Stadium design as a dining hall

“Take me out to the ballgame,” isn’t the main idea in baseball,
anymore. Consider Tropicana Field, a.k.a. the Trop, in St.
Petersburg, the dome-topped home of American League
East’s Tampa Bay Rays. In 1996, it got made over from
a functional field to a dining, shopping, entertainment complex.

Seen from the highway, the dome slants down on one side like
a beret worn nonchalantly. The tilt sinks from 225 feet above
second base to 85 feet at the center field wall, and appears
downright debonair. The pitch of this roof, which reduces the
volume of stadium air needing climate control, was an economy measure. You get that point on arrival.

While the angle of the dome looks rakish from a distance, it
just looks lopsided up close. The attempt to save money is
made clear by the grim look of the inside walls: bare concrete, mostly in a sulking shade of gray – like a subway station.

It doesn’t matter how many Cuesta-Ray Cigar Bars, Monsta Lobsta stands or how much Spanish, Thai and French cuisine abound, the
crude stone of the interior walls seem unwelcoming, even forbidding. And the myriad points of food sale, which push at the gloom, only serve to define the Trop as a kind of tourist trap.

Granted, the eight-story-high rotunda entrance pays homage to the one that heralded Ebbets Field, built in 1913. But a 900-foot-long ceramic mosaic walkway that leads to the rotunda, complete with theatrical lighting and piped-in music, has nothing to do with baseball.

And because the dome is not retractable, there is no wind, no
rain, no sun at the Trop. There is no flag rippling in the air with
the singing of the National Anthem. Old glory stretches out
stiffly, like the one planted on the moon. Catwalks under the
mammoth tent-like dome – looking like high-wire rigging –
conjure up the circus at New York’s Madison Square Garden.

The field? Covered in artificial turf, only the dirt is real. After an
inning of play, it smudges, turning the turf into what looks like a
carpet in need of vacuuming after toddlers – in from their sandboxes – track it up. It’s the game of summer, but sitting under a glass-roofed rotunda, you wouldn’t know what season it is.

F. Scott Fitzgerald called baseball a game bounded by walls
that keep out novelty and change. Clealy, he never frequented
the Trop. It doesn’t focus on the sport. It’s multi-purpose, like
a reversible raincoat.