The Texas Rangers released their latest round of vaportecture renderings yesterday, and their new taxpayer-funded building will apparently feature a retractable roof and oh so many power chords. I can’t figure out how to embed the video that the Rangers put together, but please click here to enjoy it on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s site. Then once you’re done with that, let’s spend some quality time with this particular rendering:
Several things about this:
- Yup, it still looks an awful lot like the Houston Astros‘ stadium.
- Whoever drew it either thinks stadiums are best viewed through a fish-eye lens or has some funny ideas about stadium geometry. Or maybe thinks the Rangers actually play pesäpallo?
- For an image supposedly meant to illustrate how close fans will get to the game, “specifically in the upper deck,” this actually shows anything but: The players are tiny flyspecks from this vantage point, which if you look carefully is actually the middle deck — there are two more decks even farther from the action, which are both set back immensely far horizontally from the field and also cast up into the rafters by a big glass wall of luxury suites or restaurants or car dealerships or something.
- The three levels of seating in left field unreachable by any human means have now been reduced to only one level suspended in midair. Improvement, I guess?
- Somebody has just gotten their 3000th hit as a member of the Rangers, it looks like. Adrian Beltre already cleared that milestone, so it looks like next in line on the team roster is … Shin-Soo Choo, who is a mere 1656 hits away and on pace to reach 3000 at age 50, in 2033. No wonder beefy-arm dude is so excited!
I guess I shouldn’t be too hard on HKS architects’ illustrators, though. After all, it’s notoriously hard to draw air-conditioning.
You forgot the fact that if Choo is playing in a modern stadium with state of the art flatscreens and gym equipment, that he will hit so many more hits than he could ever imagine back at the antiquated Globe Life Park.
Exactly! The poor downtrodden Texas Rangers, whose last World Series appearances were a staggering 6 and 7 long years ago, will finally return to being a competitive team once they have air conditioning in their brand new taxpayer funded mallpark.
The 3000 actually refers to the cost of the stadium for each household in Arlington.
For a stadium whose only purpose is to provide air conditioning the concept art sure is in love with wide open spaces that would let all the cold air out. The original round of art featured a gigantic opening along the first base side. (So unobstructed it appeared you could skip the regular entries and just stroll right onto the field if you wanted.) That appears to have been filled in now–a bit hard to tell since the vantage point is different in this art–but the area around the brick pillars behind the floating grandstands still appears to be wide open.
Love the lens-flare around third base. Can they guarantee I will see that at a real game.
So, the 3000th hit was a home run? There are no offensive players on the bases. Everybody out there is either the opposing team, an umpire or a coach.
And yet the player on the video board (in home whites, so definitely a Ranger) is clearly standing on the basepaths. Maybe in the future the Rangers will be so bad that they’ll have to constantly replay video of Beltre’s 3000th hit, to remind fans what it was like to have baserunners?
I bet $100B the roof will be open 99% of the time. Any takers?
This is Texas for a summer sport. I’d bet it’s closed more than it’s open. Houston’s roof was only open for 14 out of 81 games in 2013 (the last year I can find statistics). Florida and Arizona have similar numbers as well with the Marlins only opening up 8 times in 2013.
With the exception of Toronto where the locals want sun and sky whenever they can get it, the retractable domes tend to be closed more often then they are open to take advantage of the air conditioning and de-humidifiers of an enclosed space.
Disagree with you on Toronto, JM.
As the SkyDome was built to be an enclosed stadium (IE: electrical and other systems in many cases not rated for exterior use), it literally cannot be kept open if there is any suggestion of rain or snow in the area. So the dome is closed most of the time, sadly.
That said, anyone who has ever suffered through a sweltering 90% humidity June or July day in the GTA without air conditioning will know that having the roof closed is much more comfortable for fans than having it open… it’s less aesthetically pleasing, but….
I remember when I moved to Houston in 2003, they used to open the roof every night in the 7th inning. It was a nice use of the thing, since it wasn’t as hot by the end of the game. It must have been expensive or hard on the roof though, because I feel by the time I left 3 years later, they didn’t do that anymore.