessee. With plans for a lavish new stadium ready-to-go from day one, Houston gained the final expansion slot creating an NFL realignment securing Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Cincinnati all playing in new open air stadia in the same division. Not a single one of those fields stood when Art Modell announced his move to Baltimore.
Baseball had a bit of unfinished business that by the early 2000’s had become insufferable. Montreal, Quebec clearly had no interest whatsoever in baseball. The Expos needed a new home. After two rounds of expansion yielding teams in Florida with little fan support in Tampa and Miami, where was a team to go? The league initially proposed contraction, eliminating two teams one being the Expos. That would never fly with the players’ association, and there was a still lot of money looking to bring baseball to either northern Virginia or Washington, DC to serve the nation’s Capital. As much as the Baltimore Orioles fought the move, that Baltimore and Washington could still be a unified sports market was pretty much demolished with the Ravens having recently won a Super Bowl trophy. The Expos would become the Washington Nationals. Somehow it seems few would notice DC even had a team aside, from some folks in Baltimore counting more empty seats, despite opening a new ballpark this year just south of the Capitol.
Ironically, beginning the 2008 season, Orioles Park at Camden Yards now has the distinction of being one of the oldest stadia in baseball as more than half of the current baseball diamonds have been erected since the Baltimore miracle shocked the sports world in 1992. Likewise, many cities have new football fields since the Ravens moved into their new home in 1998.
The Ravens clobbered Cleveland yesterday playing to a full house full of crazy fans. Next week it’s on to Pittsburgh the night after the Orioles would have closed up shop for another season of futility still boasting a better record both in wins and losses and paid spectators than the Pittsburgh Pirates. While the lowly Tampa Bay Rays visit Baltimore on their way to the playoffs, the game will be surrounded by the site of empty “Camden” green seats. How many baseball fans in “Charm City” even clicked on the TV to see the Orioles play the Yankees in the last game ever in Yankees Stadium which brings this writing to a final irony – what’s going on in New York?
What venue could ever seem more immobile and permanent than Yankees Stadium? Sure the “House that Ruth Built” seemed pretty shabby in the early 1970’s as the “modern” multipurpose stadia sprung up in Philadelphia, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and Diego, Cincinnati. Shea Stadium was just beginning to develop its critics as a poorly executed design. To address that, the New York Giants were evicted to setup shop across the river in the Meadowlands where Giants Stadium served as the template for many of the new modern football fields. Yankees Stadium was shutdown for a major sprucing up. When it reopened in 1976, the field was still grass, the ghosts of its legends were still present, but it served as the most elegant and mighty fortress in all of sports.
The Camden Yards revolution created the unthinkable, after half of baseball had moved into new modern baseball only parks, Yankee Stadium itself was beyond refurbishing to make it viable in the new age of baseball thus next April, the New York Yankees will take the field across the street in a 21st century version of the old Bronx madhouse, every detail carefully engineered to emulate Yankee stadium of yesterday but processing all the modern fixings and even more than what every major league team demanded since Baltimore built its monument to the great national pastime in the very neighborhood of Babe Ruth’s youth. Shea Stadium will fall as Citi Field opens for the Mets, a stadium designed partially harkening back to Ebbets Field, home of New York’s Brooklyn Dodgers, but more like Baltimore’s Camden Yards whose architects studied the old ballparks like Ebbets Field and Wrigley Field to create an atmosphere designed to seem as timeless as the game itself. Across the river, construction moves along to put the Giants and the Jets in a new football stadium befitting of the nations’ largest and most powerful city.
All is well for football fans in those old blue collar cities and their baseball dreams are there for the making if their teams can find the right formula to bring cheering fans back in through the gates. Average Joe fan can take great delight that for once; they led the way having something that only now New York is getting for itself while LA-LA land has only USC, a college team, to follow for its pigskins glory.
All is not well in a few select cities with pro baseball and football teams playing in obsolete facilities. The threat of a largely league financed stadium in Los Angeles ready to host a NFL team has the gun loaded pointed right at the civic officials who don’t fall over when their NFL team demands a new field. Meanwhile, baseball has some unsatisfactory venues demanding attention but franchise owners don’t have the kind of high power bargaining chip of greener pastures to threaten their cities into building their new estates.
Right now, the Minnesota Vikings, San Diego Chargers, San Francisco 49er’s, Buffalo Bills, New Orleans Saints, and Oakland Raiders all have stadia far from the standards set by the recent wave of new construction. Likewise, although playing in a new 1990’s era stadium, the NFL’s decision to put a team in Jacksonville has not been blessed with adoring fans. Will one or two of these teams be headed for Los Angeles in the next five years? It’s hard NOT to imagine. In baseball, the Oakland Athletics have had an on again off again plan to move further south in a new ballpark with wealthy high tech financing. With two world championships, the Florida Marlins still have not secured a fan base often having the most embarrassing fan support in the whole sport. The Marlins have a tentative deal for a new facility, but county commissioners and pending lawsuits could still block the way. After 2010, they will not have a home in Dolphins Stadium as the football team seeks to consolidate its value to improve its field as football only field. On the other coast, there’s hardly a drearier more miserable place to play ball than Tropicana Field in the Tampa Bay region. Proposals are afloat for a retractable roof new home possibly on the grounds of Al Lang stadium, Tampa’s old minor league field. The latest news is those plans have been scrapped. What are now the two elderly National League parks, Wrigley Field and Dodgers Stadium face huge renovations including the possibility that the Cubbies could play a few games in South Chicago during the heat of the construction.
