How exciting: Braves rename their ballpark ‘Truist Park’

Last year North Carolina-based BB&T bank bought SunTrust Bank, creating the sixth largest bank in the country. The bank’s new name: “Truist.” I don’t care about that, but given that the baseball team I root for plays in a place that was originally called SunTrust Park, I did wonder what the name of the park would be called going forward.

As of today, we have that answer: the Braves and Truist just announced the new name: Truist Park. Which is exactly what I guessed they’d name it last year. Hey, you pay millions for an advertising campaign, you’re gonna slap your name on it.

As I noted last year, “Truist” is not a real word, but it’s the 21st century, so I’m not sure that even matters anymore.

For those of you wondering why we ran that exercise for giving baseball stadiums alternative names a while back…..

Rangers honor retired jerseys with dimensions at new stadium

ARLINGTON, Texas (AP) — The dimensions at the new Texas Rangers’ ballpark will be similar to their old stadium, with slightly altered distances designed to honor the team’s retired jersey numbers.

The left field pole will be 329 feet from home plate, the 29 a reference to former third baseman Adrian Beltre’s jersey. It will be 407 feet to straightaway center field, honoring Hall of Fame catcher Ivan “Pudge” Rodriguez, and 410 at the deepest points to mark Michael Young’s No. 10.

Former manager Johnny Oates’ No. 26 will be marked by the 326 feet to the right field pole at Globe Life Field.

So, what do they do if they retire more numbers?

Former Marshall, MLB pitcher gives $1M for college ballpark

HUNTINGTON, W.Va. (AP) — A former Marshall University and major league pitcher has donated $1 million to help build the school’s new baseball stadium.

News outlets report Rick Reed’s contribution will go toward a ballpark scheduled to open in March 2021 in Huntington.

Reed says Marshall has been in need of a new stadium for a long time and that he was happy to make the donation.

Very complex: Nats, Astros share spring site, meet in Series

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Asked how his Washington Nationals figured out Gerrit Cole in the World Series opener, Juan Soto didn’t have to look far for an answer.

“I’m glad I face him in spring training,” Soto said.

In fact, all of the Houston Astros and Nationals see a lot of each other starting every February — they share the complex at the Ballpark of the Palm Beaches.

More than 200 days after breaking camp, they’ve ended the year on the same field with much more at stake.

Apparently, this is the first time this has occurred, for those interested in milestones.

The Las Vegas A’s? Baseball commissioner tells Oakland it could happen

Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred made it clear to Oakland officials that the A’s proposed waterfront ballpark and the team’s desire to develop at the Coliseum is an “all in one” proposition — and that the city needs to drop its lawsuit over the Coliseum land sale to the A’s or risk the team relocating to another city.

And apparently, everyone got the message.

“He kind of laid down the law,” said City Councilman Larry Reid, who also sits on the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Authority. He attended separate meetings Manfred held last week with Mayor Libby Schaaf and council President Rebecca Kaplan.

“He talked about how it was five years ago that he became commissioner, how he had resisted the A’s moving to San Jose back then,” Reid said. “Then he talked about his frustration with the lawsuit and how the city needs to make it go away.”

There are things that could be said about this- I’ll leave it to all of you to have your thoughts…..

Two Playoff Teams, Two New Stadiums and One Great Divide

Two maps tell the story.

First, John Schuerholz stared into a camera and stunned a city. Unflinching, the Braves’ GM turned president, whose teams had won 14 straight division titles, explained to Atlanta baseball fans on Nov. 11, 2013, that the club was abandoning the area just south of downtown, its home since 1966. No longer would the Braves play at Turner Field, where skyscrapers looming over left center made it feel as if the entire city was watching. Instead, the franchise would build a stadium 14 miles north, in Cobb County. “This new ballpark,” Schuerholz said of what would come to be called SunTrust Park, “will be in the heart of Braves Country.”

Accompanying the announcement, the team released a map showing where, precisely, Braves Country was—and, notably, where it wasn’t. That view of the greater Atlanta area was speckled with red dots, each one indicating the home of a 2012 ticket buyer, including season-ticket holders. Only a smattering of red appeared to the east, west and south of Turner Field, while thousands of dots congealed into a ribbon above downtown that expanded into a wide swath in the half-dozen suburban and exurban counties to the north. The new stadium would be closer to the middle of that mass, which happened to embody an older, whiter and more conservative population than the city proper. Those northern suburbs were fast diversifying, yet many in Atlanta—particularly in its black population—felt slighted by the decision, their perspectives colored by decades of racial and political tension between city and sprawl.

