MLB 2018

[ursus arctos]

Enough to give you flashbacks of the Coliseum, Flynnie.

The white spaces are the athletics track?

[Flynnie]

Enough to give you flashbacks of the Coliseum, Flynnie.

The white spaces are the athletics track?

Yeah, they're essentially building grandstands down the line, since even in West Ham formation the seats would be far too far from the field.

The upper deck seats behind the scoreboard (the notches in the diagram) are the cheapest tickets in the building. I might snag them since, well, I've sat there for rugby, sat at the Coliseum for baseball and it's fine. You're just far away.

[Hot Pepsi]

For comparison:






I understand there are economics and space considerations, but in my experience, venues that are built to accommodate multiple different kinds of sports and events are usually not very good for any of them.

[Ray de Galles]

Yeah, curse the "shitdick organisers of London 2012" for building one of the greatest athletics stadia ever. Why oh why couldn't they have put in more corporate boxes?!

I understand there are economics and space considerations, but in my experience, venues that are built to accommodate multiple different kinds of sports and events are usually not very good for any of them.

This one wasn't "built to accommodate multiple different kinds of sports and events" though.

[Flynnie]

Yes, I am going to have a go at them for spending billions of taxpayer money on a stadium with such a poor corporate offering (and one, narrow concourse for 55,000 people) that MLB has to turn the stadium side-on to have an actual press box.

Otherwise we could have had Stade Olympique Deux, Boogaloo Electrique, which while no Fenway Park would have been infinitely preferable:

[Hot Pepsi]

This one wasn't "built to accommodate multiple different kinds of sports and events" though.

I suppose that's even worse. It was built for track and now they're trying to wedge in a premier league football club and, at least temporarily, baseball.

When MLB went to Australia, they played at the SCG. That looks ok.

.

[Ray de Galles]

Yes, I am going to have a go at them for spending billions of taxpayer money on a stadium with such a poor corporate offering (and one, narrow concourse for 55,000 people) that MLB has to turn the stadium side-on to have an actual press box.

Otherwise we could have had Stade Olympique Deux, Boogaloo Electrique, which while no Fenway Park would have been infinitely preferable:

Your first sentence is just staggering, taxpayers money should be spent on corporate facilities?!

The entire stadium and concourse worked fantastically well for 80,000 people during the Olympics & Paralympics and for 60,000 during the Athletics Worlds last year, blame it’s bodged conversion to it’s “ball game set up” for anything else (though I’ve been to rugby matches in that format which it worked fine for).

I can’t understand your second paragraph at all.

If the Olympic Stadium didn’t exist then London wouldn’t be having MLB games at all, I can absolutely assure you of that, and I expect them to be a massive success and a great experience.

[Gerontophile]

I'm rather annoyed I won't make it. After all those years of waiting.

[Janik]

Your first sentence is just staggering, taxpayers money should be spent on corporate facilities?!

If a stadium is being built with taxpayers money, it should be done in such a way that it has some semblance of a chance of recouping the cost. Which means including decent corporate facilities, as you can bilk those types for a load of cash.

[Ray de Galles]

Corporate facilities have been added though, and as far as I’m aware it’s West Ham that are reaping the benefit.

[Flynnie]

If we're going to bring the taxpayer money argument to the party, then why was the stadium built at all? Wembley was more than adequate. The stadium only exists because Seb Coe and the toff nerds who like javelin throwing didn't want to go to Crystal Palace anymore.

[Ray de Galles]

Er, you brought the taxpayer money argument in to it, bizarrely as you thought it should benefit corporate interests.

I’m not sure what you think Wembley was “more than adequate” for but it’s certainly not baseball which would never have happened there.

Crystal Palace would have to have been levelled and rebuilt completely for the Olympics and the Olympic Park built around it without the advantages that Stratford’s location and infrastructure allowed.

The fact you use a phrase like “toff nerds” really does illustrate the utter bollocks and bullshit any argument you think you might have is based on.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of problems with the Olympic Stadium that stem from lack of foresight in planning and it’s use as a political football since the Games. However, at root it is still a wonderful stadium and, repeating myself, there is absolutely no way in hell MLB would have come to London had it not been built.

