The Dead Baseball Stadium Era

And even when fans, searching for anything to make their home team’s stadium remotely charming, find a clever moniker for these commercialized arenas, the volatile nature of the business world has ballparks changing names quicker than you can say Pacific Bell Park (which became SBC Park when Southwestern Bell Corp. bought Pacific Telesis Corp., and which later still became AT&T Park when now-renamed SBC Communications merged with AT&T Corp.)

And worse still than these space-age, corporate-wrought stadiums are ballparks like Baltimore’s Camden Yards and Cleveland’s Jacobs Field, which has recently been tragically refitted with the ironic moniker Progressive Field.

These are teams and owners that attempt to snatch at absent tradition and off-sepia film reels by constructing effigies to an era that was never there. History is being falsely rebuilt and recast here, and worse than even selling out the name of one’s ballpark, these are sickly attempts to sell fake memories with only the bottom line in mind.

Perhaps the creeping presence of business and luxury amenities in sports is a microcosm of modern day’s constantly changing society, where rushing busybodies in today’s fast-paced business world need something more to maintain an increasingly restless interest level. Perhaps it’s because the difference between the baseball of today and that of yesteryear is the increasingly understood notion that professional sports are businesses first, entertainment second and a game a distant third.

Ultimately, it is a trend that has no sign of letting up. And in New York, there exists an ironic example of that trend in motion; by 2009, the New York Mets will be getting their own new ballpark to replace their old faithful, Shea Stadium. So what do developers predict the new stadium, now in the designing stage of its development, will look like?

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