March 14, 2006
Baseball at 30,000 feet
The renderings for the new Washington Nationals are out, and they look even more like an airline terminal than the Nats' current home. It's also a good depiction of that upper deck that will be 21 feet higher than at RFK - for a stadium with 15,000 fewer seats.
—Neil deMause
Those renderings look like once again HOK has tried too hard.
Posted by Bertell Ollman on March 14, 2006 06:25 PM
I agree. I spoke with someone from MLB and they really aren't that impressed with the work HOK does. It just seems everyone expects HOK to design stadium so they do. One problem he mentioned with HOK is they have no concept of where to put junction boxes etc. and that leads to overruns and changes once things get going since they have to correct problems like that.
Posted by NYC20-Never on March 14, 2006 09:19 PM
Thomas Boswell has an interesting bit in his WP column today:
"But we know what he ought to do. MLB stopped the bidding for this team at $450 million because it didn't want somebody it didn't prefer (perhaps George Soros) to "buy the pot" with a high offer."
So MLB is simultaneously extracting the highest price from the public for stadium funding while NOT selling the franchise to the highest bidder. Has anyone seen any other reporting that the MLB bid is capped at $450 million dollars? It seems like a pretty egrigious abuse of their monopoly exception and an acknowledgement that they are able to secure vastly inflated terms for their franchises based on the same exception - what other business sells for less than market price?