Magic Lacking in Armour Field

By David Marasco

I recently purchased a copy of Philip Bess's City Baseball Magic. It is a reprint of a 1989 article presented in the Minneapolis Review of Baseball. Like Armour Field, the proposal at the heart of the book, City Baseball Magic is widely acclaimed. I'm unhappy to say that I was disappointed in both.

The first big problem with this work can be recognized immediately. It was spawned in a time when A. Bartlett Giamatti was High Sheriff. That was a period of baseball writing when too many authors were trying to audition for positions as tenure-track Ivy League literature professors. Take the following sentence, the first of chapter three, "The formal order, i.e. the physical arrangement, of a good city is characterized by beauty, durability, and hierarchy, and contributes greatly to the experience of the city as simultaneously monumental and domestic, grand and charming, fragile and resilient, ceremonial and workaday, familiar and strange, shared and personal, cultivated and low." In theory this is supposed to help pitch a new ballpark on the South Side of Chicago? Can you really see Mayor Daley concerning himself that the physical order of the City of Broad Shoulders isn't properly ceremonial and workaday simultaneously? You don't get clout with pretty words, at least in Chicago you don't.

After a short introduction the book leaps into a critique of the doughnut ballparks of the 1970's. This made sense when the book was written, but it doesn't fly with the 1999 reprint. The point is made that the tragic flaws of the past, the symmetry, astroturf and domes, are multi-use issues. Sure enough, they were right. Now in the era of baseball-only stadiums we've been cured of those ills. Bess briefly touches upon another big problem, the pushing back of the upper deck to eliminate obstructed-view seats. He quickly drop this topic, perhaps because the stadium he proposes does a poor job of solving the question. The author then enters a short discussion of the designs on the drawing board in the early 1990's. Again, that may have been a strong point when first published, but today it reads as interesting history only.

To the writer's credit the book contains "The Economist's Warning." Using Robert Baade's study of the impact of stadiums of local economies, Bess feels compelled to not make the same claims about economic turnaround associated with most stadium proposals. That being said, he turns around and claims that for "trickle down" to work the best, the stadium should be surrounded by businesses rather than a parking lot. While all of this makes sense, I wish he had included a different kind of Economist's Warning. How about something like this - Note that by building a smaller stadium the team restricts supply. Also, with the presumably more satisfying baseball experience, demand will rise. This will cause a great jump in ticket prices. The new ballpark may in the end act to freeze the lower rungs of the economic ladder out of live baseball as a source of entertainment. An example? The $16 that bought a seat in the lower deck of Milwaukee County Stadium will only get a seat in the fourth deck of new Miller Park. Somebody is getting a better view, but it isn't guaranteed to be you.

One of the main points in the book is the distiction between the suburban stadium and the urban ballpark. Here the definitions get a little tricky, suburban is defined as a style where a person needs to drive from home to get to work or entertainment. Urban is a situation where the facts of life are acessed by walking, or at worst a short jaunt on public transportation. I don't buy one of Bess's main points, that streets and blocks are an important part of being urban and that anything larger than that scale is a negative to the city. By that logic a large park that is uncut by low-traffic streets is disruptive to a city's sense of being rather than a happy addition. And for a while I was resistant to his claim that many downtown ballparks were actually suburban in style. Bess feels that the true urban ballpark is fully integrated with its surroundings, not an island in a parking lot. What flipped my thinking into agreement with his view was a thought I had about food. When I go to see baseball at Wrigley Field, I stop at either the Taco Bell across the street or pay for some of Ronald's cooking at the golden arches. The Cubs let you bring food into the stadium, so I save a few bucks by buying cheap fast food. On the other hand, even though the White Sox allow people to bring in food, I never enter New Comiskey with a bag full of burgers. Instead I give Mr. Reinsdorf money for his hotdogs and sodas. Why? Because there aren't fast food places right next to New Comiskey. Sure, there are lots of places to park your car, but no short walks to a place to eat. New Comiskey is separate from the community. Unlike Wrigleyville where the drunks at the ballgame will be drunks in the neighborhood bars a few hours later, people do not linger around New Comiskey. Some of this is due to the reputation of the locale, but I believe that the disconnect between the stadium and community also plays a role. Note that the new stadium in Milwaukee more closely fits the New Comiskey model than it does the Wrigley Field model.

But then there is the follow up question. Do I really care if the stadium fits this urban model? From the eyes of a resident of the neighborhood, perhaps they do. On the otherhand, perhaps the local is much happier with drunk and rowdy fans segregated to a parking lot rather than puking on his flower beds. But as somebody who doesn't live in the neighborhood, is this really an issue to me? Isn't the inside of the ballpark the important thing? How much do I enjoy baseball less because there is parking lot outside of the stadium rather than a doughnut shop? Heck, in Milwaukee with its tradition of tailgating they would probably be happy to plow under the doughnut shop for a parking lot! To me this issue is something that academic urban planners can worry about, when push comes to shove, so long as traffic isn't a bitch I'm more worried about the actual design of the playing field rather than how well it integrates with its local environs. When I see a game at Wrigley Field it is an enjoyable experience because it is an intimate ballpark and I'm close to the field. If you follow the ideas of the urban ballparkers, the experience is enjoyable because the bars are initmate and I'm close to the beer.

