02.14.11
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This cup doth not runneth over

Update 2/17 16:00 – The Consumerist checked in with Aramark on the cup size controversy and received this response:

For a short time early last baseball season, we used an incorrect cup size for the $4.99 beer. The cup was larger than it should have been. When we discovered this, we began using the correct cup size.


That would mean that the GC12S (12/14 oz.) cup may be used instead. If so, I hope people enjoyed getting the extra suds on the mistakenly larger cup while it lasted.

Today at AN, a fanpost contained the following video comparing the “small” $5 domestic beer with the “large” $8 domestic.

I normally don’t drink one of the big domestic brews (BTW it’s SF Beer Week if you’re interested) and there’s no chance I’d pay $8 for a large one. A $3 upcharge for that tiny difference in cup volume is embarrassing. The same phenomenon has been seen at Seattle’s Qwest Field.

You may remember that the Coliseum complex changed to compostable cups (PDF) several years ago. The cups are manufactured by Fabri-Kal as part of their Greenware line. Greenware comes in a multitude of sizes, and the problem appears to be the specific sizes of cups used.

  • GC16S – The company lists this as one of their “squat” models. It’s listed with dual volumes, 16 oz./18 oz. and its “flush fill capacity” is 18.3 ounces. This is the cup used for the “small” beer size and for the various craft beers served all over the Coliseum.
  • GC20 – The taller “large” cup’s “flush fill capacity” is 20 ounces.

I broke out my abacus to determine the minuscule disparity of 1.7 ounces. That’s less than the capacity of a shot glass. If the A’s want to be fair to the swill-buying public they should up that large to 24 ounces. Then again, this immediately brought to mind a conversation I had yesterday with a bartender. His establishment is a noted beer bar, though they also keep swill on hand for those who ask. A customer with a large party had no interest in any of the great craft beer they had on tap and kept requesting bottled Coors. At the end of the night the party went through nearly two cases of the stuff. They were charged the same for the Coors as they would if they had requested Pliny the Elder.

Lesson for the consumer: If you must get a Bud or Bud Light, get the smaller size. Better yet, if you’re going to spend a couple extra bucks, get a craft beer. It won’t taste like piss.

P.S.: At the Coliseum the vendors don’t usually fill the small cup to the brim. They stop at a fill line on the cup – probably 16 oz.

02.12.11
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Sometimes the best things in life really are free

We’re two weeks from the first spring training pitch, and the month is going according to form with little in the way of ballpark news. That’s not a big deal as I have a feature (not news) that will be posted in the next few days. The good news is that hope springs this time of year, even if it’s not eternal (A’s season ticket sales are up 50%!). Despite the paucity of action, there are occasionally really good little stories that pop up that make me glad to be a fan.

LA Times columnist Bill Plaschke just wrote one of those pieces. He describes his favorite lunch spot in LA not as a really fancy place or a well-reviewed hotspot. Instead, his favorite locale is a place where he brings his lunch in a brown bag:

My favorite lunch spot in Los Angeles takes no reservations because it has no tables. It has no menus because it charges no fees. It requires no parking validation because parking is free. It has no waiters because, well, it doesn’t even serve food.

All you need is a brown bag and a giant imagination and, on this, the quiet final winter weekend before the loud return of the NBA All-Star game and the start of the Lakers’ spring push and UCLA’s rush toward March Madness, I figure it’s a good time to celebrate our simplest of pleasures.

I do lunch in the upper deck of Dodger Stadium.

I love to sit alone in the blue seats and munch on my midday meal while staring out over the field and mountains and memories.

He goes on to explain how any local can have the same experience by driving to the stadium’s gift shop on an off day. As I am not a local, I had no idea anyone could do this, but going back through my few experiences at Dodger Stadium it makes perfect sense. Hopefully the next time I visit, this tacitly approved option will still be available.

