What about (what was) the BOB?
Will the Diamondbacks leave Chase Field and bolt for tribal lands? Plus we take the temperature on Pac-12 getting into the tournament business.
TOP OF THE FIRST
Too Hot to Handle
The Pac-12 tournament is pricey and a bit warm
Here is a strange fact about the Pacific-12 Conference:
Between 1978 and 1999, the then-Pac-10 — which has long billed itself as “The Conference of Champions” — had no champion in baseball.
The conference sanctioned baseball. At times it was arguably the best conference in the country for baseball. But when it expanded from the Pac-8 to the Pac-10 before the 1978-79 academic year, it decided to forgo a championship between its North and South divisions.
As if that wasn’t quirky enough, the Pac-10 North — but not the South — held postseason tournaments from 1984 through 1991.
In 1999, the conference scrapped the divisions altogether. So whoever finished on top of the regular season standings was the champ. End of story.
Conference tournaments — not just a playoff between two top teams but a multiple-team affair at a neutral site — have become common in college baseball. The SEC started doing it back in 1977.
But, as with conference basketball tournaments, being part of a national football championship, hiring competent refs, and other changes in college sports, the Pac-12 lagged.
In August 2021, the conference announced it was getting with the times and would hold the tournament at Scottsdale Stadium in late May.
Hot times in Old Town Scottsdale
Scottsdale is a great choice in some ways — and not, in one big way.
It’s a perfect facility for a neutral field. Scottsdale Stadium, the Giants’ spring training home, has a capacity of 12,000 — pretty good for the Catus League. But unlike some other spring training parks, it doesn’t seem cavernous with a small crowd.
Scottsdale has no shortage of hotels and trendy — and not trendy places — to eat and drink. Great for parents and boosters.
And the Phoenix area has a fair amount of interest in college baseball. Not SEC-level interest but more than say Los Angeles.
The drawback is that May is not a good time to visit Scottsdale. It’s hot. Highs in the 90s and often above 100.
I missed last year’s tournament. I was recovering from surgery. But I wanted to support the events this year. The D-backs played a day game on Wednesday, May 24, so my evening was open. I decided to take in a tournament game.
Sticker shock
My real interest is Arizona State and secondarily Arizona. But the schedule on the website showed between Cal and Stanford. ASU wasn’t playing that day. Arizona had played earlier.
At least it was a good rivalry game.
I couldn't find the price of a ticket, (it is on the site; I just didn't find it). I was a little surprised when I got to the ticket window and they wanted $34. Now that is for the entire day. But as a practical purpose, most folks are going to attend the evening game on a day when the high is in the high 90s.
That’s a little stiff for one game of college baseball, in my opinion.
I think they should charge $15 for a single game and $34 for the whole day — at least before the semifinal and final.
This year each team played two pool games in the first three days with the top four teams playing in an elimination bracket the final two days.
This was Stanford’s first game. Cal lost its opener to Oregon. So the Bears needed to win to stay alive.
By my reckoning, there were fewer than a thousand fans in the stands. The tournament announced a crowd of 2012 — but that must have been for the whole day (the same sized crowd was announced for the other two games that day).
The game itself was entertaining enough. Cal was ahead early and led 5-2 after Rodney Green Jr. doubled and scored on a wild pitch in the bottom of the fifth.
Stanford’s Carter Graham tied the game with a three-run double in the top of the sixth, and the Cardinal added three more before the inning ended.
Stanford led the rest of the way in a good old fashion, aluminum bat slugfest winning 18-10. Alberto Rios was the Cardinals’ hitting star, going 3-for-5 with a homer and a double and scoring three times.
Winners and losers
After the loss, Cal was done. Stanford managed to get to the final four, where the Cardinal was run-ruled by Arizona 14-4.
Oregon topped Washington in the other semifinal. In the final, Jacob Walsh homered in the sixth to break a 3-3 tie and Oregon hung on to beat Arizona 5-4 before a respectable crowd of 4,051.
Stanford, Oregon, Oregon State, Washington, and Arizona made the NCAA Tournament. ASU and USC, both of which probably need to win the tournament to make the 64-team, didn’t.
Arizona got into the tournament after finishing eighth in the Pac-12, five games behind USC and 4.5 games behind ASU.
The all-important RPI proved to be all-important for the Wildcats. Arizona ranked 45th, ASU 52nd, and USC 53rd.
It was a particularly disappointing ending for ASU. The Willie Bllomquist-coached Sun Devils started the season 24-9 but finished with a 32-23 record. They were ranked as high as 12th by Baseball America.
HEART OF THE ORDER
Where will the Diamondbacks call home?
The franchise weighs fixing up Chase Field or finding a new place to play
Sadly, when you get to my age, something happens with events from the past. Things that happened 25 years or 30 years ago seem like they happened more recently. Not like yesterday or last week. More like 5 years ago.
