Buttermilk & Molasses

Girls, Girls, There's Enough Room for All of Your Stadiums

The best thing about the latest proposal to bring baseball to Richmond, as NBC12's Rachel DePompa points out this evening in her blog, is that it actually isn't even a frakkin' proposal!

It's a guy with a plot of land he wants to sell.

Come to Northside, folks, there are a few dozen small plots available for nice pick-up game fields -- all you have to do is tear down the homes sitting on them.

DePompa makes a more pertinent point deeper in her post, though she never really comes out and blatantly says it. "It" being the very obvious question: Who is running this shell game to begin with?

The answer, apparently, depends on where you want to build your ball field, as DePompa notes:

If you want to revamp the Diamond, well don’t call the city cause the RMA owns it. If you want to put it in the Bottom, then you make the counties AND the RMA feel left out of the discussion.

All of this comes in a flurry of reports and press conferences over the past month that were alternately inane and visionary -- baseball in Shockoe Bottom; the idea of baseball in the Bottom is not about baseball, but about economic development; let's combine the baseball initiative with high-speed rail and a bus transfer station and a national slavery museum; let's do baseball in Chesterfield; let's keep it at The Diamond, but fundamentally rebuild the ball field and add bumper cars.

No wonder the whole thing imploded. Most things do when they lack cohesive leadership, and are built around ever-changing stories.

Such as the latest story from Michael Martz at the Times-Dispatch about a new sort of, quasi-possible location in Manchester for a new stadium:

The stadium site would be part of a 17.5-acre property between the Manchester and 14th Street bridges, with a clear view of the river and downtown skyline.

"How good would a ballpark look there?" asked John T. "Trib" Sutton III, senior vice president of CB Richard Ellis of Virginia, a real estate brokerage that is handling the sale of the property for Reynolds...

...However, Richmond officials say they didn't consider the casual conversation a pitch for a new stadium site and that they don't have any formal proposal to consider.

"Unequivocally, we are not considering any proposal for a baseball stadium on that site," Tammy D. Hawley, the mayor's press secretary, said yesterday.

By the way, if you haven't made time to periodically read the comments in the Times-Dispatch (especially on news stories that deal with race, sports or politics), do yourself a favor. My favorite comment on the latest ball field proposal echoes DePompa's blog post. TD reader "Rayzor" writes:

New month, new baseball article. Sadly, it’s the same old non-committal load of crap we see with each story:

"Reynolds Packaging Group has MENTIONED to city officials INFORMALLY the POSSIBILITY OF a minor-league baseball…"

"Richmond officials say they didn’t consider the casual conversation a pitch for a new stadium site…THEY DIDN’T HAVE ANY FORMAL PROPOSAL…"

"Unequivocally, we are NOT CONSIDERING ANY PROPOSAL for a baseball stadium on that site"...

...With all the staff cuts at the RTD lately, whoever has landed the plum assignment of the weekly baseball story will have job security for years to come.

I’ll be on vacation next week, so I’ll miss the next installment of…"Baseball in Richmond: Will They or Won’t They? No. They Won’t."

U2, Day 2: Barcelona (Electrical Storm)

My go-to guy for all things U2-related is @aarondotson, and he recently posted a link via Twitter to the first live performance of U2's "Electrical Storm" -- one of my favorite of the band's recent releases over the past few years. Too bad I wasn't able to make it to Barcelona earlier today. Ah well, we'll always have Charlottesville this October.

Mayoral Quotes That Are Too Telling To Let Pass

Incomplete thought, subconscious slip or right on the money? Here's a quote from Richmond Mayor Dwight Jones speaking to City Council last night:

"We want to be able to say our city is a first-class city and in order to do that, we've got to be operating right and to do that we've got to have a leader," Jones told the council.

Of course, Jones was talking about his new chief administrative officer.