In either downtown Oakland or San Jose, we’ll have a different situation. The ballpark won’t be built into a hill, so there won’t be a chance to drive to the top and check out the upper deck gift shop. Instead, I can only hope that there will be a public space that will be open year round, where fans, tourists, and locals can soak in the atmosphere and let their imaginations run wild. Chances are that such a public space will be in the outfield, not behind the seating bowl. That’s just fine. PETCO’s Park-in-the-Park is beautiful, expansive space that sits on valuable Gaslamp acreage yet feels oh-so laid back and quintessentially San Diego. Miller Park has the Friday’s Front Row restaurant just beyond the left field fence. AT&T Park has the knothole area, but there’s no place to sit. The pre-Mt. Davis Coliseum had views through slats in the chain link fence, but it also had the occasional security guard to shoo people away.

In the Cisco Field (Diridon) renderings, the place for this kind of public space is beyond the bullpens in center field. Let’s take a closer look at how it’s laid out.

To make it a usable public space while maintaining security, a few gates would have to placed at the entrances to the seating bowl and colonnade. No big deal there as this is common to many stadia, including the Coliseum. Even better would be a way to “open up” the batter’s eye. You may remember that in the Fremont concept, the batter’s eye was to be a sort of garage door that opened up before and after the game, allowing a great view of the field from the public area beyond center field. A garage door isn’t feasible in this case, but a motorized shade is. With the shade rolled up, the batter’s eye would be an empty frame, allowing for great views from those umbrella-covered picnic tables behind the batter’s eye. A shade would be much better than blinds.

I’ve advocated for a public space within whatever ballpark is built since this blog started in 2005. At Diridon there’s an opportunity to create an urban oasis that helps connect the Diridon/Cahill area to the rest of downtown. At Victory Court there’s an opportunity to beautify Lake Merritt Channel and make it a place that fans and residents can enjoy year-round. A neighborhood bar or restaurant was a dream for me. Honestly, I’d just as soon have a plaza where I can brown bag my lunch. All I want is a chance to experience what Plaschke does on a regular basis, except as an A’s fan in an A’s ballpark. It’s not too much to ask for, is it?

02.11.11
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Nuggets from the Tittle-Wolff interview

Thanks to David for alerting me and others to the Wolff interview on Rick Tittle’s second hour today.

On Lew’s opinion of Victory Court as a site:

I’d like to answer that a little obtuse… With the same kind of detail the committee is going into, we don’t think we have any options available there. It has nothing to do with the fanbase or the City of Oakland. It’s just that our exploration is perhaps deeper than soundbites in the newspaper.

If the A’s can’t move to San Jose, would they move or threaten to move out of state?

I think what we’ve tried to do is to be one of the few teams in the history of baseball not to leverage by “you know we’re gonna move if you don’t do this for us”… So we have not sat around and thought about what our options are. We want to stay in the Bay Area. Our ownership doesn’t want to own a team in Omaha or someplace. We’re gonna make every effort to stay in the Bay Area and truthfully do not measure these other options.

On Oakland Mayor Jean Quan’s suggestion that Lew’s in it for an ancillary real estate deal in San Jose:

I haven’t spoken to her – if I have it’s been once in seven years, so I don’t know what she’s thinking – but as far as the San Jose parcel there is no ancillary development right for us. My ownerships in San Jose are a small piece of the Fairmont and one lot where we have a racquetball club. I’m hoping if we go down there it’ll stimulate development but it won’t be our development.

Any updates on the status of XTRA Sports 860 (KTRB)?

We may be – I don’t have the details – the party selected for further negotiations so I think that’s happening right now.

Do you find the tarps have/have not been a success?

I think they’ve worked out fine. Maybe it’s my fault – we still don’t fill out the ballpark… I think the tarps was a plus in terms of obscuring a lot of empty seats. Is it a great thing? No. Is it a terrible thing? I don’t think so.

What are you and Billy referring to when calling the A’s a small market team?

