TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042991/0429260.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.8 KB | 160 lines

                                                                                SPORT, Page 80

Remaking The Field of Dreams


A ball-park revival aims to restore the intimacy of an older
baseball tradition

By WALTER SHAPIRO/CHICAGO


    Midway through the fourth inning last Thursday, the home
team was behind 16-0, and the restless opening-day crowd began
to leave their seats. Rather than rushing to beat the traffic
home, they set out on sightseeing tours along the broad
concourses ringing the field. It was an epic day, the unveiling
of the new Comiskey Park, and Chicago White Sox fans were ready
to gawk. The splendor of the grass, the picture-perfect sight
lines from the lower deck and the allure of the sun-speckled
bleachers all trumpeted that this was a park made for baseball.
Before the game, aging knuckleballer Charlie Hough, trying to
hang on with the White Sox, captured the festive mood when he
said, "I love the outfield seats. I'd enjoy sitting out there,
I'm sure. I hope I don't have to."

    Just across 35th Street stands the forlorn hulk of the
original 1910 Comiskey Park, with a gaping hole cut through the
right-field stands. A mournful opening-day banner reads,
SPEEDWAY WRECKING: THE HARDEST `HITTER' OF ALL TIME. With these
ghostly memories still in sight, how hard it is for the
nostalgic baseball fan to come to peace with progress. Yet the
truth must be acknowledged: the new Comiskey Park represents a
hopeful beacon for the future of baseball. It is a talisman that
the wonder of the game will survive this era of luxury sky
boxes, insanely lucrative television contracts and pouty $4
million sluggers. "What's happening in baseball architecture is
what you see here today," says architect Richard deFlon, who
designed the new Comiskey for the HOK Sport group. "This is the
first of the new single-purpose stadiums. Baltimore's next, then
Cleveland. There is a return to the intimacy and the character
of the old ball parks."

    Ball park. Just the words jog the memory and uplift the
spirit in a way that is antithetical to seemingly analogous
terms like stadium, coliseum and that ghastly civic-booster
construction "sports complex." The key word is park, because
nothing better conveys a small child's glee at the first glimpse
of the field on an outing to the ball park. The three survivors
of baseball's glory days -- Fenway in Boston, Wrigley in Chicago
and Detroit's Tiger Stadium -- are islands of green in a densely
urban setting. Lawrence Lucchino, president of the Baltimore
Orioles, explains his team's quest for a modern-day field of
dreams: "Everyone harked back to their youth and looked for what
was special about the ball parks we loved."

    This desire to recapture the tradition and character of
bygone ball parks is a radical departure for the lords of
baseball, who just a few years ago seemed entranced with the
air-conditioned, carpeted sterility of the shopping-mall
culture. Think back to the National League play-offs last
October that pitted two teams bursting with young talent, the
Cincinnati Reds and the Pittsburgh Pirates. It would have been
an epic series, save for one problem: both teams played in
nearly identical 1970 concrete slabs, monuments to the
bottom-line obsessions that created multipurpose stadiums
equally antiseptic for baseball, football or rock concerts. In
1989 the Skydome in Toronto found a way to exaggerate this folly
to Herculean proportions. Boasting a hotel overlooking center
field, a Hard Rock Cafe and the aura of high-tech razzmatazz,
the Skydome became a monument to itself, with baseball reduced
to a minor sideline.

    What is stirring about the ball-park revival that began at
Comiskey is that it shows art and commerce can sometimes mix.
"We all love the game of baseball," says Terry Savarise, the
White Sox official who directed the project. "But let's not kid
ourselves: baseball is a business." Indeed it is, and Comiskey
has 93 luxury sky boxes renting for up to $90,000 a year to
prove it. The steeply pitched upper deck, elevated over three
levels of luxury seating, invites a remake of Vertigo.
Comiskey's other flaw is a love for blandness, rejecting the odd
angles or idiosyncrasies that add character to a ball park.

    If, architecturally, Comiskey can be scored as a double
off the wall, the new ball park rising in Camden Yards in
downtown Baltimore is a going-going-gone home run. Make no
mistake, fans and players alike will miss the homey pleasures
of Baltimore's Memorial Stadium, now in its final year. Set in
the middle of an old-fashioned front-porch neighborhood and
never an architectural icon, Memorial Stadium is like Baltimore
itself, a place that purports to be nothing more and nothing
less than it is.

    Standing in the upper deck of the half-completed Camden
Yards ball park, one can appreciate why baseball bard Roger
Angell proclaimed, "This is a fan's park . . . They've done it
at last." Although Camden Yards is designed by the same firm
that created Comiskey, here the upper deck is a graceful
incline, not a mountain climb with Sherpa guides. Downtown
Baltimore is always in view, from the Bromo-Seltzer clock tower
behind left field to the massive, restored brick warehouse in
right field that will become a 460-ft.-from-home-plate target.
(Already the Orioles are searching for lefthanded sluggers with
"warehouse power.") The homage to old ball parks can be seen in
such retro touches as the exposed steel support beams, the
irregular configuration of the outfield angles and arches that
open wide to embrace the city.

    Watching a game in Detroit is a graduate course in
capturing the magic of the old-time ball parks. Unlike the
ivy-clad perfection of Wrigley Field or the self-congratulatory
ugliness of Fenway Park, 79-year-old Tiger Stadium represents
the last remaining link with baseball before it became too
self-conscious. No park provides more of the sensual joys of the
game itself. On a clear night, fans can hear the crack of the
bat, the infield chatter and even the ball hitting the catcher's
mitt in the Tiger bullpen down the third-base line. The
cantilevered closed-in upper deck gives you the impression of
sitting in a cherry picker over the umpire's shoulder; the
lower-deck bleachers are so close to the field that you can
nurture the illusion that you are not a spectator but the
Tigers' right fielder.

    Yet Tiger Stadium is an endangered species. Pizza baron
Tom Monaghan, the team's owner, wants to open the 1995 season
in a new stadium. William Haase, the Tiger vice president for
operations, argues, "Everything is wonderful about old ball
parks. But that doesn't mean they are meant to last forever or
that they can be economically feasible." Preservationists are
battling to prevent this rendezvous with the wrecking ball. The
Tiger Stadium Fan Club, with 12,000 members, has developed its
own plan for retrofitting the ball park and is promoting state
legislation to bar the use of public funds for a new lair for
the Tigers. As Bob Buchta, one of the founders of the fan club,
says, "There is a special connection between old ball parks,
childhood and the game of baseball. We feel that the Tigers are
making an artistic mistake and a financial mistake."

    For the moment, at least, Tiger Stadium endures. Next
season they too will be aiming for the warehouse in Camden
Yards. Other teams -- the Cleveland Indians, the Milwaukee
Brewers and the Texas Rangers -- may soon make their own
contributions to the ball-park revival of the 1990s. On the
field before the opening game at Comiskey, Baseball Commissioner
Fay Vincent said proudly, "This is the best that baseball can
do in terms of architecture." For the true fan, the enduring
hope is that he ain't seen nothin' yet.