I have to admit, I'm a bit of a neophyte when it comes to baseball.
I mean, I played a few seasons as a kid, cheered Chipper Jones on a couple of times here in Richmond, know how to throw a few stats around, but essentially baseball is about as important to me as Spiro Agnew. Which means I don't really care whether a baseball stadium is built in Shockoe Bottom or not.
I've been following the Great Stadium Debate, looking for a reason to throw Buttermilk & Molasses' support in one direction or the other -- or to drive up my readership with a daily series of incisive, and insightful, posts. At the end of the day, however, I'm left with two relatively simple observations that I'm surprised aren't leading one debate or another.
Observation the First: Location. Why hasn't someone made a grand end-run play to built a new ballfield in the one place in the region that surely can guarantee turnout? That's right, put the new ball field smack beside the Poseidon Aquatic Center and Kicker's fields at Chippenham Parkway and Route 10 in Chesterfield County. In addition to Chesterfield's burgeoning status as the center of sports in Central Virginia and its demographically perfect population, a stadium in Chesterfield could pull from the booming Fort Lee growth spike.
A stadium downtown might look pretty, and fit all of the lovely images we have of Shoeless Joe Jackson tucking a dime in the heel of his shoe for streetcar fare after every losing game, but it's just as contrived a location for a ball field as putting it atop the Short Pump Town Center would be.
The original ball fields were fields and abandoned lots. So was Chesterfield, once.
You want to talk regional cooperation? Let's see Richmond's leaders throw a curve ball for once.
Observation the Second: Economy. Someone mentioned it in passing during one hearing in North Richmond, but the developers apparently still haven't gotten the memo. By the time the American public has chewed down enough of its debt to become consumers again, we'll have a new economic paradigm in the United States. Oh, there will still be room for condominiums and downtown retail or mixed use development, but are Richmond's leaders really willing to be the bank on an $800 million development built on 2006 economic assumptions?
Giving the proposals (the Shockoe stadium and the companion North Boulevard development) some extra breathing room while the economy recovers is a bit like giving a lung cancer patient an extra day off of work. We're going to no more be in a position to digest $800 million in commercial development in the City of Richmond in August of 2009 than we were in February.
What the city -- and the developers, for that matter -- ought to be doing is retooling the entire proposal around bright green development centered around an energy technology enterprise zone that attracts the best and the brightest (and the richest) from the emergent field of ET. Then throw in a few Applebee's and Starbuck's around the edges.
At the end of the day, Richmond will probably move forward with both the Shockoe ball field development and the North Boulevard mixed use development. But the city and its partners in the development community are missing an opportunity to push two major pieces down the field -- a forward-looking regional approach to sports with a Chesterfield ball field, and a creative approach to economic development that avoids the somewhat withered retail approach so popular a decade ago.
