Smith's Ballpark, Salt Lake City (AAA #12 - Where are You Going to Build the New Stadium?)

 

Tonight we’re at Smith’s Ballpark in Salt Lake City. A prime reason to do this one-off trip now (more about logistics later) is that, like Oakland Coliseum, Smith’s Ballpark is in its last year qualifying for our list, because the Salt Lake City Bees will be moving to a new stadium next year. So there is lots of talk in Salt Lake City about building new ballparks (yes, plural), and there are all sorts of interesting forces at work.

Smith’s Ballpark:

Smith’s Ballpark has the largest seating capacity of the 10-team Pacific Coast League, 14,500, and second largest in all of AAA baseball. It’s also the second oldest, built in 1994. Tacoma’s Cheney Stadium, built in 1960, wins easily as the oldest stadium in AAA baseball. There are four stadiums in the other AAA league, the International League, that are older than Smith’s, but the oldest was built in 1988 (that’s Buffalo’s Sahlen Field, which also happens to be the only AAA stadium with a larger seating capacity). In other words, the AAA stadiums often feel like cookie-cutters, with 2/3 of them built between 1988 and 2010, and with seating capacities of about 10,000. They’re lovely, but they’re all the same, except for the little touches. Often, it’s the view, the bridge from Sacramento or downtown El Paso. Or, it’s the sense of place in Albuquerque, with the “Green Chili Philly” sandwiches and the concrete baseball that came from the previous stadium.

On the other hand, there are 10 major league stadiums that opened before 1994 (and one in 1994), including two that are more than 100 years old (Fenway and Wrigley). It wasn’t obvious to me before we started this journey that there would be more diversity in MLB parks than in AAA stadiums.

Smith’s is one of the few outdoor stadiums that we have been to (or will go to), where home plate is not in the southwest quadrant of the compass. The most common orientation of the stadium is to make it so that neither the batter nor the pitcher has the Sun in their eyes, and the result is that a left-handed pitcher’s pitching arm is to the south, hence the likely origin of the term “southpaw”. But Smith’s has home plate in the northwest corner of the stadium. That means that the Sun was in the pitchers’ eyes for the first couple of innings, and the fielders on the left side of the field were looking into the sun even later. In the picture below, notice that the left fielder is just at the edge of the shadow of the grandstand, and his shadow is nearly (not exactly, but too close for comfort) pointing straight away from the hitter, which means that he has to look straight into the Sun. In the 4^th inning tonight, the Sun was just above the grandstand for Salt Lake City shortstop Jack López  when a line drive was hit right at him, shoulder (head?) high. That’s normally a fairly easy play, but he caught it, fell backwards, and just lay there. I think he felt lucky to have seen the ball. 

 

So why did they do the layout that way? That orientation means that from many of the seats, the Wasatch Mountains are visible over the outfield wall (see picture at the top). I highly approve of the aesthetics, but I worry about the shortstops and pitchers.

I like the stadium. Beyond the outfield berm, there are picnic areas and a playground for kids, with a residential neighborhood just on the other side of the fence. And I like the little train that runs back and forth on the path at the top of the berm for kids to ride in.

But it’s 30 years old, and showing its age. It was built to look retro, with exposed steel beams and a brick outside. When something that started retro gets to be 30 years old, it’s not so quaint anymore. And the scoreboard isn’t nearly as fancy as most AAA stadiums. I found it to still be an enjoyable place to go to a game, but the owners of the team (the heirs and corporations derived from the real estate empire of Larry Miller) decided to build a new stadium.

Next year’s (sort of) Salt Lake City ballpark

Starting next year (2025), the Bees will be playing in a ballpark being built as park of a planned community called Downtown Daybreak. A substantial fraction of the land in the community is owned by the Miller group. Remember, they’re real estate people, and they own the Bees. The ballpark will seat “approximately 6500 fans”, and the Miller group is paying for it. The seating capacity is less than half that of Smith’s, but larger than the Bees' average attendance last year (6160). Tonight’s attendance, a random Tuesday in June, was 6807. Of course, some of those people were on the grass area behind the outfield, which, like most AAA stadiums, the Daybreak stadium presumably will have, so a crowd as big as tonight's will probably fit. It’s worth pointing out that it’s the highest attendance we’ve seen at a AAA game this year, even though the Bees are a last-place team. So SLC does support baseball.

