New Cheney Stadium will have bells, whistles and a whole lot of TVs
Posted By Peter Callaghan on November 20, 2009 at 4:35 pm
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Sometime next month three design-build teams including the nation's primary stadium design firms will submit proposals for a renovated Cheney Stadium.
While those teams will come up with their proposals, the winner is expected to meet a detailed list of requirements drawn up by the city and the Rainiers – all for less than $30 million.
Construction would start in March and run through the 2010 season. Completion is set for the start of the 2011 season.
Based on that Project Summary, here's what the new ballpark will offer fans:
– a main seating bowl with 6,000 fixed seats and 2,000 bleacher seats plus a party deck.
– new, larger dugouts with connections to new, larger and fancier home and visiting team clubhouses (with 11 plasma screens for the home team and six for the visitors). The clubhouses will include a player lounge and a family lounge.
– a bunch more bathrooms in the main concourse, in the bleachers, in the party deck area and near a grassy berm.
– a kids play area.
– an outfield berm where fans can watch the game on the grass. Think Tightwad Hill that you have to pay for.
– ticket windows and entrance in left field.
– an outfield concourse behind a new outfield fence.
– new bullpens outside the field of play.
– a lot more concession stands, many with a 42-inch plasma screen so fans can keep an eye on the game while in line, a team shop and other stores.
– six large suites (seating 20 fans) and 10 smaller suites (12 fans) with their own restrooms, their own hallway, their own commissary. The large suites must have two 42 inch plasma screens and the small suites must have one 32 inch screens.
– dugout suites behind home plate and between the player dugouts that will offer fans a ground-level view of the game.
– a restaurant on the suite level with at least four 50-inch plasma screens.
– a remote-controlled camera system to capture the game and feed it to all of those TVs.
Bells and whistles, in addition to $10.00 beers and $9.00 hot dogs, for the working class !
To the Suite owners all will be "complimentary" !
ClownPosse has obviously never rented a suite- nothing is "complimentary", it is all built into the cost. But why let facts get in the way?
There was nothing cute about it, CP. In fact, your initial reply would be more acuratetly described as cute, not jimkingjr's.
I can't wait to see the finished Cheney Stadium!! It will be fun to watch the progress during next season.
Next week the city of Tacoma will sell $50M worth of bonds to pay for Cheney and other pork projects. If you like taxes...you'll love Tacoma.
Wow, just what I've always wanted. Go to one of the best ballparks in the Pac. NW so I can sit back and watch the game on a flat screen TV.
Next Spring, I'll just dump my grass catcher in the living room, slow cook some hot dogs and watch the game on the tube. I've beat the parking lot madness, saved a small fortune and yet, I've still got the smell of the freshly mown grass, hot dogs and beer, just like Cheney. If I could get the neighbors to yell out "Kill the Umpire", once in a while, I couldn't tell the difference.
Why is it a foregone conclusion that this is going to happen?
Wasn't Cheney Stadium just the recipient of a big work-over, just completed a couple summers ago, and including an expensive scoreboard?
Furthermore, are we are expected to buy the argument from the civic cheerleaders and the team owners - well-known to be fickle and greedy - that they are going to honor their end of a _thirty_ (!) year lease? Thirty years is like four lifetimes!
When it comes down to enforcing the lease, who gets to pay, albeit indirectly, to go to court for who know's how long? The taxpayer's, that's who....
So it's a done deal, eh? We are going to spend a bunch of money (again!) fixing something that doesn't need to be fixed, and that benefits a bunch of budding major league ball-players and owners, (again!) so that some guy - hardly "Joe Average" - can sit behind a window looking into the dugout, while many of us are relegated out to the distant land once known at "Cheapskate Hill?" And all for an undoubtedly higher ticket price.
Color me unimpressed.
Somehow, I just don't see the benefit, regardless of how much I may like baseball.