I think we’re referring to revenue. In other words, if we had a new ballpark – I don’t want to use that as the only reason – when you have huge revenues even though you share them as the Yankees and Red Sox do – it takes revenue to pay and retain players. I don’t like the term small market. I just want to be able to have revenues close to the Giants, for example. When you trace the change in the teams from 2000, every statistic we have from advertising sales, sponsorships and so on, we started to fall way behind. Some of it has to do with revenue, some of it has to do with Barry Bonds.

Is it impossible to find that revenue in Oakland as opposed to San Jose?

Nothing’s absolutely impossible, but the answer is that demographics have changed tremendously, the corporation bases. We’re in a region here. It’s not like we’re not moving to another country or another state. If you landed tomorrow from Mars and said, “I’m looking to locate a ball team, where should I put it?” You might opt for the South Bay in the current economic and demographic environment.

On the Quakes stadium and the A’s ballpark being separate or related:

They would both be in separate venues. We don’t think we should combine them. Baseball, which is more dominant (in the US), needs to be in a baseball-only facility.

A very good interview by Tittle in which he asked numerous clarifying questions without antagonizing Wolff (it might help that Wolff may be Tittle’s boss’s boss’s boss in the near future). In any case, it covers a lot of ground that we frequently cover here at the blog, and other than the rather pat answer about Victory Court the answers were reasonably genuine. Discuss amongst yourselves.

02.09.11
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News for 2/9/11

Not to be outdone, a rival to the dome/town at UNLV has emerged. The $1.5 Billion complex, called the Las Vegas Sports Center, would consist of three separate venues instead of one multipurpose domed stadium. Included would be a NBA/NHL-quality arena, a 50,000-seat football stadium for UNLV football, and a 9,000-seat partially covered baseball stadium for the AAA 51s. The area targeted for the project is near downtown, the same area which has been bandied about for a new arena and a new MLB domed stadium in the past. The ballpark could be expanded to MLB capacity, though with the way it would be constructed it’s hard to see how it would work. Architecturally, all three venues would have large arches from which tensile roofs would be partly suspended. Heading up the plan is a group called International Development Management, with 360 Architecture doing up the plans. The scary bit? It’s quite possible that the UNLV Now domed stadium concept could approach the cost of the three purpose-built venues simply due to the cost of the technology that would be used.

VTA has an idea for finding operating funds for Caltrain’s 2011-12 year: take it out of the electrification and stalled Dumbarton Rail Corridor projects. The Dumbarton project would rebuild the abandoned rail bridge south of the existing vehicular bridge and provide rail between Union City and Redwood City. Interestingly, this redheaded stepchild of public transit (VTA took from it for BART-to-San Jose) may receive renewed interest now that Facebook has announced plans to move its 2,000-employees-and-rising from Palo Alto to the former “Sun Quentin” campus in Menlo Park. A planned station would be situated adjacent to some land that Facebook bought for parking or a campus expansion.

Blowback from the Super Bowl seating scandal continues with one fan looking to sue the NFL and Jerry Jones. Also suing: Cowboys premium season ticket holders who got limited view seats. All this hubbub reminds me of a friend who lives in Chicago. A few years ago, he got Super Bowl tickets as his family had Bears season tickets for several generations. The weekend of the big game, a family friend died and they were forced to cancel the trip. Let’s calm down and have a little perspective, shall we?

The Rangers announced that they are raising single game ticket prices. We can call that the Beltre-not-Lee Tax.

Five Cal sports may not face the axe after all, thanks to complications arising from Title IX compliance. Short $25 million in the budget for the next 5-10 years, the University chose to target men’s and women’s gymnastics, women’s lacrosse, men’s baseball, and men’s rugby squads for elimination. The organization Save Cal Baseball, which has been renamed Save Cal Sports in a show of solidarity, has raised $16 million, which should be enough to keep all five teams running for at least the next four years. The university decides the fates of the teams on Thursday. Update 2/10 1:45 PM: The University has put off the decision for the time being and is telling people to “stay tuned.”

