Dude, you are preaching to the choir, sort of...bobbyhawks wrote:I think, for one off experiences, people are more forgiving of a remote location and a new type of experience. Some of the major points of a downtown stadium are to put it closer, from more angles, to more people already in the metro, and to connect the team to the city's image and identity. There are tens of thousands of people in businesses downtown who either already have company tickets or would be more likely to have company tickets to these games. A huge portion of the tickets sucked up at any sports venue now are from corporations and small businesses. Why do you think it is that the Royals will announce 20k fans on a Wednesday night game when the stands look more like 12 to 15? It is because going to a Royals game can be such a chore. Have you ever tried to get rid of tickets? Even on weekends, it can be a challenge. Want to have a night on the town AND see a Royals game? Good luck finding a DD or avoiding checkpoints. Our team is far and away the #1 reason why attendance is low, but there are so many benefits to a dowtown stadium, even if attendance is low, that can't be quantified or qualified. You don't just think that a town is a "major league town," but you see it and feel it from the core, literally.
People were mostly satisfied with the stadium in 2007 in the way they are satisfied now. The only point of dumping 50% of new stadium money into this place was to temporarily boost attendance while the team still sucks (also boosts the franchise value quickly). If you wish to modify my previous analogy to Kauffman = Lexus with new paint and DT = new Camry, then why wouldn't we drive the Lexus without the paint job (and that we're already happy with) a little longer so that we could get another new Lexus? It just doesn't make sense to me. And to me, Kauffman is no Lexus. It is an anomaly in that it is still a nice park considering it was built in the early 70s, but it is far from one of the premier parks in the league.
People tell us all the time how nice the K is, and it is a nice stadium. Lets not fool ourselves, though. It is a concrete bowl in the middle of an ocean of more concrete and asphalt, with fountains and an awesome scoreboard. The fountains and scoreboard are really the entire reason the stadium has any sort of nice quality to it (aside from history and nostalgia). Those can still be moved to a new stadium. The entire reason why people prefer that location is so that they can leave quickly and be on the highway. Is that really the kind of patronage and community interaction we wish to promote?
Citing Dallas and LA as reasons why KC should stick with a suburban park also doesn't really make sense to me. With 5+ million people, the stadium will draw regardless of where it is. Also, citing Pittsburgh as a reason why the stadium location won't draw fans is disingenuous. Pittsburgh has been just as hapless as the Royals in recent years, and they are not an equivalent baseball city in my opinion. But one thing that everyone, almost universally, says about their baseball park is that it is beautiful and in a great location. It is a major feature of their urban environment. People cite, time and time again, the view and the location as a major benefit. People also rank the Rangers' stadium in the bottom third frequently. KC is almost never listed as a top stadium. A 2008 SI survey cited the K at #12 in a fan poll, but the lowest ranked qualities of the stadium (aside from the poor quality of play) were atmosphere, "getting to the game," and neighborhood. Some of the main reasons why we were #12 were affordability and food, which have little to do with the stadium.
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/baseba ... oyals.html
http://away.com/features/top-ten-baseba ... ums-1.html
http://www.travelandleisure.com/article ... l-stadiums
http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1006 ... ll/page/31
http://www.ballparks.com/baseball/gener ... 050423.htm
I fully support and wished KC would have built a downtown stadium. My point is that the location of Kauffman is not really that big of an issue to 99% of the fans that go there. A downtown stadium would have been awesome for KC. But it didn't happen and it's likely 15-20 years from even being discussed again, so why lose sleep over it? Life's too short. Kauffman is a great park. I have been to them all and can compare.
And why do you mention Dallas and not Milwaukee when quoting me on how remote stadiums do draw well??? Come on. At least be fair with your quoting. People in Philly generally don't give a rip about their stadium's remote location. It's in the city, but may as well be 20 miles out. They like the access. It makes no difference. And every body does like the stadiums Pittsburgh and Cincy and Cleveland and Seattle. But everybody saw a game there and now there are just not many fans that want to go to those stadiums just because they are downtown, even when the teams are playing well.
I also think you are grossly exaggerating the corporate support of a stadium's location while ignoring that fact that the vast majority of fans to the park will come from the suburbs and region, not the downtown core, regardless of the location of the stadium. Did I mention that Baltimore has been drawing like 10-15k on weekday games this season to see a first place team? The Nationals are near several hundred thousand residents and employees and they don't draw crap on weeknights either. Then on the weekends, the region comes down and fills up the stadiums in DC and Balt. Just like KC. KC's corporate community basically turns its back on downtown anyway. Why would it matter if the Royals were down there. I think you would get the same amount of corporate season tickets. You are talking about filling a small section of a stadium with these downtown dwellers while you are probably causing four times that many to avoid the stadium because they do't want to drive downtown on a weekday and deal with parking and traffic.
Like I said, I agree with you. I support a downtown stadium. But you are exaggerating the support a downtown stadium generates while ignoring the much bigger fan base of the metro that prefers the convenience of the TSC and making way to big a deal out of the location in the first place. The Royals need to play 500 plus ball...consitantly. Then watch one of the better baseball towns come alive and KC will average 30k plus a game. I'm not sure it would have been the best idea for KCMO to spend 500 million on a park all by itself anyway (because it wouldn't have had any support from the region) and if they put that much into a ballpark, it would have been that much harder to get many other much needed projects done. The city can't even find enough money to build a 2 mile long streetcar line.
But it would have been nice to have a downtown park. It would have helped fight the kansas/country image of kc to have an actual city surrounding the baseball stadium instead of freeways and sparse haphazard development.
