Catching up: Dome renovation thoughts, links, and more!

"Toronto Rogers Centre" by Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine is licensed under CC0 1.0

Well this has been a longer hiatus than I expected. Thanks, Covid! Fortunately I’m finally feeling better, and while the business of baseball remains shut down due to the lockout — which I wrote about the last time I found myself typing out words — there have actually been several Blue Jays-related things worth commenting on over the last couple of weeks, including the news that the club will not be moving into a new stadium but instead will soon embark on a massive renovation of the Rogers Centre.

So let’s talk about it!

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The Rogers Centre has been spared

The “stadium issue” has loomed over the Blue Jays for at least as long as Mark Shapiro has been the president and CEO of the club. His arrival marked a shift from the days when we all breathlessly awaited fresh data from the University of Guelph on whether real grass could be grown in the Rogers Centre into dreams that were a hell of a lot more ambitious. The idea became so ambitious, in fact, that it outgrew Shapiro’s desk. For months and months prior to the pandemic the idea of what to do with the Blue Jays’ home was being worked on by even-higher-ups at Rogers, and involved the City of Toronto — and presumably various other levels of government. The idea was to basically create another Maple Leaf Square type project a couple blocks west on Bremner from where MLSE has already successfully folded their arena into a hub full of hotels, offices, condos, restaurants, and high-end retail.

The Atlanta Braves have done something similar with Truist Park and its surrounding development, albeit on fresh suburban lots that they actually owned (the land the Rogers Centre is on is owned by a Crown corporation, Canada Lands Company) and with little in the way of zoning restrictions. For the Jays to have pulled the same kind of trick in the limited space south of Front Street while keeping the SkyDome operational would have been much more difficult to pull off, logistically. Maybe even impossible — though I have long contended that there is probably just barely enough room between the Gardiner Expressway and south side of the Rogers Centre to build out the shell of a new stadium that could be nearly ready for the team to move into when the time comes to implode the old one.

Busch Stadium construction - "IMG_8711" by jacorbett70 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

All of this talk is now moot, however, as the trade publication Venues Now reported last week that the Jays will instead pour massive amounts of capital into upgrading and refurbishing the current building.

The Toronto Blue Jays have decided to renovate Rogers Centre instead of building a new stadium to replace it, according to industry sources familiar with the Major League Baseball team’s plan.

Populous, which designed renovations to the Blue Jays’ Florida spring training facility, will plan upgrades to the 32-year-old building, and PCI Construction is the general contractor.

Both firms won proposals issued by the team over the past few months. 

The project cost is estimated at $200 million to $250 million (Canadian figures)  for an extensive makeover, sources said. There is no timeline for when construction would start.

This news is maybe not quite as exciting for baseball fans as getting a new stadium, but there is plenty to be happy about in this story, I think.

For starters, the team isn’t going anywhere. No schlepping to the Port Lands or Downsview or whatever other fantastical locales have been spitballed for the next home of the Blue Jays over the years. The location of the Rogers Centre is absolutely perfect, and clearly the team and ownership understand this.

For another, Rogers is seemingly going to be paying for this themselves. “The decision to renovate over new construction most likely came down to sheer economics,” sources told Venues Now.

Presumably this means public funds weren’t in the offing, which may be connected to last spring’s demise of the nearby Rail Deck Park proposal. The pandemic induced downturn in commercial real estate also may have been a factor in scaling back the scope of the project.

The taxpayers of Pinellas County, Dunedin, and the State of Florida are on the hook for about 60 percent of the aforementioned spring training facility (as I mentioned in my most recent mail bag), but with all the renovations being in their own building there should be no such public gifts coming to multibillion-dollar corporation on this one. Though it wasn’t for lack of trying, as we know Rogers and Blue Jays executives had registered as lobbyists with the City of Toronto regarding the project — something Shi Davidi noted in his piece on the subject for Sportsnet last week.

Another bit of good news is that we no longer have to reckon with the rather grotesque idea of demolishing a perfectly good building that’s barely 30 years old. And it’s not just any building, either, but one that likely contains as much “embodied energy” (i.e. the amount of energy it took to produce and transport the components of the building, which in the SkyDome’s case meant massive quantities of energy intensive concrete and steel) as any in the city.

