Category: vaportecture

Arizona Cardinals renovation plans break new ground in catering to rich people

access_time personNeil deMause

The Arizona Cardinals ownership announced a bunch of stadium renovation plans yesterday, and since the only outlets reporting on it were the tattered remnants of Sports Illustrated and The Athletic and they pretty much just reprinted the press release, there’s no way of knowing how much the work will cost or who will pay for it. So for the moment, let’s just enjoy some of the more bonkers aspects of the renderings, because there are plenty.

First, though, let’s visit part of the press release, which is bonkers in its own way:

Last year, the Cardinals had the least expensive gameday experience in the NFL according to Team Marketing Report’s 2023 Fan Cost Index and affordability will remain in 2024. In addition, those fans seeking an unparalleled, upscale way to enjoy Cardinals games at State Farm Stadium will have an array of breath-taking new options starting this season.

Translation: “We’re charging our fans less than any other team! We want to keep things affordable, but we also want to charge as much as possible to people who can afford it, so here’s some stuff we think we can get away with charging through the nose for!”

Like what? Like this:

This is being dubbed a casita, or mini-house, which in this case means ripping out the seats behind the end zones and replacing them with tiny lounge areas with seating outside of and on top of it, to be enjoyed by … I’m sorry, what are these people wearing to a football game? Is there a heterosexist business executive cosplay convention in town? That would explain why there’s no one else at all in the stadium, though it’s left to the imagination what everyone here is watching if it’s not a football game.

Not to be confused with the casitas is the Casita Garden Club, which has no actual casitas, but does offer the chance to take photos of the Cardinals players while they … taunt you? I honestly can’t figure out what’s going on here, but I do wholeheartedly approve of the choice to show one of the clip-art fans facing away from the players she or her corporate employer paid so much for her to be near, the better to use them as a backdrop for her selfie.

Then there are the “field seats” built right out onto the field, or at least into the sideline area. Again, this is an extremely poorly attended game, despite the opportunity to, apparently, walk right up to the visiting team as they take the field, or even go on the field yourself, not like there’s a barrier or anything stopping you. Maybe this will be the ultimate premium experience, where if you pay enough for a ticket you can actually be a part of the game? In that case these fans are definitely dressed all wrong for it, at least one of the guys in the second image is wearing a souvenir jersey — and, it appears, possibly souvenir shoulder pads — so he might last a few seconds before going down with a traumatic brain injury.

All this, plus “an array of all-inclusive high-end menu offerings and handcrafted cocktails, beer and wine,” can be yours for only … okay, pricing isn’t available yet, but just put down a $10,000 deposit and we’ll start there. If these plutocrat pens can pay for themselves, more power to the Cardinals for identifying a market, I guess, but it’s absolutely a sign that income inequality is way out of control.

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Ex-Jazz owners propose Salt Lake development with MLB stadium that would cost (checks notes, coughs uncomfortably, looks down at shoes)

access_time personNeil deMause

One day, I try to take one measly day off of posting, and then this goes and happens:

The Larry H. Miller Company intends to put at least $3.5 billion into a mixed-use development on Salt Lake City’s long-overlooked west side, including a potential Major League Baseball stadium.

Blah blah, “transformational,” “catalytic,” “once-in-a-generation opportunity,” what’s the public price tag, I don’t got all day here, Deseret News:

Thursday’s announcement didn’t include specific details about the proposed ballpark. Big League Utah recently said it envisions a year-round, multiuse stadium for all kinds of events from sports to concerts to community celebrations.

Construction of a ballpark would likely include some public investment. State government officials are averse to diverting taxpayer dollars directly but have acknowledged tax increment financing or a public-private partnership could be options.

Reading between the lines, that comes to “It wasn’t in the Miller Company’s press release, and we didn’t take the time to ask.”

But look, there’s a rendering!

Not a whole lot of detail there, though it has one of those translucent roofs that are all the rage, revealing some kind of fan concourse above the top level of seating and with no actual concessions or even restrooms? Also lots of umbrella tables on the outside of the stadium for fans to sit at during games, this must be in the Stadiums Pro 2024 Clip Art package, because everybody sure is using lots of them.