Salt Lake City tried to get the A’s as temporary tenants for the next four years, but lost to Sacramento. Sacramento has a comparable metropolitan population to SLC, but has a 50% larger seating capacity than the Daybreak Downtown stadium that SLC was pitching. Maybe SLC should have offered Smith’s Ballpark…

Will the stadium work well for AAA?

Downtown Daybreak is roughly half the distance from downtown Salt Lake City, where’s Smith’s Ballpark is, to Provo, 30 to 40 minutes drive from each. In recent decades, particularly for major league sports franchises, the trend has been to move stadiums closer to downtown, not farther away. Just among the stadiums we’ve been to, San Francisco, San Diego, Houston and Minneapolis are all stadiums that are in the heart of downtown, when their predecessors were in the outskirts of town or the suburbs. It seems to be working. At a AAA level, while some stadiums are downtown (Reno, Oklahoma City, Des Moines, El Paso, Louisville), others have been built well out into suburbia (Omaha, Sugar Land, Round Rock). Of the PCL teams, only two, Round Rock  and Sugar Land, have stadiums that are truly in the suburbs. They are 6^th and 10^th, respectively, in attendance in the 10-team league (although the top two, Albuquerque and Las Vegas, are by no means downtown). So good luck with the Downtown Daybreak stadium.

Major league baseball in Salt Lake City?

The flirtation with the A’s to become their temporary home wasn’t the last we’ll hear of Salt Lake City and major league baseball. Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred has said that he wants MLB to add two teams to the current 30 in the next few years, and Salt Lake City is very interested. SLC is just one of many cities in the running, though.

Unlike most of the others, Salt Lake City has a very specific plan for the stadium. The same folks who own the Bees and are building the Downtown Daybreak stadium are leading an effort to land a team, called Big League Utah. The group has even generated renderings of the proposed stadium, which would have the Jordan River on one side and the Wasatch Mountains on the other, potentially a gorgeous place to watch a game. The stadium would be in an area near downtown where there are concerns about gentrification, so it’s not a foregone conclusion that the stadium could be situated there, even if Salt Lake City could get a team.

If they built it, would people come? The situation reminds me a lot of Denver’s Lo-Do district, which was apparently quite run down (the Wikipedia article describes it as “skid row”), but also quite central. Denver began to redevelop the area in the late 1980s, and Coors Field  opened there in 1995. The result was the area became a go-to place in Denver. When we went to a game there last year, we had to walk close to a half-mile to get a ride-share, because traffic was gridlocked by a combination of the Rockies game and all the people in the area sports bars to watch the hometown Nuggets play an away game in the NBA Finals. I’m not sure SLC’s West Side is that run down, but it sounds like a good place to put a stadium, better than Downtown Daybreak.

 

Last Dive Bar:

I brought along my “Baseball’s Last Dive Bar” wristband that I’ve worn to seven A’s games this year (two in Oakland). Kerry gave hers away to an A’s fan. However, it’s not really that appropriate. First, as you’ve probably gathered from my description, Smith’s Ballpark doesn’t feel like a dive, unlike the Oakland Coliseum. Second, the “Last Dive Bar” campaign is largely a protest against the mistreatment of fans by Oakland ownership, which is moving the team to Sacramento, and then Las Vegas, but the Bees aren’t abandoning the Salt Lake area, even though they are moving out of the city, so there are no 5^th-inning chants of “Sell the Team” or “Sell the Team” T-shirts. which has a comparable metropolitan population, but has a larger stadium than the Daybreak Downtown stadium that Salt Lake City was pitching. Maybe they should have offered Smith’s Ballpark…

Logistics:

We attended last night’s game in Phoenix, flew in to Salt Lake this morning, and will fly back tomorrow in time for the game. There are several nonstop flights each day from Phoenix to Salt Lake City and back, but it’s harder to get from our regular home in Tucson, so we decided to pick a random day in the middle of a Diamondbacks’ home stand, when we’d be in Phoenix anyway. We’ve found that missing one game in the middle of a homestand can be a good thing – yes, there is such a thing as too much baseball, particularly if your team doesn’t play well, and unless you’re a Dodgers fan, you never know when you’re going to have a stinker of a homestand. This comes after a game where the Diamondbacks came from ahead to lose after having a two run lead in the 9^th inning with two outs, nobody on base, and two strikes on the hitter. So in one sense, our timing was perfect.