Update 2/10 2:49 PM – MSFC will replace the roof at a cost $18 million, holding the Vikings to their last year on the Metrodome lease. The cost of the replacement will be mostly covered by insurance. Update 2/10 12:27 AM – A report to be issued to the Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission will show that the H.H.H. Metrodome’s roof was damaged so extensively in December that it cannot be repaired and must be replaced at a cost of $18 million. This news will only serve to advance talk of either replacing the Dome with a new stadium somewhere in the Twin Cities area or a threat of a Vikings move to Los Angeles. And since I can’t get enough of watching the Dome’s roof collapse…

02.07.11
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Quan talks tough as cities race

The Merc’s Tracy Seipel has the pulse on race to the keep/land the A’s. It appears that Oakland Mayor Jean Quan and Doug Boxer have their talking points in order.

“The reality is that even though you have land,” Quan said of San Jose, “you still have not gotten permission” from Major League Baseball to relocate the A’s to San Jose. “My timeline is less urgent than your timeline,” said Quan.

Apparently Oakland’s timeline is urgent enough that the Victory Court EIR is being fast-tracked for completion in less than 12 months. When was the last time in the Bay Area anything this large got its EIR completed in less than 12 months? Beyond that, there’s still the issue of issuing bonds for the project – which may not be possible after this summer, at least not without a vote.

Despite the numerous questions about Oakland’s ability to compress 2-4 years of work into 12 months, Quan is pushing forward and that is a good thing. It’s best for Oakland and A’s fans to see if anything can come out of this, because the last thing we want right now is one less option.

Experts quoted for the story, namely CSUEB’s Paul Staudohar and Smith College’s Andrew Zimbalist, aren’t so sanguine about Oakland’s chances. In explaining how San Jose is well ahead in the process, Staudohar said:

“So unless Oakland pulls a rabbit out of a hat very soon, it appears they will lose the A’s by default.”

For his part, Lew Wolff relates that Bud Selig wants to look at every angle, which would indicate that Oakland should and will have time to complete the process. Unfortunately for Oakland, this redevelopment crisis may provide the most cruel, unkind cuts to both the schedule and funding. Here’s to Oakland finishing the work, with as few legal and procedural issues as possible.

02.07.11
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Could San Jose A’s and Giants coexist?

The cover story in this week’s San Jose/Silicon Valley Business Journal discusses multiple scenarios in which the A’s (subscription required, written by Eli Segall), should they move to San Jose, would have to indemnify the San Jose Giants, the High-A affiliate of the San Francisco ballclub. The parent club bought controlling interest in the team last year, which could lead into a handsome payoff just for the minor league team in addition to whatever is agreed upon for the SF team. In the article, Roger Noll estimates that the A’s would have to pay the SJ Giants $4 million, which would be in addition to $20-30 million for the parent club Noll estimated a year ago.

The worry for the “little” Giants is that the A’s will siphon away sponsorship dollars, which in a large city such as San Jose is a goldmine for a mere Class-A club. The rest of the California League cities can’t hold a candle to San Jose in terms of corporate sponsorship potential. Despite the looming A’s threat, SJ Giants CEO Jim Weyermann isn’t worried much about losing attendance since the fan demographics are different, and there’s a chance that sponsors could be retained.

A sidebar mentions the fact that $14.5 million in renovations to San Jose Municipal Stadium are on hold pending the fate of the SJ Giants, which is of course tied to the A’s. Should the A’s move to SJ it’s likely that the SJ Giants would be forced to move. But that isn’t a given as Lew Wolff signaled that he’d be fine with the Giants staying there. Going this route would change the eventual terms of compensation, since Wolff and his partners wouldn’t have to go out-of-pocket for relocation costs. Instead they might have to foot part of the bill for compensation and for renovations to Muni – still not cheap but definitely cheaper.

Last month, Pacific Baseball Partners head Chris Lee made news when he admitted that the SF Giants’ refusal to do anything regarding T-rights has put his ballpark project in jeopardy. After I made my post I got this clarification from Lee:

“…note that the request to the (SF Giants) is not to move their affiliate to Sonoma County, but to relocate some other team, whatever its affiliation may be.”

