Royals release two sets of stadium renderings, plan to let them battle to the death

The new Kansas City Royals stadium renderings are here, the new Kansas City Royals stadium renderings are here! Or should I say “renderingses,” because the freshly updated KC Ballpark District website actually contains two sets of renderings, one for downtown K.C. (the East Village District) and one for North Kansas City (the North Kansas City District). The site explains that “each site offers unique opportunities,” and blah blah something about “vision” and “momentum” okay okay, what we want to know is do they fulfill all of the mandates of stadium vaportecture, as established in my 2019 guide to vaportecture:

1. Does it have fireworks?

Does it ever!

Wherever the Royals play, they will be continually doing so under a rain of chemical explosions. Though only if they play downtown, apparently, will they perpetually be playing in the World Series.

2. Is there enough lens flare to make J.J. Abrams blush?

Sadly, no. Lens flare seems to be on its way out in the latest upgrade of Stadium Design Wizard Pro, to be replaced by the Birds and/or Balloons Module:

Birds and balloons don’t seem to be allowed to appear in the same rendering together, which is good because otherwise the birds would choke on the balloons and die.

3. Are some of the renderings strangely devoid of people?

The crowds seem notably uncrowded in some of them, but no ghost people, no.

4. Are the people that are there behaving, well, oddly?

The people in the top image above are showing off vaporSims’ love of waving large, unwieldy flags at sporting events. In the image below, meanwhile, we have people engaged in the traditional pregame activity of canoeing. Which, it takes all kinds, but hey, shirtless guy, put a life jacket on that kid already before your stand-up canoe tips over and they drown!

5. Do the games depicted bear only a vague similarity to actual sports?

This image shows a game that’s clearly in progress, but what on earth is going on in the game is impossible to say: Is the home team employing some sort of radical, not to mention illegal, shift where the shortstop plays to the right of second base, the first baseman plays 20 feet down the line toward home plate, and two outfielders gather near the infield to compare notes?

Sadly, many fans are missing out on this unprecedented baseball spectacle, as they’ve chosen to either ignore the game instead wander aimlessly around a gardened patio in the outfield, or are boycotting the entire event and are instead parading through the streets outside.

6. Are there blatant violations of the laws of physics?

Nothing too terrible, though the extension of the left-field roof in this one appears to be held up by nothing more than wishful thinking:

7. Is there anything totally batshit?

Any craziness is fairly subtle, like the fans in this one who seem to have all come to the game wielding oddly oversized and misshapen thundersticks/balloon animals/light sabers:

But wait! There are also videos! Videos featuring the same images of doughy white people, though set to different public-domain backing tracks for some reason, and … are those CGI hamburgers? What is even happening.

We’re excited to share the future vision of Royals baseball.

For more images and to learn about the economic impact of a ballpark district in both the East Village and North Kansas City, please visit: https://t.co/Cuz4H6wWD1 pic.twitter.com/KWbomvOo8B

— Kansas City Royals (@Royals) August 22, 2023

The point of vaportecture, as always, is to deliver shock and awe to distract from questions like “How much will this cost?” and “Why is a new stadium even necessary?” Presenting twin competing visions adds the element of choice: It’s not just whether you like the pretty pictures but which pretty pictures you like better, which is a proven way to get buyers to buy. At yesterday’s unveiling, Royals president of business operations Brooks Sherman made sure to confound the situation even more, saying:

“There’s a number of factors in there. That brings in agreements with the elected leaders. When you think of that public-private partnership, that brings into play the public funding to go along with the private funding to know that we can finance it appropriately. The lease agreement plays right into that as well.

“… Site evaluation to be done. There’s still working going on, from due diligence perspective of environmental, soil boring, those kinds of things. We have to get those complete. And then we’ve got other partners and other constituents that we’re dealing with today, from the developers, from the Chiefs.”

It also can’t hurt Royals owner John Sherman that whatever the price tag on his eventual stadium plan — the only numbers he’s revealed so far remain maybe $2 billion, of which the public would pay I’ll-get-back-to-you — in the context of one of the biggest stadium-grubbing frenzies in baseball history. As Marc Normandin writes this morning at Baseball Prospectus, “things are exhausting, and never ending,” with the Royals, Oakland/Las Vegas A’s, Tampa Bay Rays, Arizona Diamondbacks, Milwaukee Brewers, Baltimore Orioles, and Chicago White Sox all angling for either new stadiums or nine-figure upgrades to their old ones. He cites multiple theories for why this stadium rush is hitting right now — hunger for an Atlanta Braves-style stadium district whose revenues don’t have to be shared with the rest of the league as baseball revenue, desire to get their move threats in before expansion comes and takes cities like Nashville off the table, “the death spiral of shame in greater society” where it’s no longer considered gauche for billionaires to stuff as much money in their pockets as possible — and concludes: “It’s probably a little of all of the above.”

In discussing this yesterday while working on his article, Marc asked me if AI is also making it easier to churn out stadium renderings, and while I don’t think any of the above Royals images were designed by robots, that’s not to say that they’re any better than designs made by robots. In fact, let’s ask Bing Image Creator for a new state-of-the-art Royals stadium and see what we get:

That’s definitely sort of like a stadium, though a roof canopy that doesn’t actually cover any of the seats is, let’s say, an interesting innovation. Can it do any better?

Now we’re talking! This roof absolutely covers all the seats, even if by the trick of extending into some sort of non-Euclidean space — or would, anyway, if not for the fact that this stadium design is so state-of-the-art that the seats are actually on the outside of the stadium! And before you say “But how will fans see the game?,” the baseball diamond will also be outside, or at least the pitcher’s mound and two baselines will be — players who want to advance past first base will need to teleport into the 4th dimension, which will totally be a new rule Rob Manfred has put in place in the next few years.

If nothing else, stadiums that have been subjected to the fog that turns things inside-out make the standard bizarre stadium designs seem reasonable by comparison, and “reasonable by comparison” is very much the name of the game here, whether the comparison is with another part of the metro area or with whatever the MLB owner down the road is demanding. I can see it now: Should the Royals get a new stadium in downtown, or in the suburbs, or in outer space? Spending $2 billion for a building that (mostly) obeys the laws of physics doesn’t sound too crazy now, does it?