[Flynnie]

Er, you brought the taxpayer money argument in to it, bizarrely as you thought it should benefit corporate interests.

I’m not sure what you think Wembley was “more than adequate” for but it’s certainly not baseball which would never have happened there.

Crystal Palace would have to have been levelled and rebuilt completely for the Olympics and the Olympic Park built around it without the advantages that Stratford’s location and infrastructure allowed.

The fact you use a phrase like “toff nerds” really does illustrate the utter bollocks and bullshit any argument you think you might have is based on.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of problems with the Olympic Stadium that stem from lack of foresight in planning and it’s use as a political football since the Games. However, at root it is still a wonderful stadium and, repeating myself, there is absolutely no way in hell MLB would have come to London had it not been built.

Oh come on, this is just willful misreading. I'll explain again.

Wembley was built to accommodate a running track on a platform, like so:



It could have easily hosted the Olympics on its own. This, in effect, makes the London Stadium redundant. But the London Stadium stuck around because the powers that be wanted it so, especially Seb Coe who desperately wanted to retain a massive athletics stadium for big events, even though the London Grand Prix at Crystal Palace didn't consistently sell out because no one gives a fuck about athletics at the end of the day.

London Stadium is not a wonderful stadium. It's cheaply built, inadequate to handle the crowds it gets and any transition to football or rugby is woeful.

If my plan means no MLB then fine with me. Hoofddorp in the Netherlands should have been hosting games before London anyway, they built an MLB-ready complex with crazy shit London Stadium doesn't have like a functional press box, locker rooms (MLB will have to build their own for the London games) and bullpens. They did this with tacit encouragement from MLB, which then ghosted them and left them 6m euros in the lurch. Which is an insult to a country with an actual, real baseball tradition that has produced major leaguers (and I'm not even counting Curacao and Aruba).



The empty space are for 35,000 temporary seats. It goes without saying that nowhere in the UK does a complex anything like this exist.

[Ray de Galles]

It could have easily hosted the Olympics on its own. This, in effect, makes the London Stadium redundant. But the London Stadium stuck around because the powers that be wanted it so, especially Seb Coe who desperately wanted to retain a massive athletics stadium for big events, even though the London Grand Prix at Crystal Palace didn't consistently sell out because no one gives a fuck about athletics at the end of the day.

Here is no one giving a fuck about athletics last year :

"More than a million people attended both Championships with events not just held in the London Stadium but across the capital. The IAAF World Championships were awarded a Guinness World Record for tickets sold in excess of 705,000, whilst the World Para Athletics Championships with 305,000 ticket sales, exceeded the figures for all previous editions of the event combined."

There might be an artist's impression of a hypothetical platform system that allowed Wembley to stage athletics but , you know, there's an artist's impression of Portmouth's floating stadium from the same time. There's about as much reality to either. I'm sceptical as to the the time and cost it would take for Wembley to accomodate it and suspect it was a "pie in the sky" scam to get their full allocation of lottery money. Look at what the FA were putting on their own website in 2004 "For a start, a question mark hovers over how much of a role Wembley will play in London's 2012 Olympic Games bid. The likelihood is that it will be used for just two events, the men's and women's football finals. While it can be converted into an athletics stadium - a condition of part of its Ł120m lottery funding - the process takes weeks and costs millions."

The bodged conversion of Wembley to an athletics stadium would be even more of a pig's arse than the Olympic Stadium's bodged conversion to a football ground but far worse because the Olympics would have suffered rather than West fucking Ham. I'm also mindful that a similar platform system for athletics at Hampden for the 2014 Commonwealths took two years for conversion, installation and removal.

As regards to Athletics/BOA not wanting to get involved with Wembley, you do realise what an absolute clusterfuck the gestation of that stadium was for the majority of the noughties don't you? Not that it's been any smoother since it opened and there's still the likelihood they're going to have to sell it to Shahid Khan to try and settle the debt.

Ultimately, whatever the shambolic disorganisation of sports administrators and infrastructure snafus there is the demand in London (a city of 8 million people with 20 million people across the south east as whole and the absolute epicentre of world sporting events and with similar justifiable claims with regard to entertainment events) to have two megastadia. I know for a fact that Wembley struggles to find enough free dates in their diary now and turn down many hire enquiries and that will still be the case even when Spurs stop squatting there.