It is possible that one of the other Cal League teams, perhaps Bakersfield, could relocate to Windsor, though given the circumstances, the frontrunner would still be the San Jose Giants. For that change to happen, the A’s move would have to be the first domino to fall.

If the San Jose Giants can stay in town, great. The parent Giants could choose to keep the team there in order to keep its foothold, though that would work against any idea that they bought into the little Giants to raise potential compensation. Keeping the SJ Giants in town would undoubtedly be the cheapest option for the A’s from a bottom line standpoint. From a strategic standpoint, it would make much more sense for the Giants to take advantage of an opening in the North Bay if the A’s go south. The SF Giants aren’t exactly greatly accessible from Sonoma County, with an hour drive from Santa Rosa to Larkspur just to catch the ferry. Still, it’s not as if common sense has prevailed in these matters so far. Why think it would happen now?

02.04.11
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Struggling in The Town

Let’s go back two weeks. Lost in the glorious vengeance that usually comes with an Al Davis press conference was a question about a future stadium from KPIX’s Kim Coyle. Davis admitted that he is not involved day-to-day in the work, but he pressed the notion that the Raiders need a new stadium… somewhere. Go 24 minutes into this video to get the question and response. Below is the text.

“The best place for a site is the Oakland Coliseum. It really is. Traffic-wise, the BART, all those amenities that go there – it’s the best place. BUT. If they can’t get it done, you’re gonna have to use other avenues. You’re gonna have to do other things. And we need a new stadium.”

“I mean we’re no different just like someone here brought up, being able to compete… If we’re going to be able to compete we need a new stadium.”

“And we want the Raider Nation, we want the fans out there, you gotta support us.”

“Someone said we had 22,000 (season tickets). We’re at the low end or close to the low end and we’ve gotta to do better. That’s just the facts.”

After the press conference officially ended, Davis talked a bit more. Asked about the impact of the new CBA and the extension of the regular season to 18 games, he said this:

“What does a club do that’s in a depressed area like Oakland, where we find out that the fans don’t have all the money we’re hoping they do?” Davis asked. “What do the Raiders do about 18 games, which means another home game? These are important things that we have to decide.”

So you have the short term danger of even more blackouts coming from greater ticket inventory, thanks to 18 games. Yet Davis is clear in favoring Oakland first, as opposed to immediately looking south to Santa Clara or even Los Angeles.

There’s the dilemma. The Coliseum is great from an accessibility standpoint. It is rich in history and legacy. Is that enough? Davis did something no other owner in the Bay Area is really willing to do – talk directly about the elephant in the room, Oakland’s struggles as a city. Unfortunately, to ignore Oakland’s issues is to ignore reality. Yes, there are great places to live within the city limits. Yes, it is only one-sixth of the East Bay’s population and is near many other wealthier cities. But it has issues that make it difficult to consider from the standpoint of funding a near billion-dollar stadium (not to mention a half-billion-dollar ballpark), and Davis has been feeling that pinch for a while. You’re not going to hear outsiders or “carpetbaggers” like Lew Wolff or Joe Lacob talk about this. They’ll dance around it as much as possible. Davis has nothing to lose at this point and has never edited or censored himself for good or bad. His opinion counts more than most other local owners because he’s part of the community, at least much more than Wolff or Lacob. Apparently Davis gets credit for giving the Coliseum a real college try – at his behest no less. If it’s too hard and the Raiders explore those “other avenues,” what then? Does that college try translate into greater goodwill? A shrug? Or will people remember only the endgame?

02.02.11
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Quan speaks out in defense of redevelopment

We’ve been waiting for comments from Oakland Mayor Jean Quan about redevelopment, and now we have them courtesy of KGO-TV’s Alan Wong.

ORA apparently has $52 million in cash on hand, $20 million for Victory Court’s development area. Quan was quick to talk up the benefits of redevelopment, specifically pointing to the renovation of the Fox Theater as a glittering example done under Jerry Brown’s watch.