Needless to say, Salt Lake City doesn’t not have a major-league baseball team, so this would presumably be a plan to keep in the Miller family’s back pocket should an expansion franchise become available, or maybe the Oakland A’s, who knows? But anyway, they’re undoubtedly hoping that “$3.5 billion in private investment” sticks in people’s heads for long enough that they won’t bat an eye when they see how many billions taxpayers may have to put up for the stadium part — umbrellas don’t actually grow on trees, you know!

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Renderings for new White Sox stadium are wonderland of fall risks, hoverkayaks

access_time personNeil deMause

We got Chicago White Sox vaportecture renderings! Rack ’em up:

Credit where credit is due: Whoever drew these up used a ton of clip art people (“entourage,” in industry lingo), and that really makes the scene at the proposed South Loop site look super lively. Also, the rendering designers sure do like terraces, don’t they? There are terraced balconies on the building across the plaza from the stadium, terraced levels in the plaza itself, terraced picnic table areas on the outside of the stadium where fans can sit and watch the plaza. They’re extra-attractive thanks to the only guard rails being glass and maybe three feet high, but what’s a little risk of falling to your death compared to unobstructed terrace views?

Also a nice touch: Working the team name vertically into the design of the stadium exterior wall, though rebranding the team as the “Chicacago White Sox” may be slightly controversial among traditional fans.

A river view this time, the better to show off the classic Chicago practice of standing up in your kayaks — or hoverkayaks, since according to their reflections they’re suspended a foot or two above the water. On the big screen, we see that Michael Kopech is still pitching for the White Sox, which is bound to disappoint diehard fans who were hoping he would be somebody else’s problem by then.

On to the stadium interior!

Glad to see future sports fans are still following in the rendering tradition of throwing your hands in the air wildly to celebrate a key game event, which here is clearly a home run given that the center field fireworks are going off, while on the field … the batter is still in the batter’s box, but is also approaching first base, while another runner rounds second and a fourth stands watching from the cutout near third. Enough with the rule changes, Rob Manfred!

As for the stadium design itself, it can best be described as “terracey,” with a whole lot of levels, incorporating the current White Sox stadium’s least-loved feature, the glass-walled luxury suites that force the upper decks into the stratosphere. We’re not getting back the old, fan-friendly Comiskey Park cheap seats anytime soon, it looks like.

But what about the economic impact of all this, you ask? Could there possibly be renderings of that?

Those sure are some big numbers! Even the typeface is big! Would be nice if we got to see how they were calculated — maybe that’s included somewhere in the spiral-bound booklet this appears to be a page from — but it is considerate that they at least included the footnote detailing that this is only what will happen if the entire development is built out, which may or may not ever happen.

And finally, let’s check in on the site of the White Sox’ existing stadium:

It’s a soccer stadium! Or, well, part of a baseball stadium with part of a soccer stadium grafted on. There’s not really much reason to keep part of the old stadium around for soccer — the seats in one end zone would point in the wrong direction, and nobody needs those glass-walled suites — but I suppose it lets people pretend this is ecologically sound reuse, just put it in the PDF, you can always redesign it later.

All this, Chicago, can be yours, for only around $1.7 billion in public money! Kayaks sold separately.

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Friday roundup: White vetoes Royals/Chiefs tax vote, everybody losing mind over White Sox vaporstadium

access_time personNeil deMause

Everybody’s talking about that new Chicago White Sox stadium proposal despite it not actually being a proposal yet, but first, potentially big news out of Kansas City:

