Irish Boy wrote:
Sox fans really got unlucky with The Cell. Starting with Camden, every new stadium has been a modern yet metro park with character and tourist appeal. The Cell is really on a lot of ways the last of the shitty, nondescript cookie cutter ballparks.
IB, "Unlucky" is a bad word to use here. "Dumb" is better. The staidum design plays into marketing of which is where Jerry Reinsdorf has about as much skill as BP in that arena.
Jerry, his son, his construction people, etc all designed that place themselves. Basically they learned how to build a stadium on our dime and then went out and charged other people to build stadiums.
International Facilities Group. Basically they leverage Jerrys power and get contracts to build stadiums.
My favorite is the recent one. It is similar to what Jerry tried to pull in Washington. First his son creates the bidders package, and gets paid for it, then they bid on the project that they just created the bidders package for. LOL.....Google Up ED SMITH STAIDUM down in Florida. My peeps told me about this one last week,
The stadium was built with the principal goal of maximizing sky boxes. That goal resulted in the design we have today. Reinsdorf was approached with the first retro stadium design but rejected it because it lacked in sky boxes. Now, 20 years later, there are several sky boxes that have not even been built out due to lack of interest.