Updated: More from Oakland North’s Laura Hautala:

Currently, the city council is the governing body of Oakland’s redevelopment agency and directs its actions, but (CEDA director Walter) Cohen said the successor agencies might turn out to be cities themselves. If so, the council might continue overseeing the projects normally carried out by Oakland’s redevelopment agency, but with less funding.

Quan told the council that she and the nine mayors from California’s 10 biggest cities will meet with Brown’s finance director next week to discuss details of how the proposal would work. “The scary thing is that folks in Sacramento have not a clue what redevelopment is,” Quan said, adding that even Brown, formerly Oakland’s mayor, seems to have forgotten the extent to which the redevelopment agency provides funding for the city. “We have a special responsibility to make this real,” Quan said.

When the subject shifted to the A’s, things got a little more uncertain. Let’s Go Oakland head Doug Boxer took the question.

When asked if this was the nail in the coffin for the Oakland A’s, Doug Boxer — Co-found of Let’s Go Oakland — says, “I don’t like to think of it like that. It’s very difficult to move a franchise. The Giants were on their way out, quite frankly, including Canada.”

Not exactly confidence inspiring. And there’s an important distinction to make here. In nearly every case of the A’s or Giants wanting to move, the owner was looking to sell the franchise.

  • 1976 – Horace Stoneham looked to sell Giants to brewing giant Labatt’s, who would move the team to Toronto. A court injunction stopped the sale and the team was sold to Bob Lurie.
  • 1978-79 – Charlie Finley tries to move the A’s to New Orleans but is bound to his lease by the Coliseum Commission.
  • 1980 – Finley tries to sell to Marvin Davis, who would move the team to Denver. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn struck down the move. Finley was held to his lease again. (Thanks, MB) Finley would sell the following year to Wally Haas.
  • 1992 – Lurie tries to sell the Giants to Tampa Bay interests after striking out several times in his efforts to get a new stadium built in SF or the South Bay. NL President Bill White intervenes and allows time for Walter Shorenstein to assemble the saving ownership group.

Legal obstacles (ironclad lease, sale acting as a gating mechanism) prevented the moves in all cases. Talk of a lawsuit against the A’s emanating from a clause in the lease has been all but debunked. That leaves Wolff/Fisher with the thing we already know as the last true obstacle: T-rights enforced via the commissioner. We can debate all day and night about how sacrosanct T-rights actually are, but let’s be clear – they’re the only real obstacle left.

02.02.11
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Brown may make June special election vote-by-mail

Governor Jerry Brown’s efforts to balance the budget have taken a new twist. According to Matier and Ross, the June special election, which would’ve had a referendum to extend current tax rates for five years, would be done by mail. The change would require a supermajority in the Legislature.

This doesn’t bode well for the chances of a ballpark initiative on that same ballot. The same kinds of resources that would normally be mobilized to bring out the vote in favor of a ballpark won’t be as effective for the mail-in vote. There’s also a danger for Brown in that mail-in vote tends to skew older and more conservative (anti-tax), and that the turnout may be poor due to people being unfamiliar with the process. The savings to the individual counties would be huge, however.

Can I hear it for a November ballpark election? Get your wallet out, Selig.

02.02.11
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Are you ready for some football stadia?!?!

Ed Roski may have an EIR done, but AEG has the glitzy package in downtown LA, which may translate into the largest naming rights deal in sports history. The deal with Farmers Insurance starts at 30 years, $700 million and could escalate to at least $900 million over the same period if two NFL teams play there. It’s an absurdly, staggering large amount that actually has a chance of paying off if enough additional events provide the requisite exposure. Here’s a list of what they’re putting together:

  • At least 10 Chargers NFL home games every year
  • A new or relocated college bowl game (non-BCS) or a playoff game if a system is introduced
  • The Pac-12 championship game
  • A place in the college basketball site rotation (Final Four/regional finals)
  • A future NBA All Star Weekend
  • The X Games
  • At least one high profile boxing/MMA event every year

Plenty of “one-off” possibilities are out there, such as World Cup games. Other soccer/rugby exhibitions are likely. It won’t hurt that the stadium is planned to be a extension of Los Angeles Convention Center, and that it’ll get a frequent broadcast nod after groundbreaking thanks to national exposure from Staples Center events such as Lakers games and the Grammys.