“From a climate perspective, it’s criminal,” architect Kelly Doran told Alex Bozikovic of the Globe and Mail when asked about the potential demolition of the Rogers Centre back in January. “That building has 55,000 tonnes of carbon baked into it.”

Of course, as a place to watch a ballgame the Rogers Centre is certainly more “perfectly good” than perfect. A couple hundred million dollars should go a long way toward making up that gap, though. The experience of seeing a game there when the stadium is packed is excellent, but there are some simple things that could make it much better — starting with larger, more comfortable seats, actually pointed toward the action on the field, perhaps even with drink holders!

If they focus first on basics like that before bells and whistles like new bar areas, additional premium seating, brightening the concourses, pulling down the hotel, a Blue Jays museum, or reorienting the field (which is something I know they’ve considered in the past, though I doubt will be on the table now that the press box has been moved out to right field and replaced by ultra-expensive new lounges) we’ll all be better off for it. The long-dreamed-of grass playing surface seems highly unlikely, for all the reasons we’ve heard before, but that just means more money to get everything else right.

And if they do get it right, and we get to keep watching baseball in the same building where Joe touched ‘em all, Bautista flipped the lid off the place, and so many other memories have been made? That’s a pretty tremendous outcome.

Quickly

• It’s obviously been a bit of a fallow period for Jays content, or baseball content in general, but maybe some podcasts will help get you through. The Jays were the focal point of a recent podcast from Baseball America, as last week Ben Badler and Kyle Glaser broke down the top names in the farm system with a review of this winter’s Jays top 10 list. Elsewhere, on Wednesday night I had a fun chat about the state of the Jays with Christopher Crawford and Colin Henderson of NBC Sports Edge’s fantasy focused Circling the Bases podcast. Plus, keep your eyes peeled on Friday, as Nick and I will be back with a fresh, year-end episode of Blue Jays Happy Hour for you to slam into your earholes.

• Sticking with some housekeeping, be sure to also look out for a call for mail bag questions, which I will be putting out some time early next week. Because of the lockout this was never going to be an especially busy month around here, but the fact that I also spent a bunch of time out of the country, then dealing with a knee injury, and then Covid, made it much slower than I anticipated. Get set for a whole bunch more from me in the weeks ahead, even if I have no idea what the hell I’ll be writing about.

• I should also take a moment here, since the year is winding down, to say thank you so very much to everyone who has read and supported my work over the first year of this site. This is all that I do for a living, so the generosity of those who are paid supporters is especially incredible, but I truly appreciate everyone who subscribes in any way, or just keeps coming back here to read my work. You all make this thing viable (though please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you don’t already!), and I think year two is going to be even better than year one. You know, once this whole lockout business is through.

• Speaking of the lockout, Evan Drellich of the Athletic has a very informative lockout mailbag up this week. In it he says that he figures there’s an 85 percent chance that season starts on time. Let’s hold him to it!

• Sticking with my former employers, in a back-and-forth between Dan Hayes and Aaron Gleeman at the Athletic, they ask the question, “Now that the Twins have Byron Buxton signed, should they trade top prospect Austin Martin for pitching help?” LOL. Lmao.

• Closer to home, Kaitlyn McGrath has a Q&A up with prospect guru and Danny Jansen slanderer Keith Law, who gives us a preview of some of the things we’ll see when he releases his top 10 Jays prospects list in the new year.

• Kaitlyn also has a recent piece co-written with Cleveland-based Zack Meisel, as the two try to work out a trade between the teams they cover that would bring José Ramírez to Toronto. The pair end up zeroing in on four names: Cavan Biggio, Lourdes Gurriel Jr., Alejandro Kirk, and Jordan Groshans. I’d do that without even batting an eye, personally.

• A Jays-Guardians trade involving Ramírez was also the focus of a piece this week at Blue Jays Nation, where Lewis Foster takes a look through all of the talent the Jays might part with — including Biggio, Gurriel, and Kirk, plus several others.

• A potentially interesting alternative for the Jays, should they fail to land — or Cleveland not want to give up — Ramírez is Jeff McNeil of the Mets. Mike Puma of the New York Post wrote last week that the lefty hitting infielder could be available after the lockout, and presumably at a discount given his lacklustre 93 wRC+ in 2021; his career mark is 126. His dustup with teammate Francisco Lindor in "rat/raccoon gate" may make him a non-starter for the culture-sensitive Jays, as might the fact that he's hardly a Statcast darling and didn't hit for power at all in 2021. But if the Jays see something in there they can fix — or strongly believe that McNeil's hamstring injury was the reason for his dip this season — he could certainly be a fit.