  • Jackson County executive and eight-time Gold Glove winner Frank White yesterday vetoed the planned April vote on a sales tax extension to raise more than $500 million for the Royals and Chiefs, saying he won’t support it “without robust, binding agreements in place” on leases and community benefits agreements. The county legislature doesn’t have the votes to override it right now, and the deadline to make the April ballot is Tuesday, so expect a whole lot of frantic gamesmanship over the weekend — we’ll see if the teams actually commit to anything substantial, but props to White for trying, anyway.
  • Crain’s Chicago Business has investigated who would pay for a new White Sox stadium in the South Loop, and come up with a resounding ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Gov. J.B. Pritzker weighed in yesterday to say “I think you know my views about privately owned teams, and whether the public should be paying for private facilities” but also “there are things that government does to support business all across the state” and “we’ll be looking at whatever they may be suggesting or asking,” so somebody’s ready to haggle over the price. Crain’s does confirm that the site is in a TIF district that would get property tax kicked back to pay for construction, but also that stadiums are typically owned by the public so they don’t pay property taxes anyway, so lots and lots of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ here.
  • Somebody posted a bunch of renderings of a possible White Sox stadium of unknown origin that had previously been posted to Twitter then deleted, and yup, they look like generic renderings. NBC Sports Chicago complains that “the renderings have the stadium face the wrong way” and “it’s a no-brainer to face the stadium towards the river so (hopefully) White Sox players can hit home runs into the water” — can somebody please inform NBC Sports Chicago of how the sun works?
  • “Are we really talking about a new stadium for the White Sox when we still don’t know how two people got shot during a game at their current one?” Sure, that’s a take.
  • Oakland A’s execs are visiting Salt Lake City to see if its Triple-A stadium could be a temporary home until the team (maybe) moves to Las Vegas, after visiting Sacramento yesterday and probably other sites to come. Somebody has suggested an appropriate rebranding, all good, no notes.
  • Virginia probably isn’t going to consider building a Washington Commanders stadium while it’s considering spending over a billion dollars on a Wizards and Capitals arena, meaning new Commanders owner Josh Harris will have to settle for getting Maryland and D.C. to bid against each other, or else wait a bit until the arena issue is resolved, still plenty of options there.

There was other stadium-adjacent news this week — MLB TV carrier Diamond Sports cutting a deal with Amazon to escape bankruptcy, New York Knicks and Rangers owner James Dolan getting sued for sexual assault charges that somehow involve both Harvey Weinstein and the Eagles — but I’m still technically on vacation here. Have a good weekend, and we’ll return to our regularly scheduled outrage on Monday!

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OKC approves $30m in tax money for overruns on shapeshifting minor-league soccer stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

The Oklahoma City council voted unanimously yesterday to approve using $30 million in tax money to pay for cost overruns on a new Energy F.C. soccer stadium, which isn’t exactly surprising since the council already discussed doing this two weeks ago. There are several amazing bits, though, that are worthy of note:

  • Amazing quote #1: “In the original plan for this stadium, there was no provision for land or funding for land, and we have a unique opportunity right now,” said Kenton Tsoodle, president of The Alliance for Economic Development of Oklahoma City. I’ve read this five times now, and can’t interpret it as anything other than the initial stadium plan neglected to budget for either land or the actual cost of stadium construction, now the public has the rare opportunity of being allowed to contribute another $30 million, which only really makes sense as an infomercial pitch.
  • Amazing quote #2: “We’re siting the stadium, which had no funding in MAPS, and we’re doing so with a donation, which is much appreciated and we thank the team for that pledge,” said OKC mayor David Holt. Thanking team owners for contributing anything to the cost of their own stadium is fresh rhetorical ground, but then this is the same guy who touted a plan to fund a Thunder arena with a $780 million “sales tax that will not raise taxes,” so words truly mean different things to Holt.
  • Amazing rendering #1:

    Why are they building a soccer stadium with a double deck at the end line, and only a tiny single deck along the side, where fans actually want to sit? Also why is one guy on the white team standing in an offside position way down the pitch, and does it have anything to do with the fact that it seems like three of his teammates have been red carded, leaving the team with only eight players on the pitch? And why does this entire design bear zero resemblance to:
  • Amazing rendering #2:
    This looks a little more like soccer at first glance, but there’s still a lot of weirdness: the number of people (mostly women) who are paying no attention to the match, the four women in identical red floppy hats and green scarves standing in the same row at lower right, the fact that one of the teams pictured on the video board (in black) appears not to be either team playing in the actual game (which features blue vs. white with a diagonal red stripe).

Taken together, this all looks like OKC officials throwing out a whole lot of half-assed justifications and quarter-assed clip art in defense of spending $71 million on a stadium for a minor-league soccer team that hasn’t played in two seasons and only drew 2,200 fans per game the last time it did. Surely once they have a 10,000-seat stadium they’ll fill the place, at least once Holt gets funding approved for his floppy-hat clone army.

