The Tropicana Field Experience

As a fan of an American League East team, Tropicana Field has figured in my imagination for years, though before the Joe Madden era it was mostly as just that dump where the Sox could pick up a few wins — though I also seem to remember that something about the place made Pedro Martinez mental. It is the architectural odd-man out in our division, which includes old classics like Fenway and Yankee Stadium (the old one, that is), as well as new places like Camden Yards, which completely changed the way we think about new baseball stadiums, and the Skydome (or whatever they call it now), which everyone thought was really cool for a few years when it was new (until said Camden Yards revolution happened). 

Last week, on a quick trip to Florida, I had a chance to catch the Sox down there, and seeing a game there was just as weird as I always imagined it would be.

The strangeness begins on the interstate, as you head into St. Petersburg from Tampa and the stadium appears before you, like some kind of giant, lopsided wart. It is near the highway, which is good I guess, but apparently everyone is convinced it is too far from most of the population of the Tampa Bay region, which is bad. Its neighborhood feels very lonely — in one of those marginal neighborhoods Sun Belt cities seem to have with undesirable and possibly empty office buildings, lots of parking lots, multi-lane boulevards, and no sign of human life outside of vehicles except the guys waving stadium traffic to the lots.

As is critical in that part of the country, there is lots of parking. And since the weather is always nice, there was some actual tailgating going on when we arrived. But even for a parking lot, it's pretty bland, save for the tall palm trees and the long mosaic on the pavement that leads through the lots to the stadium entrance from... nowhere. 

There is a main entrance rotunda, which bizarrely lets you into the outfield seats (and which, more bizarrely, the team claims was inspired by Ebbets Field). The inside tunnels are fairly spacious, with creatively packed with ways to spend money. But the walls are all painted cinder block, and there is something temporary about it all. It feels like one of those semi-permanent structures you find at fairgrounds. 

We sat in the 200-level, just beside press box on the third base side. Since it is a rare case of a baseball-only indoor stadium, it feels about the right size. And the sight lines for baseball were great. But it was very hard to put out of your mind how strange it is to be watching a game indoors when the weather outside is so nice. Sure, there are lots of showers and storms in the summer, but it is still hard to make peace with having a roof over your head for baseball. Or the massive air conditioning ducts lining the upper level. The Trop makes it worse by having such a strange roof, with its concentric circles of catwalks that have occasionally gotten in the way of the game. I have no idea how fielders play there, because just watching, I lost every fly ball that went up. 

I imagine it is a little easier for Rays fans live with the place now that the team has some history to build on. All over you see lots of photos from those encouraging recent years, but I fear that winning hasn't translated into any greater passion for the team. Attendance was very poor when I was there, and there was a very strong presence of Sox fans. By that, I mean close to half the obvious fans I saw were supporting the visitors. My section got very loud when Stephen Drew's grand slam blew the game open in the third inning. 

There's been a lot of chatter down there about getting a new ballpark, preferably somewhere more central in Tampa, with a retractable roof. But thanks to the fiasco of the Marlins new stadium down in Miami, the team probably can't count on much taxpayer help. I think the Trop will be around for awhile. And since tickets are affordable, the place is comfortable, and the team is decent, that isn't a disaster.

A new new media

Being cynical about professional media and the State of Journalism means I'm almost never impressed by the things that I love. I realized how bad it was a few weeks ago when I tried to put into words why I was so grumpy that my wife and begun a subscription to The New York Times. I realized that it was because I subconsciously want newspapers to die so the deadwood and barnacles stuck in the field would drift away to sell cars or whatever, while the people really interested in reporting and writing would have to start anew and get on with it. 

These days I still read a lot, and almost exclusively online. There are old media outlets I follow now on computer screens, like the New Yorker, the Economist, the New York Review of Books, which I've kept an eye on since college. There are a few new media outlets I check everyday — The Awl is a favorite, and Grantland is an experiment I'm curious about. But I realize that all of them are alike in that they don't fundamentally challenge the same categories we've always had. They are all, basically, conservative. Text is text, images are images, videos are videos, audio is audio, and the idea of hyperlinking has been around long enough to have become perfectly conventional. But everywhere, the same tried and true cubbyholes are respected, kept a safe, respectable distance apart.

But does it need to be that way, and should it remain that way? I sort of had my mind blown a little the other day when I clicked on a link at Pitchfork to a feature about the new London-based poseur-core indie band Savages ("No Heroes," by Laura Snapes). At this point I have no opinion on the band at all, I'm not in awe of the quality of the writing, and the overall vibe of brooding intensity reeking off the band is perhaps a bit overmuch. In the details, it feels more like marketing or promotion material… but why? The piece is visually interesting, the different elements are seamlessly connected, it is clear that writers, editors, photographers, and designers all worked together on it. And I realized that on the web you can do things like this, so after all this, why doesn't anybody?

I've been endlessly amused at the way old media tries to adopt bits of new media. It never worked out the details in a creative way. I don't see much value in forcing already overworked reporters to tweet photos and create slideshows for the website of images they have to take themselves. I don't mean the big boys, who give a little space and funding for videographers to present different kinds of stories. And I don't mean the occasional fancy infographic with clickable data points to graft next to an enterprise story. I mean, why doesn't anybody try to put it all together? Reading this profile of Savages, at some point I stopped paying attention to the band, and began thinking how awesome it would be if someone gave this treatment to municipal water rates.

Each January I teach a course at Williams on long-form magazine reporting and writing. One of the recurring themes that comes up is that it is very hard to do this kind of stuff anymore, certainly not in the great age of the postwar magazines, larded with ads for cigarettes and booze and read by upwardly mobile folks. I got to thinking that I wanted to try to think about something else, and last winter hatched the idea of bugging a good friend who is an outstanding computer scientist into co-teaching a course about marrying old and new media. I figured we could create one big project about something related to the college — about the breakdown of admissions applications, or the college's investment portfolio. Something that would blend old fashioned reporting and writing with all the graphic wonders out there that no one thinks are relevant. I wanted to do this for myself as much as anything else.

Maybe someday.