• One infielder who hits from the left side that we can definitively say won’t be coming to Toronto is Kyle Seager. The Mariners stalwart surprisingly announced his retirement on Thursday. The 34-year-old was a great Mariner and had an excellent career. He still plays a strong third base and was a league-average hitter in 2021. But, oh man, that was not an option I wanted the Jays to consider, so I can't say I'm too upset that he's off the market. Godspeed, Corey's brother!

• Speaking of the Mets (weren’t we?), they recently hired Buck Showalter to be their next field manager. [Insert leaving Zack Britton in the bullpen in the 2016 Wild Card game joke here]. Hey, it beats them trying to poach Pete Walker — though I’m sure we’re all glad J.P. got himself a radio hit out of that noise. Over at Sportsnet, Jeff Blair tells us about the time the Jays almost hired Showalter to be their GM.

• Elsewhere at Sportsnet, my Blue Jays Happy Hour cohost Nick Ashbourne goes deep on the value of the additional draft picks the Blue Jays have gained by allowing free agents Robbie Ray and Marcus Semien to sign with other clubs this winter.

• Another friend and another deep dive here, as Darragh McDonald of MLB Trade Rumors tries to spend $30 million of the Blue Jays’ money.

• Speaking of Danny Jansen (weren’t we?), Rob Longley of the Toronto Sun checked in on the Jays’ incumbent catcher down in Clearwater, Florida, recently, and found him spending his offseason hitting alongside of Teoscar Hernández and Bo Bichette. Can’t hurt! Sounds like a bat that’s about to be in the best shape of its life.

• Elsewhere in the Sun, uh, Steve Simmons’ Hall of Fame vote, everybody! I really think the Hall of Fame is more trouble than it’s worth — soccer, for example, has plenty of reverence for its greats without needing the freaks who write about it as gatekeepers to some higher plane of existence — but I must say I do love a bit of ideological inconsistency, especially when it’s from the clown who hasn’t met a drop of Paul Beeston’s water he won’t carry yet once had the temerity to call me “Mark Shapiro” in the newspaper. (Or whatever it is you’d prefer to call the Sun.) Anyway! Steve Simmons submitted a HOF ballot with votes for only Andruw Jones, Curt Schilling, and Gary Sheffield. “I’ve never supported those of the steroid era,” he said while giving his support to a guy (Sheffield) implicated in both the Mitchell Report and Game of Shadows. “I won’t vote for him this year because of domestic abuse allegations,” he said of Omar Vizquel while checking a box for Jones. And then, lastly, he went with the guy who, among a whole lot of other piss-awful things, publicly applauded a dude wearing a shirt that said “Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some assembly required.” Good job, Steve! Fuck you!

• Speaking of lefty hitting infielders (weren’t we?), the Jays rather quietly added one to the organization a couple weeks ago, signing former Yankees second-rounder Gosuke Katoh to a minor league deal — as announced by their official transactions page. Katoh has had an up-and-down minor league career, as exemplified by the .650 OPS he's produced in Double-A and the .846 OPS he has in Triple-A, but his 2021 was actually pretty good (.306/.388/.474 at hitter-friendly El Paso). Brito-esque!

• Future Blue Jays is a great resource for those who are interested in a well-informed view of the farm system, and their year-end list of the team’s top prospects — which is currently being unveiled — is always a highlight.

• George Springer is one of the best players in baseball. I’m just going to assume that’s what Gregor Chisholm’s Christmas day piece on him in the Toronto Star was about, because anything else just wouldn’t make sense.

• Seeing Troy Tulowitzki in a Texas Longhorns jersey is as weird as, frankly, seeing him in a Blue Jays jersey. But that’s what the former Jays shortstop wears now, as one of the many hipsters (dude used to go to the Duff!) to have invaded Austin in recent years. Patrick Saunders of the Denver Post caught up with him recently.

• Lastly, I don’t think there could be any better way to wrap up 2021 in baseball than with Howard Bryant’s piece at ESPN.com about what the sport has lost over the last 12 months, and the uncomfortable places it may about to be going.

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