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Friday roundup: Bears rumors! Titans vaportecture! Coyotes still about to announce something, sometime!

access_time personNeil deMause

Another week in the books! Will “in the books” soon become an anachronism, once there are no more physical books to keep? Or will “books” just become a term for long documents, and future English speakers will wonder why the phrase isn’t “in the spreadsheets”? Has this already happened and I didn’t notice? Gen Z readers, say your piece!

Moving on to the news:

  • Chicago Bears president Kevin Warren said, “What intrigues me about downtown is I strongly believe Chicago is the finest city in all of the world,” and now everybody thinks this means the Bears would prefer to build a stadium in downtown Chicago rather than it just being a savvy negotiator trying to create leverage for a stadium wherever he can get one paid for by somebody else.
  • Virginia’s billion-dollar-plus subsidy for a Washington Capitals and Wizards arena in Alexandria may now turn on Metro public transit funding, as Senate majority leader Scott Surovell says “making sure Metro is fully funded is a precondition before we have any kind of dialogue about the arena” while Gov. Glenn Youngkin retorted that he wants to see a Metro business plan first because “they’ve got overhead levels that far exceed any of their benchmarks.” Hey, you know what would help fill Metro’s $750 million budget deficit? Here’s a hint, it rhymes with “bot giving a billion dollars to the local sports team owner,” hth.
  • New Tennessee Titans vaportecture! This time the (imaginary) camera moves but the (pretend) people don’t, so we get a horrorscape of fans frozen in place with their arms flung skywards for all eternity! All except for the rock band that is playing forever to a perpetually frozen audience, and the video boards that show moving replays of a forever-static game, this is the most terrifying Black Mirror episode ever.
  • Former Utah Jazz majority owner (and current minority owner) Gail Miller is buying up land around the site of her proposed baseball stadium for her proposed MLB expansion team, hey at least Salt Lake City has more TV households than Las Vegas.
  • The public cost of the new Chattanooga Lookouts stadium has soared from $80 million to $139 million in the last 17 months, which will be fine so long as an extra $500 million worth of development appears from out of nowhere and pays new taxes that won’t cannibalize existing ones, this is fine.
  • “The Orlando Magic are making millions by selling naming rights to a building the team doesn’t even own,” yup, that’ll happen.
  • “[Arizona] Coyotes on ‘precipice’ of announcing location organization will focus on for new arena,” reports an Arizona Sports headline, then the story itself doesn’t have anyone at all saying the word “precipice” with regard to anything, wut.
  • Baseball stadiums built since the early 1990s have crazy-far upper deck seats, reports Travis Sawchik for The Score, will that change with the latest wave of new buildings? Populous architect Zach Allee says there’s a tradeoff that’s “kind of like a balloon” where “if I say I want to be closer to the field horizontally, it ends up pushing the seats up higher,” which isn’t really how geometry or balloons work, and then Sawchik touts the Texas Rangers‘ new stadium for moving the last row of its upper deck 33 feet closer than the last row in its old stadium, but actually they did this by just removing the last 8,000 seats, this is actually a terrible article, I’m sorry I linked to it.

I’m traveling next week, posts may appear at sporadic and/or unexpected times. Have a good long holiday weekend, or as our Toronto readers know it, Monday.

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76ers arena plan draws six hours of hate at first city oversight meeting

access_time personNeil deMause

A group of architecture and planning experts and members of the public weighed in on the proposed Philadelphia 76ers arena design yesterday at the first official city meeting to discuss the project — how’d that turn out?

“It’s a serious proposal … and there’s a lot of great aspects of what would make a successful downtown arena included,” said Dan Garofalo, vice chair of the CDR committee, which is composed of architects and planners. But “we’ve never had an experience just like this one. There hasn’t been anyone speaking in favor of this project in, what, six hours?”

Yikes! What did people so uniformly hate about this plan? Actually, first, can we get a rendering, preferably a creepy one that makes it look like the arena is floating weirdly in space, disconnected from any surrounding neighborhoods?

