Looking Good for 35

New ballparks are being built all the time. Since 2000, ten ballparks have opened. That's a whopping one third of all baseball stadiums. Next season two more ballparks will open up in the same city, New York. The Twins are getting their very own shiny new ballpark in 2010. How I wish they would add a retractable roof, but that's for another column. Three more teams, the Marlins, A's, and Rays, are looking into building new stadiums for the 2012 season. While it makes sense for both the Marlins and A's to get new ballparks as they both play in cavernous football stadiums, the Rays play in a park built in 1990 and renovated in '97 for the Rays inaugural season. It's only in its tenth season of hosting Major League Baseball. How can a park become outdated so quickly? With the increasing demand of having luxury boxes, restaurants, bars, and other revenue boosting amenities in your ballpark, old stadiums are going the way of the dinosaur. Yankee Stadium is the most obvious example of this as the Yankees chose to do away with history for a little extra money. Thankfully not all teams feel the need to do away with their acceptable older stadiums. Kansas City made a wise choice in keeping Kauffman Stadium, a thirty five year old stadium I thoroughly enjoyed.

Before praising the positive aspects of Kauffman Stadium, there are some negatives to shed some light on. All the stadiums I have visited have their negative aspects, except Safeco Field in Seattle. That place is flawless. New blog idea: Rank the ballparks I have visited. That would be a fun column to write. Back on topic, Kauffman has two negatives that annoyed me. The first is the location of the ballpark. It is off interstate 70 next to Arrowhead Stadium, the home of the Kansas City Chiefs. Besides that, there is nothing around it. No restaurants or bars to walk to before or after the game. There might be a hotel and a gas station nearby, but thats about it. With so many new parks being built in cities with eating and drinking options only a block or two away, Kauffman loses points for its isolation. Maybe they hope the isolation will force you to eat at the game giving them more revenue! It worked on us, as we drank our dinner on Friday and ate our dinner on Saturday at the stadium. That leads to the other major negative of Kauffman Stadium: the infamous small, cramped concourse. If you remember, this was my major complaint of Yankee Stadium. It is also one of my main complaints of the Metrodome. Maybe new parks like Safeco and Miller Park have spoiled me with their spacious concourses. Maybe everyone is fatter today than in the seventies and more space is needed. Whatever it is, cramped concourses are a pain when all you want to do is buy your sixth beer before the end of the seventh inning. At least the lines moved relatively quickly. Screw you, Yankee Stadium concession workers.

While those negatives knock Kauffman a few notches below the palaces that are Safeco Field and Miller Park, it has a couple of the coolest amenities I have seen in a ballpark. The best aspect of Kauffman Stadium is the new scoreboard that was added during the offseason. It is the largest jumbotron I have seen in my life. When I say jumbotron, I literally mean JUMBOtron. It is 84 ft wide and 105 ft tall, and during games it requires seventeen people to operate it. The video quality is amazing and it offers all the in game stats a fan would want in one place. Pitch count, pitch speed, lineups, updated statistics, defensive positions, etc. At most ballparks, you have to search all over the stadium to get all the information you want. In Kansas City, all you need to do is look in center field. For a big baseball fan like myself, it was a dream. No other stadium can match the jumbotron in KC, and that's a huge positive for Kauffman Stadium. Surrounding the jumbotron in left and right field are fountains that light up and shoot water into the air between innings. It's like watching the fountain show at the Bellagio on a lesser scale. It creates a beautiful background and could be more entertaining to watch than the team the Royals put on the field. When will the Royals be good again? Poor, poor Royals fans.

The food and drink was good standard ballpark fare. The Italian sausage I ate was humongous and piled high with cooked peppers and onions. It was delicious, but not as good as the spicy one I had in New York. The beer was decently priced, a twenty-four ounce brew for $6.75, the same price of beer at the Metrodome. From our seats on both the first and third base side there were no obstructions in viewing the field of play. The atmosphere was fabulous as a third of the fans were Twins. It turned into a quasi-home game as the Twins fans out cheered the Royals fans on occasions. Both nights were beautiful, not too warm with a cooling breeze if it got a little humid in the seats. Fans and workers were all friendly, with one even offering us his wife to get us a couple beers. Two Twins wins certainly didn't hurt my enjoyment of the stadium. Both nights I went home a little tipsy, really happy, and satisfied with Kauffman Stadium. Kauffman will be getting a face lift over the next year, one that has already been started. That face lift includes building wider concourses and some more restaurants. The Royals will be getting their extra revenue that all the teams desire without forfeiting their ballpark and all the history that goes with it. Hopefully we will make the trek down I35 again to check out the finished product. With wider concourses, Kauffman Stadium might creep up near the top of my list. All I need is some space to walk and a gargantuan jumbotron.