On Tuesday, the blog The Rickey Henderson of Blogs noticed that Oakland A’s management had “recently (and quietly) updated its Las Vegas ballpark page on MLB.com” to include what it hilariously called “verbal renderings” of the team’s proposed new stadium:
That’s a screenshot and not a blockquote because the A’s swiftly removed the first four updated paragraphs from their site. But among the things it said before it was tossed down the memory hole:
- The stadium would “exude” an “outdoor feel” with a roof with “five overlapping layers” that is “inspired by traditional baseball pennants” but wouldn’t actually retract, except for an opening to the north to “allow for natural light.”
- There would also be “the world’s largest cable-net glass window” on its northwest side (corner?), though it’s not clear if that would cover the opening or what. Also not clear: Who could look out the window, since the northwest side of stadiums is traditionally the third-base grandstand, so that hitters don’t have to look into the setting sun.
- The stadium would feature “an 18,000-square-foot jumbotron,” “the largest video board in MLB,” which would be placed neither in front of the opening nor the window, but somewhere else undisclosed.
- The team hired Bjarke Ingels Group and HNTB as the architect on December 4 to design all this.
December 4, December 4, that’s oddly familiar — oh yes, that’s the day that the A’s were scheduled to announce new stadium designs, until they were suddenly delayed because two Nevada state troopers had been killed by a drunk driver four days earlier. So were those renderings drawn by somebody other than BIG and HNTB? Did they never exist at all?
Anyway, we now have some more details of what a Vegas A’s stadium might look like, or at least what somebody thought it might look like before it was taken down from the A’s site. (Sadly, Wayback hasn’t archived the A’s site lately so we can see exactly when it changed; people, please submit the page to Wayback regularly so we can see how it’s changed over time.) And we have even more questions, which hopefully will be answered soon by some BIG/HNTB renderings, though given past Bjarke Ingels renderings, those may only raise more questions themselves.
Meanwhile, A’s president Dave Kaval tweeted about how “the 2024 season will be a celebration of our fifty plus years in Oakland,” and the reaction is going about as well as you’d expect. It’s truly very kind of A’s ownership to fill the post–writers strike release drought with so much fresh entertainment content.
Cable-net glass…
”Even if the wind induced local pressures are under the limits for glass panels, the wind action induced cinematics on the façade structural system might be unsafe”
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40940-022-00180-2
This ends well…
Warnings issued as winter storm reaches Nevada; strong winds for Las Vegas
(The high should be near 73)
https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/weather/warnings-issued-as-winter-storm-reaches-nevada-strong-winds-for-las-vegas-3008894/
I typed that description into an AI text to image tool and it produced something that looked like the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Stadium. Not great for baseball, but good for long jumpers.
More bad news for fans of Las Vegas AA’s…. Fisher would never be able to pay for professional long jumpers while staying under his ‘ideal’ payroll.
I’d pay to see Bob Beamon leap the final 30 feet when stealing second.
“whose design is inspired by traditional baseball pennants,” leaving us all to wonder what *non* traditional baseball pennants look like…
but this reminds me of when the atlantic terminal shopping mall was being developed in downtown brooklyn. at a city planning hearing, the architect explained that the design was inspired by ebbets field, prompting one of the city planning commissioners to stand up and yell that that just wasn’t true.
A real “get that name out yo mouth,” and “I knew Jack Kennedy, Senator, and you’re no Jack Kennedy” moment.
but it goes to show that architects will say *anything* to promote their buildings, no matter how ridiculous.
Stupidly amusing: Jumbotron is a trademark of Sony and is the specific brand name of the original large screens.
It has since evolved to a new technology and Jumbotrons are no longer made.
But like jacuzzi and xerox, it has become the generic name for all stadium size TVs
Another giant video screen! Just what Vegas needs!
Yes, I thought that too. Good thing (and no accident) they limited the comment to ‘biggest in MLB’… considering the Sphere is not too far away…
A sure fire way to succeed in glitter gulch is to build something far more modest than a bunch of things that other people have already built nearby. Every time I think these two clowns can’t be any more clear about how dumb they are, they suddenly manage to one up/down themselves.
John Fisher has managed to turn a founding club of the American League into baseball’s “The Aristocrats”. You could tell me anything about Fisher and Dave Kaval trying to build a ballpark or run a club and I’d believe you.
MLB’s ownership cabal hates their own players so much that they’ll subsidize an owner like Fisher for years before allowing in an owner who *might* raise average salaries by trying to field a competitive payroll. It’s remarkable.
I work in the engineering world and we have a term for this kind of nonsense – vaporware. The Fisher/Kaval nitwit club is setting records for vaporware production!
Way ahead of you:
https://deadspin.com/the-7-laws-of-vaportecture-stadium-arts-fever-dream-1833445857
If you had “Like a spherical armadillo” on your bingo card you win!