So I am trying to wrap my head around Bank One Ballpark or BOB, as it was then known, opened 25 years ago. Yeah, that is what the math says. It opened in 1998 and now it is 2023.
The place still looks pretty good. At least to me. Others disagree. The Diamondbacks are among those others.
Yeah, the clock above the center field wall stopped working and was never replaced. And the out-of-town scoreboards have been switched off because they can’t find replacement light bulbs.
For a while the display panels above the outfield that show the lineups didn’t work. It turned out to be like a $15 fix once they figured out the problem.
Fake dirt
The BOB Sod — specially designed by the University of California Riverside to grow in the little light available in summer when the facility’s roof was closed for most of the day — is gone. The D-backs opted for artificial turf in 2019.
The grass isn’t real, and neither is the dirt. The brown stuff for warning tracks, the batters’ and catcher’s boxes, and the infield is all coconut shavings.
The retractable roof, a first for a baseball park in the United States, still works. It is no longer safe to open and close when fans are in the park, but it works. You just can’t change in the middle of a game anymore.
The USA Today Network recently ranked Chase Field, as it was renamed after JP Morgan Chase acquired Bank One, as the 27th best MLB ballpark. Put another way, it is the fourth worst — edging out the White Sox’s Guaranteed Rate Field, and MLB's two universally acknowledged dumps, the Rays’ Tropicana Field, and the Athletics’ Oakland Coliseum.
The Diamondbacks’ lease runs through the 2027 season — and they have been open in their dissatisfaction with the facility and county’s upkeep since at least 2012.
And they are soon — perhaps any day now —going to decide whether they commit millions for renovations and stay at Chase Field or find a new home.
In order to settle a lawsuit in 2017, Maricopa County made a deal with D-backs that puts the team in charge of the maintenance. The D-backs have the right to create a stadium district and tax their fans for improvements.
The D-Backs also have the right to move elsewhere in Maricopa County — with the caveat that the team must pay at least as much county property tax as they would if they stayed put.
Tribal lands
Does that strike you as an odd provision?
That provision exists because the smart money is that the team will bolt for the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, or Gila River Indian Community, or the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation Reservation. Normally those lands would not be subject to county property taxes.
Although the team has had sponsorship relationships with all three, the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community seems the most likely. The D-backs’ spring training home, Salt River Fields, is located there, near the community’s largest casino and hotel.
The D-backs are looking for some sort of partnership if they build a park. The community seems to have deep pockets and a sophisticated development arm that among other projects lured Fender Musical Instruments to move its headquarters to tribal lands. The Loop 101 freeway, which connects the suburbs of the east, north, and west suburbs, runs through Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community land.
Obviously, something near Salt Rivers Fields would work, and there is a spot near the 101 and Loop 202, adjacent to Tempe, that could also work.
The site was used as a temporary home for a minor-league soccer team and was also the site of a proposed entertainment and sports complex. The brainchild of a former college football star Cameron Colvin, the project is embroiled in lawsuits and is unlikely to move forward.
High growth
Census figures show Maricopa County added 56,831 residents between July 2021 and June 2022, more than any other county in the country.
While downtown Phoenix is growing — there are seven large multifamily projects slated to be completed before then of 2024 — to great fanfare in the local media, that pales compared with what is going on in the burbs.
And for many folks in places such as Peoria, Cave Creek, or San Tan Valley, a destination along the 101 will be a quicker (though not necessarily shorter) drive than trying to get to downtown Phoenix.
Trains
Well, what about the light rail, which runs near Chase Field?
With fewer than 40,000 riders a weekday for the entire system, which is less than the number of vehicles that traverse a mile of many major city streets and a fraction of the traffic carried by a mile of freeway, the light rail is fairly irrelevant unless you are on the editorial board of The Arizona Republic.
You can run buses out to the park to make the games available for those who don’t have private transportation.
Moving from downtown makes sense from a business standpoint. In the long run, you would generate more revenue from such a location.
Still staying downtown is not out of the question, either at the current location or building a new one.
Waste not, want not
Personally, I want the D-backs to stay put. Part of the reason is that I am a child of depression-era parents. It bothers me to scrap a facility that is not that old, that cost so much and that was so hard to get built, a process that was so divisive.
One of the county supervisors who voted for it was shot at a meeting, supposedly over her support for the ballpark. Two other supervisors who supported the ballpark were routed in the next election.
I don’t want to abandon the place where Arizona first won a big-time pro sports championship, the spot where Luis Gonzalez dumped that bloop single over Derek Jeter in the bottom of the ninth in Game 7 to win the 2001 World Series.
Phoenix isn’t big on history and tradition. But this is a piece we can build on.
I like the field with its two porches in centerfield that overhang fair territory. I like the two pillars in the centerfield wall and the notches by the bullpen that sometimes lead to odd bounces and extra bases.
And I can live without the out-of-town scoreboard — as long as the air conditioning works.