Renovating the Rogers Skydome - or building a new baseball stadium for the Blue Jays?
I love the Skydome as an icon of the city. But if it's not particularly great for any sort of event--neither baseball nor football fans seem to like it that much--we can't waste resources keeping it around. However, we have to ensure that our next venues are both highly useful and iconic so they last.
Building expensive stadiums every generation is a waste of money. It always seems to entail large public expenditures. Some American cities do that and lack a lot of what we take for granted like transit and a large downtown population of middle class people.
Junctionist and Everyone:
Anyone who follows MLB Baseball has noted that since the early 1990s that the trend has been to construct a ballpark that
is primarily baseball oriented instead of multi sport venues that many cities had - the last shared MLB/NFL stadium is in the
City of Oakland/Alameda County,CA - home of the Athletics and NFL Raiders...
It amazes me that the Skydome has fallen out of favor to many Blue Jays fans since those boom years of 1989 to 1994 in
which the Jays were attracting 50,000 fans per game along with winning the 1992 and 1993 World Series titles...
It sometimes amazes me how a stadium can fall out of favor with fans - the epitome of this is what the Atlanta Braves are
planning to do in building a new stadium in suburban Cobb County,GA - SunTrust Park - to replace Turner Field which was
built for the 1996 Olympic Games and has been home of the Braves since the 1997 season when the current lease expires
after the 2016 season. Turner Field replaced Atlanta Stadium - which opened in 1966 when the Braves moved to Atlanta from
Milwaukee. What the Braves are choosing to do is to replace a stadium located adjacent to Downtown Atlanta with one that
is located in a suburban area - in a region that has one of the worst auto traffic congestion problems in the US...
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunTrust_Park
One aspect that I do not like about constructing these new venues is that in many cases taxpayers are left footing the bill
but if there can be a way to fund them in a manner that helps general taxpayers such as "sin taxes" on alcohol and cigarettes
which Cleveland and Cuyahoga County,OH enacted to fund arena construction - or a state lottery in Maryland in which all of the
proceeds funded Baltimore and suburban Washington sports arenas...
I am all for the renovation of the Rogers Skydome and to me its prime location and retractable roof make it still very desirable
provided that issues like the turf type can be somehow worked out and being a shared stadium with the CFL Argonauts that
both of these teams can work together to improve the working relationship that they already have...
One thing that I hope does not happen is that a good relationship between teams does not go the way the NY Mets and NY Jets
had when both shared Shea Stadium from 1964 to 1983 - The Mets wanted - and got - Shea Stadium converted into a baseball only
facility and the root of the problems between the two teams was field conditions and game scheduling - the Mets had control of
those aspects and the Jets had to go along with whatever the Mets decided to do in their "Landlord-Tenant" relationship...
As many know the NY Jets joined the NY Giants at the New Jersey Meadowlands Sports Complex in 1984 and it still does not fail to
again amaze me that two NFL teams can share the same facility - Giants Stadium and recently MetLife Stadium - in some sort of
harmonious existence between them...
In closing I would like the Blue Jays to stay put at the Rogers Skydome following improvements and updates and in this case of
Toronto I am thinking "Location,Location,Location" because of its convenience to mass transit and road access from the Gardiner
Expressway - and its proximity to Downtown Toronto...
Long Island Mike