Terrible Worcester stadium deal gets appropriately terrible renderings

We have new renderings of the Worcester Red Sox stadium set to open in 2021! Let’s see what one of the largest minor-league baseball stadium subsidies in history will get for the Paris of the 80s:

I’ve always assumed that people in architectural renderings come from some sort of clip art, but if so, the ones here appear to have been imported from the Wacky Poses collection. We have the kids in oversized t-shirts putting on shower caps, the woman hailing a cab on an empty street, the woman intently staring down a tree, the man with a beard down to his navel, the two guys not at all suspiciously wearing long overcoats when everyone else is dressed in shorts, and so, so much more! Really, you could make a good “Find the X things wrong with this picture” puzzle out of this image, except the answer would be “everything.” (Why are so many of the people subtly translucent, anyway?)

The stadium will have a diner! This is, I guess, one of those touches that’s supposed to show it will be a year-round economic catalyst, and not just a giant building that’s closed almost 300 days a year. I especially like how the renderers chose to add a big dorky pointer labeling the diner, rather than the way easier solution of making the diner signage say “Diner” instead of “Signage.”

They really want you to see that diner. It will, apparently, be filled with a toxic gas that will repel all potential customers and keep them at a safe distance, which is probably a good idea seeing that the customers will all be gray, featureless ghosts. (But not translucent! Only living, breathing people are translucent in WooSox world!)

WE GET IT THERE’S A DINER OKAY

Finally, the first image where we can see the inside of the stadium. Aside from being weirdly asymmetrical — is it modeled after Fenway Park, maybe, with its short porch in left and terrible right-field corner seats? — it has a rather large upper deck for a 10,000-seat Triple-A stadium. That’s not at all a bad thing, not is the fact that the upper deck appears to be cantilevered well over the lower-deck seats, but I am puzzled by what’s holding it up, since there are no columns underneath it and nothing behind it to serve as a counterweight.This image makes it ever more clear: That upper deck is just suspended off of the front of the concourse behind it by some mysterious force. Hey everybody, we may have found the location of the universe’s missing dark energy! And who can put a price on unlocking one of the fundamental puzzles of the universe?

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11 comments on “Terrible Worcester stadium deal gets appropriately terrible renderings

  1. Is this the most not a stadium aesthetic that can be done? Sure many have aesthetic issues but when you have to completely hide what you are on most sides it seem like that should be telling you something.

  2. That’s the new team name: The Worcester Signage.
    Or maybe the Worcester SignageSox. Good news for uniform lovers: stirrups/sanitaries are required. Bad news: they’ll have ads.

  3. I doubt they’d do this but if they were to have a feed of the games at said diner….I’d be 100% down for buying slightly overpriced stadium diner coffee & just watch the game from the diner.

  4. Maybe they could bring in life size movie cutouts of the actors from the film “Diner” and display them throughout the stadium. They could posed so that the are, in effect, greeting people.

  5. Lengthy beard guy and his red-jacket-wearing friend appear several times throughout these renderings, and twice in the first one (they’re near the entrance and also across the street). Are they time travelers? Some sort of ill omen?

  6. The more I read your stories about stadium subsidies the more I realize that everything your write about is true. I recently made a trip to Gwinnet Georgia to see the Durham Bulls (Tampa Bay Rays affiliate) and was impressed with the stadium that has housed the Atlanta Braves AAA affiliate since 2009. Despite the beautiful stadium and a respectable ball club there wasn’t more than 500 people in attendance. Even more reason to believe huge investment stadiums don’t generate the revenue that organizations claim they do.

  7. They’re anxious to get this thing up and get out of RI. They managed to buffalo Worcester into paying the larger portion. I wonder if Worcester’s going to make them stay for 5 yrs. I doubt it. The stadium’s going up, they’ll fulfill and year and beat it out of town. They could care less about columns and that diner – is that part of the crap they gave us – stores, fine dining, etc.?
    My guess it will go up and the team will get sold. Larry wants out ASAP.
    For the record, I don’t believe Doc is 59 either.

  8. Those are fairly terrible renderings. The neighborhood reminds me of the “redeveloped” area in Boston around North Station/TD Garden since the Big Dig.

    Jokes about diners aside, Worcester was the city where many of the diners used in the 1930s-1950s were manufactured by the Worcester Lunch Car Company–so it is a nice, if corny (corned beefy?) nod to the city’s industrial heritage.

    The city itself still has a few famous diners (not sure if one of those would relocate to the stadium–if not a lovely example of the “substitution effect” in action).

  9. Thanks for the laughs Neil, and commentators. True on the substitution effect – “here’s the diner that your taxes will pay for that will compete with your diner”. Lovely. And signage everywhere, how special.

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