Cleveland’s $285m for Guardians stadium renovations will help build glitzier restaurants to lure fans to the nosebleeds

The Athletic continues with its series on the Cleveland Indians Guardians‘ future in the city with a look at how the team owners the Dolan family plan to spend $285 million in public renovation money that is currently up for approval from the city and county councils. (The total renovation budget is $435 million, counting $150 million from the Dolans.) This consists of a lot of links to the same renderings we saw last time, plus a few quotes from team officials about how they needed public money because their restaurants were looking tired:

The glass-paneled restaurant that hovers over the lower bowl down the left-field line has rarely operated the last few years — business began slowing well before the pandemic. Those in the Indians organization deem it antiquated. It initially served as the jewel of the new ballpark, a coveted destination where fans who paid for special access consumed cocktails and gorged on gourmet meals atop white tablecloths while watching the Indians dominate the American League. Now, one team official compares the restaurant’s buffet to an Applebee’s.

So, the problem is that the team stopped serving “gourmet meals” but now offers only a “buffet”? Or that fans have stopped wandering into a restaurant way out in the outfield upper deck now that the team has stopped dominating the American League? Neither of these seem to call for a major reconstruction of the restaurant as a solution, but when your only tool is a $435 million capital budget, I guess every problem is a renovation project. Besides, look, renderings!

The Athletic’s caption calls this “a multi-tiered, open-air social gathering hotspot that could entice more fans to visit the upper deck,” which, sure, the occasional fan will possible think, “This game is boring, let’s check out that restaurant way the hell the other side of the stadium, it’s got tiers,” but I’m not sure it’s something I’d stake my business model on.

Other proposed renovations — in addition to electrical and plumbing upgrades, plus an expanded clubhouse so pitchers no longer need to hold their meetings in the same room as the ping-pong table, which apparently was a crisis — include tearing down the “shipping containers” in the right field upper deck, which you may recall were installed with the last batch of public money to make the ballpark feel more “intimate,” but which it turned out actually don’t:

The Indians haven’t nailed down exactly how they want to transform those tan and forest green boxes, but as one team official stressed: “It needs to be different.” Their goal is to make the upper deck less of an afterthought, to motivate fans to explore what that level has to offer in terms of sight lines and concessions.

“We just don’t give people a good reason to do that,” the official said.

The problem here, it seems, is that nobody wants to sit in the upper deck at Cleveland’s baseball stadium, because upper decks at new baseball stadiums tend to be pretty awful places to watch the game, because there are so damn many luxury boxes jammed in underneath them. And while that wasn’t so much a problem when the team was selling out every game and you had to sit wherever you could find a seat, now that the honeymoon period is over and attendance has reverted to more modest levels, even in years when the team is a World Series contender, nobody much wants to climb all the way up there now. So, sure, let’s tear out the stuff we put in a few years ago to try to make the upper deck seem more attractive then, and redo the restaurant so that the buffet items sit atop snazzier counters, can’t hurt to try, especially when somebody else is footing most of the bill. “It needs to be different” isn’t much of a game plan, but sometimes that’s all that sports executives have got.