Sweet. Now, on with the six-hour hate!

  • “I want to be honest as to … what are the disruptions to the bus routes that go along here?” said committee member Ashley DiCaro. “What does it mean to shut down these streets and to have these thousands of people here at a given time?”
  • “I don’t know that that’s enough retail space to effectively engage pedestrians when the building is dark,” said Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corp. director John Chin.
  • Asian Americans United interim director Neeta Patel said the review “violates the zoning code” and must “be halted immediately.”
  • “We’ve seen other examples in other cities, whether it be L.A. or New York, where previous arenas have now been repurposed into smaller venues that house different types of events that may not be currently in the larger 20,000-seat attendees,” said Sherveen Baftechi, head of design and construction for the 76ers.

Oh, hold up! That last one is an argument in favor of the arena, on the grounds that if the 76ers ever move out, the arena could, like L.A.’s Forum, become a concert venue, or, like the Meadowlands Arena, a soundstage. Or, like the L.A. Sports Arena, get torn down and replaced by a soccer stadium, which is actually bigger, or like the third Madison Square Garden, torn down and left as a parking lot for 20 years before being replaced by an office-and-housing complex. So many options!

The Philadelphia Inquirer notes that there wasn’t much to talk about at the meeting other than the general design, since “traffic, community, and other impact studies that were promised by year’s end are not yet publicly available.” So sure, let’s look at some more design renderings:

It’s certainly interesting that the Sixers design team thinks that in the year 2031, which is the earliest the arena could possibly open, Sixers fans will still be wearing shirts of Joel Embiid and Allen Iverson. Other than that, there are a whole lot of basketball fans wandering around the arena entryway in shorts, which is an odd look for a sport whose season goes from October to May, though by 2031 it’s entirely possible it will be shorts weather in Philadelphia in January. I’m also desperately interested in what the small type is at the top of that “Rock” banner — here’s the full-size version if anyone else wants to try — though that element looks so AI-drawn that it’s possible it just says “Gud who mellled is a Rock” like it appears to. I bet Gud who mellled is a Rock will be huge on TikTok in 2031.

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Virginia arena district for Capitals and Wizards could cost public billions in tax kickbacks

access_time personNeil deMause

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin has released some financial details of his proposed $2 billion Alexandria arena complex for the Washington Capitals and Wizards:

  • A new Virginia Sports and Entertainment Authority will issue $1.6 billion in bonds to build the arena, an accompanying mixed-use district, and infrastructure. Team owner Ted Leonsis will put in $403 million.
  • The public bonds will be repaid by “annual rent paid by MSE, arena parking revenues, District naming rights, and incremental taxes generated by the Arena and Phase 1 development.”
  • Alexandria will kick in $106 million toward a performing arts venue and underground parking.

And that’s it for details. The project has a website, but unless you want crazy economic impact numbers ($12 billion in economic impact, LOLstudies) and word salad about “transformational investments,” there’s nothing solid there on the money, though there is a clearer version of that awesome vaportecture featuring the world’s least popular band playing before an audience of maybe 30 people all sitting in Adirondack chairs:

Okay, so back to the funding plan: Rent, parking, and naming rights are all real things that recoup real money for the state, though naming rights for an entire district have to be seen as a bit speculative depending on whether Leonsis gets to keep naming rights money for the arena itself. “Incremental taxes,” meanwhile, means a TIF of some kind, which is not new state revenue at all but rather kicked-back taxes that otherwise would go to the state, though the substitution effect would be somewhat reduced by stealing teams from a neighboring jurisdiction. Youngkin gave no indication of what percentage of the state money would come from TIFs, so it could be anywhere from $1 up to $1,999,999,999.

Meanwhile, the arena district would be owned by the state, meaning none of it would pay any property taxes. The property tax rate in Alexandria is 1.11 cents per dollar in assessed value, so if the whole project is worth $2 billion, then we’re talking $22.2 million a year in forgone tax money, which comes to around $380 million in present value over 40 years.