A Rare Moment of Brilliance from City Council

WWBT NBC-12 reported this evening that the City of Richmond is preparing to up the ante -- in a significantly big way -- for developers interested in building in and new home owners willing to move into areas of the city with a large number of vacant lots. I was tipped to the story by the Church Hill People's News and Richmond Good Life, but the reporting machine known as Rachel DePompa delivers the goods:

How about paying no real estate taxes for five years? The city of Richmond is considering a new ordinance that would do just that. The goal of the tax exemption is to help spur growth in certain neighborhoods in the city.

The ordinance being considered says if you build a house on an empty lot, in designated areas around the city, you would not have to pay real estate taxes on the new home for five years.

John Murden at Church Hill People's News cites North Church Hill, Carver, and Highland Park as several of the neighborhoods being considered.

What should be exciting about this for residents of the city is that we're essentially talking about taking tax money that does not exist and leaving off the books for five years. It's a net neutral tax proposition, essentially -- with significant tax gains for the city kicking in after year six.

It should also drive down blight in certain neighborhoods, and decrease the absurd number of vacant, residential properties that make our community less safe, less attractive and less livable. The current number of vacant residential properties in the City of Richmond? Somewhere north of 1,500.

New Media vs. Old: Trust, Respect, Relevance

I was almost buying the latest post by Nimrod Studios (Cliff Leftwich) on the collaborative blog Unceremoniously Dispatched, which features posts by a plethora of former Richmond Times-Dispatch writers. Almost.

But then he did two things that lost me -- he used a stupid example, and he changed the question.

The original question framed in his post -- which essentially asks whether the public should rely on weblogs for news -- was about trust. But toward the end of the post he reframed it: The question is "Who do YOU believe?"

There's a difference. But I think the answer is increasingly obvious -- the public, or that portion of the public that uses social/new media as an information vehicle, trusts both the bloggers and the traditional news outlets.

The bigger question, and it is one that everyone in the news business is grappling with, has as much to do with relevance as it does trust or reliance.

Leftwich cites the YouTube footage of a young woman, dead in the streets of Tehran. The suggestion he makes is that we can't trust that footage -- it's a single-sourced video sequence that could have been produced in a back lot.

But the reality is that a lot of mainstream news professionals not only used the video in their coverage of last week's events in Iran -- they double-checked its validity. Jim Sciutto of ABC News is a great example of a journalist who cited and linked to the video on Twitter, and then did additional background on it for ABC News.

Sciutto made the story relevant to his readers in three specific ways:

• He told it fast -- using Twitter, Sciutto has been keeping his followers actively engaged in the stories from Iran as they unfold. He was telling the story first.
• He checked his facts -- Sciutto didn't just trust the YouTube video as fact, but he dug deeper to not only validate the story but to give it richer context.
• He built context -- digging deeper gave Sciutto an opportunity to make the story his own, even though he was sparked by YouTube to chase it.

I think it's an example of the two news forms -- journalism (the profession and craft) and blogging (the technology, pace and perspective -- working together. In that world, everyone is a little more relevant.

Here's a Game Changer for the Diamond

Imagine my surprise this evening when I discovered -- courtesy of the folks at 10 South Boulevard -- that Richmond's vacant baseball field is about to be host to a passel of dog-rising monkeys. I know, you're already intrigued!

10 South Boulevard cites the always-reputable WRIC TV-8 with the news that Tennessee-based Fair Nation was bringing crash cars, a gigantic petting zoo and the sad spectacle of dogs being ridden by monkey jockeys to The Diamond this summer.

There are about a million more interesting things that can be done with that vacant space, including massive robot wars. Now that would be something worth its weight in Diamond Ducks.

Trask, Up Against the Wall

I ran into Ed Trask the other morning while we were both grabbing coffee at Crossroads North, and it didn't occur to me to ask him what he was painting these days -- we were talking about toddlers, instead. I discovered his latest project later that day, when I saw him hanging out on the street-facing wall outside of Ellwood-Thompson's with a paintbrush in his hand.