[Hot Pepsi]

Why couldn’t they play baseball at Lords or Old Trafford (Cricket)?

[ursus arctos]

I expect that the groundsmen would have had cows over the installation of a mound and infield.

That was less of an issue in Sydney because the ground is regularly used for Aussie Rules (and is currently a candidate for a “drop in” wicket.

[Ray de Galles]

Capacity is another issue, Lord's and The Oval are circa 28,000 and 26,000 respectively.,

[Greenlander]

Why couldn’t they play baseball at Lords or Old Trafford (Cricket)?

They could but the dates sit bang in the middle of the cricket season and the time MLB would need for preparing and dismantling the facilities probably wouldn't be acceptable. It's the lucrative Twenty20 time of the year too so I suspect no county would want to shift matches to outgrounds. Cricket dressing rooms are notoriously cramped and certainly not large enough for a 25 man roster so there'd be much to work around. Lords did stage archery in 2012 but I suspect the MCC wouldn't look too kindly on the idea of a baseball mound being constructed in front of the pavilion.

The capacity might be an issue too. Lords sits 30000 with Old Trafford around 26000. I think The Oval has staged a baseball exhibition game but their stadium holds even less at around 24500.

EDIT: or what RdG and UA said.

[ursus arctos]

I do wonder if Brexit will end up having an impact on London's pre-eminent position for this kind of frolic and detour that relies to at least some extent on attracting continental punters.

The ultimate visa regime will be key, but a very weak pound could so have an impacr, as would a major loss of corporate headquarters.

[Hot Pepsi]

I expect that the groundsmen would have had cows over the installation of a mound and infield.

That was less of an issue in Sydney because the ground is regularly used for Aussie Rules (and is currently a candidate for a “drop in” wicket.

It also occurs to me that it was autumn in Sydney when MLB played there so maybe they weren’t so upset about messing up the ground whereas it would be at the start or the middle of cricket season in the UK.

And, until I googled it *after*asking that question, I didn’t understand that Lords and The Oval were two different things.

30,000 would be better for baseball and an historical cricket ground would be a better environment for baseball, both live and on TV, than a massive track & field venue. But playing in an oversized stadium will give more people a chance to see the game at a less outrageous price. And it will make the games more profitable. If it were less profitable, it might not happen.

On the other hand, I don’t think baseball really has a big future in Britain. Sure, it will have fans and maybe can grow a little, just as cricket may make some inroads in the US, especially at the university club level.

But history shows baseball and cricket are mostly mutually exclusive in a given country. The possible exception is Australia, which appears to have an endless capacity to support “minority” sports, and it may have a future in South Africa, to some extent.

Baseball should be focusing its international efforts on Canada, Mexico, South America, and in Asia. There’s a lot more potential to create and keep fans as well as players in those territories.

[Hot Pepsi]

I do wonder if Brexit will end up having an impact on London's pre-eminent position for this kind of frolic and detour that relies to at least some extent on attracting continental punters.

The ultimate visa regime will be key, but a very weak pound could so have an impacr, as would a major loss of corporate headquarters.

Who, if anyone, might step-in? Paris? Berlin?

[ursus arctos]

I don’t think any one city would attract London’s current “market share”.

The more likely outcome would be that different sports would prefer different locations depending on local interest: Paris for basketball, Germany for gridiron and the Netherlands for baseball, possibly.

The NHL has been the most active of the North American leagues when it comes to spreading games across European countries with a demonstrated interest in the sport, though those results have been somewhat mixed.

[Hot Pepsi]

Those have been mostly preseason games, right? Though now, I see, there pushing more regular season games.

[Hot Pepsi]

This is a good idea and it would apply to baseball too.

https://www.si.com/nhl/2018/11/03/gl...urope-helsinki

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

I can vouch that Finland and Latvia are hockey mad - I was out there while the world championships were on in 2016 and every bar showing the games was rammed. Basketball, too, is insanely popular in Lithuania and Greece, in my experience. Have the NBA ever thought about this kind of thing?