Ed. Note: Part of a continuing series where FTT throws dirt on the graves of dead stadiums to show that yes, we are freaking old. Enjoy!
Every generation goes through waves of nostalgia, and as the speed of media increases, the cycle gets faster.
In the late 1970s of my childhood, the country yearned for the more innocent ‘50s of the Fonz and “Grease.” In the 80s, there were Doors revivals and hippie moments until AIDS made everyone stop having casual sex for, like, ever. (At least, that is what the women kept telling me.) In the 90s, we so wanted a new ‘70s Watergate so much, we had one when the President lied about blow jobs.
In the Aughts, we’ve paid actual U.S. money to see movies about TV shows from the ‘80s, and insisted on getting and watching new “Star Wars” movies, no matter how bad they were. Keep an eye out for the coming Grunge Revival, especially if it means that Frances Bean Cobain is finally ready to take her rightful place as the world’s angriest rock and roll bandleader. (Just to make you feel really old, Wikipedia says she’s 14 now. Though if she really wanted to get back at both of them, she’d become an actuary.)
Nostalgia like this also has its place in the construction of baseball stadiums… with the notable exception of the ‘60s/’70s era of multi-purpose places.
Let me, then, be the only person in the history of North America to express longing for the simple civic virtue of one place that covers the needs of 89 (81 baseball, 8 football) regular season games a year, plus pre-season and playoffs. The idea that football teams need their own yard for 8 out of 365 days a year is just kind of baffling – along with the idea that people will pay 2x to 3x more to see the same game in a newer and/or ritzier yard, especially because it has nicer facilities for corporate types.
So long as I’m not in that group, screw those people.
When I was a kid, the only thing I wanted more than a local championship team was the ability to have my own seat for *all* of the games that happened in that most magical of places, those hallowed grounds of triumph and pain – Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium and Spectrum. In these state of the art facilities, there was a 5 to 10-year run of constant title contention for all four teams (yes, I even cared about hockey then). Only the Phillies and Sixers broke through, but no team was without its giddy joys. Eventually, a local cable channel (“Prism”) took root, giving suburban kids like me a pipeline into everything that happened in those buildings. Oh, if only the walls could talk.
They were, I am sure, crap holes. But they were *my* crapholes. Yours sucked much worse.
So it was that on a low rent baseball road trip in the late ‘80s, I found myself, on back to back nights, in Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium and Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium – the carbon-copy cutouts, along with Busch Stadium in St. Louis and the Coliseum in Oakland, from the time of civic virtues and shared resources.
Pittsburgh was a spooky ghost town that was a logistical nightmare. First, there is the simple and painful ride through Pennsylvania – so small on the map, so long in the car. It takes about seven hours to make it from Philadelphia, with big rigs and pickups taking turns in shaking you down, on a state turnpike that’s lump-riffic.
Once you do get to Pittsburgh, you go through something like six bridges and tunnels, have your ears pop from sudden elevation changes, and then answer three riddles from a troll (it’s OK – all of the answers are ‘The Steelers’). Once you’ve become convinced that there is no way there’s a stadium here, and you might actually be in West Virginia, you’d find your final destination… a large concrete ashtray.
A hot, sticky ashtray where the only people showing any kind of enthusiasm were hawking credit cards with the Pirates logo on it. (I’ve always wondered if those would work at high-end establishments. A Yankees card, that probably gets accepted anywhere, but a Pirates card… you might also want to bring cash, as a backup.)
The game wasn’t competitive, the crowd didn’t care or notice, and it was a lot like Montreal, only with a view of the sky. We hurried on to our next destination and felt a great sense of accomplishment at no longer being in Pennsylvania.
Cincinnati, the next night, was better... but only because the mid-‘80s Reds teams had exciting players like Eric Davis, Kal Daniels and Barry Larkin, along with some hard throwers in the pen. The actual park seemed worse – filled with a hog-rendering stench, and in an area that seemed like it was all highways and pedestrian death.
Here’s a fun fact about the Queen City – it was known, back in the day, as Porkopolis. The fact that you are within spitting distance, and yes, there will be spitting, of Kentucky, which is where the natives go for fun… well, it did achieve a feeling of difference from the previous stadium. We’ll give it that.
But if you shut off the crowd noise and looked about, it was clearly the exact same park, just decked out in different colors. Good sight lines, tons of room for foul ground, same concrete metal pipe fencing that always managed to be in the way for something you wanted to see.
All things run in cycles. We are sure that, in our lifetime, there will be a contracting of interest in sports, a backlash against the bubble economies that fuel stadium construction and pricing, a drop in attendance, an end to the civic insecurities and next town bargaining power that creates the modern pleasure palace. It’s all going to UFC, and a dystopian leathers-and-feathers MadMax world where fantasy league nerds congregate in secret safe rooms to hunch over Excel spreadsheets and diecast figurines. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
But when that day of austerity comes, we doubt anyone’s going to go all the way back to Astroturf, front row seats that are 100 feet from the game, and the creepy sense of déjà vu that can only come from being in a place that could easily be some other place.
As always on Crap Holes We Have Known, if you’ve got a different view, we’re eager to hear it, so that we can get what people in pro wrestling call Cheap Heat. Post your impassioned defense, or pile on the corpse, in the comments below.
Coming Up Next Time on Crap Holes We Have Known: Milwaukee!