Five months later MLS commissioner Don Garber, Falcons owner Arthur Blank and then-mayor Kasim Reed proclaimed in their own press conference that downtown Atlanta would be home to MLS’s 22nd franchise, and the new club, Atlanta United, would take the pitch in 2017, the same year the Braves headed to Cobb. The soccer team would play in the same new $1.6 billion stadium the Falcons would soon call home, but United would be no afterthought. The facility would be designed to accommodate the beautiful game from the start. Pushing back against skepticism and pointing to an influx of young professionals near Atlanta’s urban core, Blank assured MLS’s leaders he could fill the massive venue, even in a market known for lukewarm enthusiasm toward pro sports. Reed boasted that his city’s foreign-born (and, seemingly implied, soccer-loving) population was growing at the second-fastest rate in the U.S. Garber himself insisted these factors combined to make downtown an ideal MLS incubator. The city “embodies what we call a ‘new America,’” he said, “an America that’s blossoming with ethnic diversity.”

A consideration of sport and space- of interest for those who wish for a long-form read.

What the Future of the American Ballpark Should Look Like

Even beyond that especially egregious example, the television viewer’s dominant perspective — that is, the center-field camera view of a stadium — can either make a stadium seem like an appealing destination or a sterile mausoleum…

Programs like ESPN’s College GameDay, NBC’s Today, and countless televised political rallies know what stadium designers often seem to forget: Putting your strongest supporters where the cameras are, and making their fervor the first thing anyone sees, makes for better television. We’ll place a seat-free tier of grandstands directly behind home plate. Every game will have a lively crowd for the broadcast, refreshed daily via ticket lottery, rewarding a new crop of avid rooters with a once-in-a-lifetime view.

Most of the proposals are impractical, but out-of-the-box discussions are refreshing.

How the Field of Dreams MLB dream came true

DYERSVILLE, Iowa — The news broke on social media midway through the morning of Aug. 8.

Seconds later, the phone at the Field of Dreams farmhouse started ringing. News may travel fast in a small town of just 5,000 people, but not as quickly as it can travel across the world on Twitter and Facebook.

One call tuned into two. Two calls turned into four. Four calls turned into eight.

“It literally did not stop ringing from the time of the announcement until the end of the day,” said Roman Weinberg, the site’s operations manager. “When I left at night, it was still ringing.”

“If you build it, he will come see a chance to make a quick buck.”

Should We Always Deride the Concrete Donut?

Engaging in nostalgic practices for the concrete donut, of course, is to engage in the same sort of practices that eventually gave rise to the neo-retro park, of which many—Pittsburgh’s PNC Park, San Francisco’s Oracle Park and certainly, Camden, for starters—remain magisterial. And of the extant midcentury ballparks, the Emil Praeger-designed Dodger Stadium, always considered a tier or two above the stadiums of the time, is endlessly lauded—and nightly packed. Across the freeway in Anaheim, over 37,000 show up nightly to see the always-maybe-next-year-in-Los-Angeles Angels.

Casting blame or praise solely on design typologies limits and lessens the agency of those responsible for shaping—and challenging—the ways in which our collective spaces are used. Baseball is a living game. Like its styles of play, notions about where and how it should be played will shift. This is important to pay attention to because in the cyclical nature of popular culture, the concrete donut era of Modernism and its cousin, Brutalism, is having a moment.

We’re at a point in history where many Modernist buildings are approaching their 50th and 60th birthdays, gracefully aging into the time when, where it’s warranted, historic preservation status applies. Mad Men still casts a cool of midcentury modern over the culture. The same sort of motivated individuals who felt that traditional cityscapes of lore were under threat by Modernism in the 1960s are the same sort of folk who may view the vulnerability of Modernist landmarks defensively. In short, Modernism is being charged with the energy that it was initially fought against, and the idea of the concrete donut—if it can be incorporated into the urban fabric more seamlessly—may come into vogue once more.