Even though Roski is putting up a fight for his City of Industry stadium concept, he can be forgiven for setting his sights elsewhere. Today he was a four hour drive away in Las Vegas, to unveil a unique stadium-arena concept at UNLV.

The stadium, which from the rendering above looks more like one of the vessel sinks my brother just installed at his house than typical sports architecture (not necessarily a bad thing), can function as either a 20,000-seat arena or a 40,000-seat stadium. It does this via a novel moving stand (the orange bowl) which retracts in and out based on the event. In arena mode, the stand moves in more than 200 feet and matches the other end, creating a round/oval seating bowl. For football the stand pulls out and exposes sideline seats, suites and club levels.

Roski’s partners in this venture are UNLV and Silverton Casino owner Craig Cavileer. The idea is first and foremost to have an on-campus home for the Runnin’ Rebels football team, which currently plays its home games eight miles away near the edge of town at Sam Boyd Stadium. The current venue also hosts a bowl game which would greatly benefit from being in an indoor venue, as a December night game in the desert isn’t always comfortable. Plus there’s nothing around the stadium.

Cavileer and UNLV are pitching the idea as a way to improve the campus, as it’s tied to an improved circulation plan, 3,000 new campus housing units, and a sizable retail/commercial component. Right now it’s common for travelers to pass the campus on the way to/from McCarran Airport, and the most prominent features are Thomas & Mack Center and the ocean of parking in front of the arena. If the plan comes to fruition, all of that parking would be turned into a new master planned community, with the new stadium as its anchor. Thomas & Mack would stay put as it’s still serviceable. No funding has been identified for the plan, so right now it’s in the earliest planning stages.

Given the site’s proximity to the airport, I’m curious if FAA height restrictions might come into play since the stadium may be only 1/2 mile from one of the runways.

When I first got word of the unveiling (thanks Dennis M.), I wasn’t sure if I had seen something like this before. Turns out I had, though not in person. Audio of the presentation had Cavileer mentioning renowned architect Dan Meis, who had done something like this before in Japan. The Saitama Super Arena is very much the same concept and was completed in 2000. While it doesn’t have a soccer/football tenant, it is unique in that it was designed to be able to stage American football exhibition games. That may sound weird but it makes perfect sense. If you go back to the 80’s/90’s you may remember that the Detroit Pistons played home games at the Pontiac Silverdome and the San Antonio Spurs played a few years at the Alamodome. The Georgia Dome was split into two venues for the 1996 Olympics, one half holding basketball and the other gymnastics. This unintentionally works well because an American football field’s width is 160 feet. Add 20-30 feet of buffer on each side to the width of the field and you basically get the length of a hockey arena or a regular indoor arena floor. All that needs to be done to stage basketball/hockey games is to put in the proper surface and add some portable seats.

At the Super Arena, an entire end is moved into place instead of collapsible risers. The change can take as little as 20 minutes to move the 15,000-ton, 9,000-seat stand.

As cool as it is, it’s not entirely ideal. 40,000 seats works for a second-tier NCAA football team and bowl game. It obviously won’t work for the NFL, not that the NFL is coming the Vegas anytime soon. There’s also an issue in the elongated configuration in that there are too many end seats and not enough sideline seats. Current design trends have end seats at a minimum. There’s probably a way to expand the footprint of the building in order to stuff more seats in there, but that’s not relevant to the UNLV concept.

I’m much more interested in the UNLV concept than Farmers Field, simply because it’s much more novel. If all of the involved parties can pull this off, it’ll be a great feather in Vegas’ cap. The preso describes a redevelopment (TIF) funding plan plus ancillary revenues. I never thought I’d see the rebirth of the “ballpark village” but there it is. Curiously, there is one thing missing from the preso – any mention of a pro franchise, like oh, the Sacramento Kings.