March 31, 2008
Nationals Stadium opens. In other baseball news, my hometown Nats moved into their new digs Saturday night -- with great acclaim for every aspect but the guy who threw the first pitch. Fan reaction is largely positive, and it's safe to say that dean of baseball columnists Tom Boswell is on board. The Nats have followed the storybook ending of their opener with another win, giving them the best record in baseball.
Lest my ultimate loyalties rest in doubt let me add "Go Sox!"
Also -- Valatan, what's our bet this year?
No link to a video? I would describe the boos as "lusty".
Continuing my day of Komment Kraziness(TM):
I see that people are making a do out of this being the last opening day at the current Yankee Stadium. That seems like a rather historic place...is there a reasonable rationale for building a new stadium in as crowded a place as New York City? It just seems callous to me.
I think we need to arrange a time to settle our previous bet first before we set up a new one.
Most new stadia are pretty damn superfluous. But, if you were to come up with a proper adjective to describe George Steinbrenner, esq. 'callous' would be a pretty decent one to start out with.
Taxes. Money spent on a new stadium offsets Baseball's luxury tax, and some sweetheart deals with the city reduce his municipal tax obligations.
I read from both articles on the stadium tax shelter that the MLB owners could have gotten together at some point and re-written the rules regarding write-downs for construction expenses. Guess that didn't happen? I suppose the articles also say that many owners must be thinking "well if the Yankees can do it..."
Good thing you said largely.
Wow. Why did they choose to have the new stadium reviewed by someone who hates baseball, doesn't know how to pack a bag lunch, and can't decide from the start of a paragraph to its end whether the stadium is a "colossal symbolic failure with national and international import" or a "C-plus"? And who elides "the ballpark, which has a surprisingly intimate feel, with good sightlines throughout, given its nearly 42,000-seat size" into damp praise about the grass, at least, being green?
I don't know what ridiculous standard this guy is judging the stadium against. "People of normal economic means can buy seats" BECAUSE other people choose to pay 4.50 for hot dogs and 7.00 for beer, Rooney. Nobody's "wringing" money out of you by offering interesting and diverse food choices. Stadiums are places to have fun and watch a ballgame. Any intelligent architect will tell you a stadium's "form or line, balance or symmetry, shape or presence" ranks, yes, below "their amenities, their bathrooms, their cleanliness and their overall convenience."
I'm not against an aesthetic review; in fact, I'd like to read one. There's hardly any criticism of this building in particular, and nothing constructive besides plant more greenery, tear out bathrooms and food stalls that I may gaze upon the fragrant waters of the Anacostia, and a novel suggestion to reduce the price of beer.
I better stop because this thing deserves a full scale fisking.
We need to get GMcD into a Menage à trois for this year's world series bet -- the newly Cabrera'ed Tigers are going to be really good. (Lulu's Indians worry me too).
I agree with mrflip...that article was weirdly unsatisfying and rambling. So the ballpark is no good because it doesn't allow breathtaking views of the river and downtown and yet it also allows views of some slummy neighborhoods and so I'm sad because we paid city money to buy a stadium...whazzawha? Is he saying that RFK is a paragon by comparison? I thought it was actually much maligned for being uncreative.
Swarthmore mathematician creates a chart that images managerial styles as faces:
The Chernoff Faces thing is neat but has always seemed weird to me. But there's an amazing new Data Mining approach from Lin & Keogh at UCSD called SAX that allows for a (less quirky) Intelligent Icons visualization -- it's a *huge* jump forward in feature extraction and anomaly detection.
Hopefully this new stadium lifts the Nationals experience higher than 29/30.
"We weighed all 10 categories equally, which hurt some of the grand old ballparks such as Wrigley Field (15th), Yankee Stadium (20th), Fenway Park (21st) and Dodger Stadium (22nd) but rewarded franchises that offer a better all-around experience"
You lost me at hello. The methodology of this is just crap. Weighting "Promotions" equally with "Team Quality"? That doesn't even pass the laugh test: promotions are what people put in place when their team sucks. I'd bet the Devil Rays could uncork the best promotion of the year -- a loss leader that would cost more than the marginal box office increase -- and it wouldn't boost attendance by more than a small fraction of having the Yankees or Red Sox playing them. And that's the *opposing* team's quality!
Summing ranks to find a score is possibly even more foolish: there's obviously a really tight spread in "Hospitality" vs a huge spread in "tradition" and "traffic". That is, for several teams the tradition is a HUGE draw and for many teams it's not at all -- I'd say 1-10 (Sox through Pirates) are basically tied (major draw), the middle third are basically tied (irrelevant) as are 20-30 (Astros through Marlins), makes a bad team laughable.
But all that is moot -- the poll was taken in March and so almost certainly reflects the dismal RFK and not the new stadium, which (from my visit last week) is B+ at worst.
And hat tip from #2 to #1 Redbird nation for their well-deserved Fan IQ victory. I also liked the tradition ranking.
But seriously? Yankees at #4 behind the Tigers at #1 on Team Quality? Not a knock on the Tigers -- who have a fantastic team this year -- but are our memories really that short?
I realized what really got my goat about this poll. You take any census of baseball fans and the list won't deviate too far from ((Fenway, Wrigley, Yankee Stadium)|(PacBell, PNC, Camden Yards, Safeco, New Busch)), depending on how you weigh Modern Ballpark Design vs Historic Tradition. Your judgement tells you which parks are vaguely in the top ten and which are vaguely in the bottom ten. The quantitative analysis is for teasing out the fine structure of where those go, and the design of that analysis also involves judgement (see above).
If your results show that parks traditionally considered among the top three have landed in the low twenties, this *should* clue you in that you're facing either a disastrous error in method or a revolutionary insight.
Now I know this SI poll has not received even the scintilla of expertise put into writing this comment. But though I feel the above is correct, it also invites the clear danger of investigator bias. How do you avoid this? Or is this basically the argument for Peer Review?
Hey, mrflip, i forgot to ask -- what was your take on the Nats park, after all? (Assuming airport delays didn't mean you missed the game.)
Not to mention that polling people for objectively measurable things like "affordability" is insane--why not just add up the cost of the third cheapest ticket, a beer, and a hot dog for all of the ballparks, and rank them that way? If you're concerned about local cost of living, you could even divide by the local cost of milk or something.
Also, the Royals tradition at #11? Ahead of the tigers and one place behind the Pirates?
I really liked it -- the views of downtown were great, we had an enjoyable view of the field, and the neighborhood looks like it's sprouting up nicely. My one complaint was that the food service was *ridiculously* slow. And my mom has had some issues with the customer service on her season tickets -- but I think that stuff will get fixed.
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Is it allowed that you make another bet when the terms of previous bets have not been met yet?
posted by natedogg at 06:21PM CST on March 31