The only other clue we have about the project cost is that Youngkin compared it to the Amazon HQ2 project in Arlington, and that was to involve as much as $750 million in subsidies, though so far Amazon hasn’t collected any money because it hasn’t actually built much because nobody works in offices anymore. Maybe the governor means that he expects another pandemic to lead to people only watch sporting events remotely, so the arena will never get built?

Lots of questions, but in the end, kicked-back and forgone taxes could easily end up costing Virginia and Alexandria more than $1 billion, and possibly even more than $2 billion, depending on those rent and parking numbers. More research required, obviously, but in the meantime who can put a price on the economic impact of four guys playing through the world’s tiniest stage amplifiers?

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Rays press conference ducks questions about $1.3B stadium plan, looks to break ground next year

access_time personNeil deMause

Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg and St. Petersburg and Pinellas County officials made their official announcement of their stadium plan yesterday, and … oh dear, it’s Marc Topkin writing it up, is it? Well, let’s see if there’s anything useful we can glean from his report:

The financing plan calls for the city and county to split an approximate $600 million public contribution, with the Rays covering the remaining $700 million, plus any cost overruns.

Those agreements with Welch and Pinellas County administrator Barry Burton require approval by the City Council and County Commission, which [Rays president Brian] Auld said they are confident of getting. They hope to break ground around this time next year.

That isn’t much more detail than we had previously, though it does indicate that the total price tag has gone up again, this time by another $100 million, which Sternberg will cover. And nowhere in Topkin’s article — nor in the press conference itself, which I watched — has anyone indicated the answers to a bunch of pressing questions like:

  • If Sternberg will be leasing the stadium site from the public, does that mean he won’t pay property taxes on it?
  • What, if anything, will he pay for the stadium land lease?
  • Who will get the revenues from the surrounding $6 billion development, to be built by Sternberg’s development partner Hines?
  • Is Hines’ reported $105.3 million price for the surrounding land a reasonable fair market value? And will Hines pay property taxes on those parcels?
  • What’s the deal with the reported $130 million in city money for “public site infrastructure,” and who’ll pay cost overruns on that?

There are a lot of moving parts here, and the press conference papered over them as best it could, mostly serving to show how many local elected officials had Rays jerseys in their closets. (Or had them supplied for the occasion by the Rays, I suppose, that’s possible too.) Let’s see if anybody else asked any actual questions, this was a national story, hey New York Daily News, whatcha got?

Rays unveil new stadium renderings, plans for surrounding entertainment district to replace Tropicana Field

Uhh, those are mostly the same renderings from last December. (That at least explains why one includes a fan wearing a jersey of now-under-investigation-for-multiple-accounts-of-sexual-assault-of-minors shortstop Wander Franco.) This one is maybe new:

That’s another from the non-Euclidean geometry series of vaportecture renderings, either depicted as taken via an extreme fish-eye lens or revealing a diamond where the first and third base lines make an angle of much less than 90 degrees. As usual, the fans are extremely excited to wave enormous flags even though the batter has yet to step into the box, with one small child apparently choosing to reenact Leonardo DiCaprio’s “I’m the king of the world!” scene from Titanic, all the better to do so because, like Leo, he’s standing on the edge of a precipitous drop from his perch in what appears to be the fifth deck of seating levels, impressive for a stadium that will only have 30,000 seats. There’s also a giant Rays logo in the batter’s eye in center field, and some kind of glowing roof support superstructure to either side of it, so don’t get too excited, kid, the batter’s not going to be able to see the pitch, let alone hit it.

There’s more bad coverage out there — here’s one that casts this as “the Rays have finally said the magic words that fans have been waiting for years to hear,” those presumably not being “We would like $600 million for a new dome right next to the old one” — but we can skip most of the rest. This was the big PR push, and from Sternberg’s perspective it worked perfectly, even if a few church leaders from the community that was razed to make way for the old stadium remain skeptical that this time it will go any better. Now that that’s done, there should be plenty of time to report on, or even post publicly, the development agreement/memorandum of understanding/actual legislative language so everyone can see the fine print and determine whether it seems worthwhile — there have to be at least a couple of genuine journalists left in the Tampa Bay area, right? Right? Don’t all raise your hands at once…

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

access_time personNeil deMause

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.

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?

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