We’ll probably do this at least one more time on our quest. The St. Paul Saints didn’t have any home games during the Minnesota Twins homestand where we attended two games, and spent another day with friends in St. Cloud. There are nonstop flights to the Twin Cities...

As it turns out, the only game we missed had the potential to be the best game of the homestand, but didn’t turn out that way. Our best pitcher, Zac Gallen, who has been one of the top five of 10 pitchers in all of baseball the last couple of years (and started last year’s All-Star game), pitched against 35-year-old Chris Sale, who (unlike Gallen) is on the All-Star team this year.

As it turned out, neither Sale nor Gallen was great (both were pulled in the sixth inning, although both are the kind of pitcher you expect to pitch into the 7^th or 8^th), but Sale was a little better, and the Braves won 6-2. So we don’t feel so bad about missing the game.

The game (Sacramento 6, Salt Lake City 2)

One of my favorite plays in baseball is the suicide squeeze bunt, and I got to see it not  once, but twice tonight, with very different results.

The setup is this: there’s a runner on 3^rd base with less than two outs. As the pitcher starts to throw, the runner on 3^rd breaks for home, and the batter slides his top hand several inches up the bat and just tries to bunt the ball. All he has to do is tap it a few feet in fair territory, and the defensive team will never be able to get the runner out at the plate, even though they may be able to throw out the batter at first. The beauty of the suicide squeeze is that you see it all developing as the pitcher starts to throw.

So what could possibly go wrong?

* It’s easier to bunt a ball than to hit a line drive, but it is by no means easy, particularly against a major league (or even AAA) pitcher. If the batter tries to bunt, and misses, the runner from third is halfway to home plate, and the catcher is at home plate with the ball.

* If the runner breaks too early, or the batter shows bunt too early, the pitcher can just throw it a foot outside the strike zone, where the batter can’t possibly reach it, and (as long as he doesn’t throw it so far outside that the catcher can’t catch it) the runner is hung up.

* Also, both the runner and the batter have to know that the play is coming. The third base coach always is giving signals to the batter and runners if the manager wants to try a specific play. But if there’s a runner on third base, you might notice that the coach always says something in the runner’s ear. That way, if the squeeze is on, the third base coach can tell the runner verbally, as well as flashing hand signals. The squeeze play isn't usually what the coach tells the runner, but if it's on, the runner gets the message even if he misses the hand signs.

In the bottom of the first tonight, things were going haywire for Sacramento’s defense. After the first hitter reached base, the next batter hit a grounder to second baseman Marco Luciano that looked like it could be a double play. But Luciano’s throw to the shortstop was wild, so wild that it went to the fence halfway between third base and the left field fence. By the time the dust settled, one run had scored and the batter had gotten to third base. The pitcher hit the next batter. He struck out the next hitter, but it still had the look of a big inning in the making. In the middle of the next at-bat, the hitter, Jordan Adams, showed bunt, the runner came down the line … but the ball was far outside, and Adams didn’t even try to bunt it. It was a classic example of why it’s called the “suicide” squeeze – the runner was a dead duck. Maybe Adams missed a sign, because if the suicide squeeze is on, you have to try to bunt the ball, no matter where it is, even if you have to throw the bat at it. Or maybe the pitcher saw the runner break from 3rd, and just put it so far outside that Adams knew he couldn't reach it. In any case, the inning was effectively over.

In the top of the 9^th, the score was tied 2-2, and Sacramento had runners on 1^st and 3^rd with one out. Suddenly, the runner from third broke down the line, and Grant McCray laid down a perfect bunt. Pitcher Bryan Shaw fielded it, glanced home to see if he could get the runner (he couldn’t), and by the time he threw to first, McCray was safe as well.

The note in my scorebook says, “That’s how you do a suicide squeeze.”

Shaw hit the next batter to load the bases, the next hitter (Luciano) singled in a couple of runs, and it was no longer a close game.

Incidentally, Shaw is one of those AAA players who are just trying to hang on to a career. We first saw him pitch in 2011, when he helped the Diamondbacks win the division championship. He pitched two years for us, then several years for Cleveland (one year, he led the American League in number of games pitched in), then one or two years each for Colorado, Seattle, Cleveland again, and the White Sox. His last appearance in the majors was with the White Sox in April, tonight he was pitching for the Angels’ AAA team, and didn’t do well. He’s had a great career, but tonight it looked like it may be nearing an end.