The challenge for baseball is far greater than the handful of NFL teams looking for bold new homes. There are plenty of areas where an NFL team could setup shop and do extremely well take the southern end of our Chesapeake region as an example. Couldn’t the Tidewater, Virginia area (Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Newport News, etc.) easily fill the stands with over 70,000 screaming fans for eight Sundays? Of course they could, and there’s a lot of money down there now too. The Redskins surely wouldn’t like it as that area is a hot “secondary” market for the skins. That’s just one of many areas, Birmingham, Alabama; Portland Oregon; San Antoine, Texas; Columbus, Ohio, and maybe even Oklahoma City are all places that immediately come to mind as capable of top tier football. The baseball season is so much trickier. How does a region support 81 home dates? Portland, Oregon has expressed some interest. Would central North Carolina be a possibility? The area has lots of money, loves sports, but would Charlotte draw fans from as far away as Raleigh/Durham and Greensboro/Winston-Salem. Perhaps, the reverse scenario would be better as Raleigh/Durham and Greensboro/Winston-Salem are closer together. Still, the goal would be to attract around 30,000 fans on a consistent basis for all those home dates. One would think, North Carolina with the banking and high tech industries that are flourishing could easily fill the need for corporate sponsors, but could the fellows who follow auto racing and college basketball develop loyalties to a major league baseball team? Some studies suggest the best possible place to relocate a team would be to add a third team to the New York market. The Yankees and Mets would never let that happen. Baseball, as a sport, needs to do a lot of soul searching on how it runs the sport as paying fans are in short supply in many cities even after building lovely new ballparks.
For Baltimore, the possibility of a packed Orioles Park at Camden Yards still is a good one if the Orioles make the right moves. With Baltimore as their home, strong secondary market in South Central Pennsylvania and being in easy reach of Washington for American league fans or fans who want to sample some of both leagues, winning combined with the right public relations efforts could make empty seats hard to find once again in what is still baseball’s most charming new park. It’s not just that the yard is a great place to watch the game but it is situated is an area rich with things to do before and after the game. Right off of I-95 and with great rail access, it’s also very accessible.
Washington’s future as a baseball city is harder to predict. The Redskins can develop a hometown identity for the football season easily, but given the job base of Washington and the ebb and flow of Washington activity, the task is tougher though the theoretical population base is greater than Baltimore’s. Aside from tourists, Washington practically shuts down for business in August. The Nation’s Capital is a transient region based on the political fortunes of whose in the White House and Capital Hill. The commercial activity is in Northern Virginia where the high tech industry is taking hold along with a huge service sector. Go to the north too far, and that’s Orioles country. A fan doesn’t have to get too far from the Washington Beltway before the cruise up to Baltimore via I-95, the Baltimore/Washington Parkway or I-97 is an easier drive than to get into the core of DC where there is no direct freeway connection but a fine Metro setup.
Over the mountains in Pittsburgh, population has dwindled since the glory days of the Pirates and aside from the little tease of the Barry Bonds/Bobby Bonilla days, the generations are slipping by since the Pirates were one of the key teams in the National League. Winning cures a lot of ills, and the Pirates ownership is showing little interest in retaining any key players. Sadly, Pittsburgh is another puppy mill for the big dogs. Unlike Baltimore, the secondary markets are not as strong as Youngstown, Ohio and territories directly north and to the west start getting into Cleveland Indians’ territory.
Sadly, for cities like Pittsburgh and possibly Baltimore too, the real secret to success rests in changing the operation of the sport itself. The revenue gap even with luxury taxes between the big market teams and the rest of the field are huge. Small market teams must labor for years for a one or two year window to go for it all. Quickly, players become arbitration and free-agent eligible far beyond what towns like Kansas City, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh can afford. While Tampa Bay triumphs this year in the American League East, how can they sustain their competitiveness against a division including the two most active teams in baseball, the Yankees and Red Sox? Some realignment might help, but if the Orioles were to move out of a division with the Yankees and Red Sox, they might not to need the talent to fight those teams for somewhere around eighteen games a year, but they also provide intense rivalries that make the game exciting. Sadly, so much of the Orioles spectator support consists of New York and Boston fans who overpower the local fans when those teams come to town.
Pulling this all together, look at how much more talk there is about baseball concerning things off the field, not on the field. For the Ravens, Steelers, and Redskins, talk is all about what goes on preparing for and playing the games. All three teams have their own kind of absolutely devote fans. For their baseball counterparts, talk is generally starts with something like, “What will it take for……?” with lots of difficult questions where answers are not immediately forthcoming.
Meanwhile, just up the road in the “Big Apple,” the New York Giants are 3-0, the defending Super Bowl Champions. Their new home is under construction. The Yankees open new Yankee Stadium next year that will surely enhance their finances tremendously. The two teams that play New York’s eternal bride’s maid roll, the Mets and the Jets, are headed for modern new homes too, although the Jets will share their future in the same stadium as the Giants but with the ability to make it look much more like home for both New York teams. When fans look forward to the next five years, it’s not hard to imagine a Super Bowl Champion coming from any of the five teams we’ve focused on here. However, when it comes to baseball, the notion of a possible Orioles/Pirates World Series appears to belong only to history books.
