Which drunk frat boy gets to be the first to vomit on somebody's lawn?

When you have the chance to leave a stadium that's unique and well designed, to go to a cookie cutter copy of what every other team did 10 years before you, you gotta take it!

yeah, KC doesn't have nearly as many drunks as Chicago, do they?

plus as much debauchery goes on in Wrigleyville (and I was a co-conspirator at times in the 1980s and 1990s), at least most of the debauchers seem either to live within walking/staggering/carrying distance of the area, or they can stagger onto the El and get home that way.

does North KC have that sort of mass transit?

(circa 1987, a member of our posse just runs out of gas around noon at Murphy's Bleachers before a 1:20 pm game - overserved over and over til the wee hours. he's face down on the grass, asleep, and we let him be. the nice local folks occasionally would walk by and ask if he belonged to anyone. we'd raise our hands, and they'd be on their way. it looked plausible that he could have fallen off an adjacent train car/station right above, iirc, which produced a modest uptick in curiosity. needless to say, we never rented a car. we were stupid but not THAT stupid.)

When you have the chance to leave a stadium that's unique and well designed, to go to a cookie cutter copy of what every other team did 10 years before you, you gotta take it!

Yeah, what's the actual rap against Kauffman Stadium? I've always thought it was considered one of the best designed parks in the AL. It's up there in years, but so is Dodger Stadium, not to mention Wrigley and Fenway.

does North KC have that sort of mass transit?

Depends on the definition of "mass transit." Does "mass transit" include masses of people getting into their cars and driving? If not, then no.

thanks.

so this is some sort of a suicide pact?

if it really will be like Wrigleyville, then definitely.

but as with all of these hustles, it might be that KCers will not at all be as irresponsible as the Wrigleyville crowd, knowing that at least one member of the crew has to drink responsibly or - better yet, not at all.

that would save lives - and make the projected tax revenue figures as big a joke as most of these proposals are.

Yeah, what's the actual rap against Kauffman Stadium?

Location. It's a suburban stadium with nothing around it. They want a ballpark district, and the Chiefs won't let them build one there, so they are looking downtown. North Kansas City is just across the river, that's an industrial/suburban area, but you can at least see downtown. If they're going to move - and they are - I'd rather just have them downtown than in another suburban development.

AFAICT the Royals' attendance has everything to do with the team's success, and almost nothing to do with the stadium.** Not that a better location wouldn't help, but like most small market teams, they need a competitive team to consistently draw well. There are only so many New Yorks, LA's and Chicagos, and only so many fan bases like those of the Cardinals and the Red Sox.

** From 1973 through 1990, when the park was new and the Royals were competitive, they were always in the top half of AL attendance, and usually in the top 3 or 4.

I don't know that this would be about attendance. You're right, that is driven mostly by team performance. I think it's more about generating more economic activity from the current attendance. There's a big difference between fans who drive in, see a ballgame and drive home, and fans who go out to restaurants, bars, do some shopping, perhaps even get a hotel room for the night.
Vibrant communities do sprout up around ballparks. Rarely quite as much as the promoters promise, but it's not nothing.

Braves are in a suburban area and it has worked out pretty well for them.

I think it's more about generating more economic activity from the current attendance.

Correct. Money that teams can keep, and not have to pay into the revenue sharing pool.

Vibrant communities do sprout up around ballparks.

True in some cases, but Kauffman Stadium has been around for 50+ years and it never happened there. Beautiful park all in all, but it's still located at the crossroads of two interstates with virtually nothing around except for some older residential areas, a hotel or two, a Taco Bell, and a gas station or two.

Oops removing double post.

Vibrant communities do sprout up around ballparks.

Not really? It's like a single 3-star hotel for the drunks, three brewpubs, a couple of overpriced burger and chicken finger joints . . . the fundamental issue is that the stadium takes up multiple city blocks and its completely dead - like not a store not a pedestrian not a nothing - for 96% of the year.* No 'vibrant' neighborhood can give over that much space to a glorified warehouse; the stadium neighborhoods are doomed from day 1.

Now for a place like a KC/Atlanta, where pretty much the entire city is dead and people just hopscotch with the car from lot to lot, then maybe the stadium-adjacent community is better than nothing. But man, talk about aiming low.


*4.5 hours * 81 games is ~4% of the hours in a year.

It's worse when a baseball stadium's neighbor is a football stadium that gets even less use.

Fun fact: When the stadia (Arrowhead/Kauffman) were built in KC, the original idea was the have a huge roof on rollers in-between, to be positioned over whichever stadium was in use at the time. Such a set-up was also mooted for Detroit, but the idea died when Motown was not awarded the 1968 Olympics. (Yes, you read that right.)

The Braves play in Cobb county and there are tons of condos/apartments surrounding the ballpark along with office buildings. It's actually a pretty big leisure destination within Cobb county even on none game days.

Yes, but that speaks to how awful Cobb County is.

Fun fact: When the stadia (Arrowhead/Kauffman) were built in KC, the original idea was the have a huge roof on rollers in-between, to be positioned over whichever stadium was in use at the time. Such a set-up was also mooted for Detroit, but the idea died when Motown was not awarded the 1968 Olympics. (Yes, you read that right.)

They brought the idea up again at the last stadium renovations in 2006, and voters approved the renos, but rejected the roof.

Fun fact: When the stadia (Arrowhead/Kauffman) were built in KC, the original idea was the have a huge roof on rollers in-between, to be positioned over whichever stadium was in use at the time. Such a set-up was also mooted for Detroit, but the idea died when Motown was not awarded the 1968 Olympics. (Yes, you read that right.)

Wow, that's quite a link. The phrase Detroit Olympic Committee just does not flow off the lips, you know? It starts out OK, but when you get into that last word there's sort of a "Detroit Olympic Comm- wait what?" moment in there. To be fair this all went down in 1963, well before the 1967 riots. But as alarming/entertaining it might be to imagine what any Olympics hosted by an American city would have looked like in 1968, Detroit would have been even stranger. They had almost no facilities and the car industry was not booming like it had been ten years earlier so the scramble to build everything during that turbulent decade would have been challenging even before considering what the event itself might have looked like.

Vibrant communities do sprout up around ballparks. Rarely quite as much as the promoters promise, but it's not nothing.

Indeed it's not nothing. New research shows that it's less than nothing.

Though researchers have demonstrated conclusively that sports stadiums are not economic development catalysts, stadium projects that include pre-planned ancillary developments have been proposed as a salutary strategy to overcome the widely observed dismal economic performance of standalone stadiums. Using an objective rubric for evaluating economic impact studies, we review a commissioned pro forma model that claims to demonstrate net positive fiscal impacts of two prominent publicly-financed stadium-anchored developments. Using reasonable assumptions informed by existing research and established discipline standards, the model estimates substantial negative returns for both projects (-$40 to -$60 million in Worcester, Massachusetts and -$100 to -$200 million in Cobb County, Georgia). We find that the reported fiscal surpluses derive from chosen assumptions and not the stadiums’ complementary developments. We conclude that pro forma estimates do not provide credible forecasts of fiscal impacts, and ancillary developments do not improve the fiscal returns of stadium projects.

a huge roof on rollers in-between, to be positioned over whichever stadium was in use at the time. Such a set-up was also mooted for Detroit

Someone with an engineering degree needs to assess how to roll the Ford Field roof over Comerica Park. It could still happen!

The stadium in Cobb was built in an office park area (the parking for the games was the office parking used by businesses during the day ). But the whole area around the stadium was built out for residential usage. Atlanta has a history of doing these purpose built residential areas and of course with massive influx of people each year all of this can work. In a place like Kansas City, idk.