Let's move on to Armour Field itself. I've seen over 100 games at New Comiskey. It deserves many but not all of the criticisms it recieves. I've often heard fans cry out "we should have built Armour Field." Well, now that I've read Baseball City Magic I have my doubts that it is the be-all-end-all that these people imagine. One of the biggest problems people have with New Comiskey is that the front row of the upper deck is farther from the field than the back row of the upper deck was at Old Comiskey. Diagrams in Baseball City Magic back this up. The distance to the front row in New Comiskey is 160 feet, whereas it was 150 feet to the back row in Old Comiskey. Now for the big surprise. What's the distance to the front row of the upper deck in Armour Field? 160 feet, just like in New Comiskey. Granted, the back row isn't as far away, but that's only because it has fewer rows. The great Armour Field has the same upper deck problems as New Comiskey!

The issue of obstructed-view seats is one that is skirted by Bess. In the past few decades the idea of clean sightlines has been one of the driving forces in ballpark design. The penalty to pay is that in order to avoid having poles in front of some of the seats in the lower deck, the upper deck has to be pushed away from the field. All of the new "retro" ballparks hve this flaw. They are great if you are paying the big bucks and sitting downstairs, but if you are in the cheap seats you are far away from the action. The gain of a few-hundred seats in the lower deck is balanced by the downgrade of ten-thousand or so seats in the upper deck. I strongly believe that to be properly classified as an old-style stadium obstructed-view seats are a must, otherwise the upper deck is simply too far away. Besides, in a city with the ethnic makeup of Chicago, you are more or less destined to be seated behind a Pole in any case. Bess should have spent a good amount of space discussing the tension between sightlines in the lower deck and distances to the field from the upper deck, but instead lets it slip by. I'n not sure if it is because his ballpark suffers the same flaws as the other modern stadiums, or if he is more concerned with the outside interactions of the facility with the neighborhood than he is with the experience of the fan. In either case I think he missed a big topic and the book seems incomplete without it.

Bess spends most of his time in the Armour Field section discussing how well it integrates with the surroundings. Two objections should be raised. Suppose that instead of building New Comsikey in the middle of a parking lot they put all the parking two blocks away in the form of multi-story garages. Surround New Comiskey instead with two blocks worth of a shopping district. Now it is better integrated into its neighborhood, and these merchants may get some trickle-down, but does it make the baseball stadium any better? How does it help me as a fan outside of perhaps giving me a chance to stop off at the golden arches before I enter the park? It's still the same stadium, it has its old problems. Yet somehow I'm supposed to believe that if over the winter the White Sox put a bunch of Starbucks where their parking lots used to be, and moved the parking farther out, we'd be most of the way to a solution. I'm sorry, I just don't buy this. And secondly, I don't think that people would hang out in this shopping district to begin with. 35th street in Chicago is the northern border of a large district of public housing. Standing on the freeway overpass and looking south you can see Chicago Housing Authority units stretching south to the horizon. The area to the immediate North is no joy either. It is currently best known for an incident a few years back where a bunch of white toughs pulled a black kid off of his bicycle and beat him until he was brain-damaged. They didn't want "his kind" in their neighborhood. You can hire all the rent-a-cops in Chicago, but most people are going to flee the Comiskey Park region right after the game. If anything, the moat of parking lots that separates New Comiskey from the local area is a comfort to most fans, not a drawback.

For all the talk that Bess does about how Armour Field will fit into the region, he only devotes a few lines to what will actually occur in the park. He mentions the large outfield and says that will put an increased focus on speed. That's it. Well, the line from the mound to the plate extends to the South rather than the South-West as in most parks. This will create different shadows and may cause interesting "sun in my eyes" situations. Not a word on this. I don't know if this was even considered. No talk about how good a view the people are going to get from the seats. Not of the field, of course Bess talks about how they'll get a good look at the skyline. Oh, and nearby apartment buildings could look in and see what's going on. After all, how the ballpark reacts with the surroundings is more important than how it affects the game that's actually played there. One of the tenets of the urban ballpark is that external vertical circulation needs to be eliminated. In English that means that ramps to upstairs should be contained inside the volume of the ballpark, not be outside. Well, I can tell you that with a big crowd it is much easier to get out of New Comiskey than it is Wrigley, where they do have internal vertical circulation. But something like that doesn't seem to matter to Bess, apparently the fans who watch the game and the game itself aren't as important as the ballpark's role in the city.

City Baseball Magic makes many interesting points about urban planning, but for a book that is supposed to be about ballparks it doesn't seem to concern itself with the actual act of watching a baseball game. It may make good reading for an Urban Stdies and Planning curriculum, but in the end I wonder if Bess at some point lost the idea of why ballparks are built.