5.31.04 SAN DIEGO
PADRES vs COLORADO ROCKIES
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The artist’s renderings on the website back in 1998 – six years ago! ouch! – looked so promising. A new downtown ballpark that would truly represent the city, evoking San Diego’s unmatched mix of brilliant sunshine, crisp ocean air, friendly and attractive people, and a kind of uniform, inescapable pleasantness that, anywhere else, might become oppressive after a while, but never does here just because, after all, it’s so damned pleasant. The plans on the drawing board, the architectural models, the computer-generated virtual iPix tour and accompanying marketing spiel together conjured visions of a facility that would be uniquely open, breezy, park-like, a sort of baseball Hollywood Bowl – my San Diegan friends will forgive the Angeleno reference, I hope – marked by terrific sightlines, a casual but intimate atmosphere, and an overall aspect unmistakably Californian, southern Californian, and southern southern Californian at that.
Well, maybe we should wait ten years for the vegetation to get past the scrawny, just-planted, someday-this’ll-be-a-real-neighborhood stage before passing final judgement, but I dunno, man. Kinda felt like just another new ballpark to me, and a particularly bland, anonymous, and corporate one at that. From the outside and walking in it looks more like a really nice new university campus than anything else, all smoothly polished granite and glassy waterfalls and lilting jacarandas. To the extent that this is “mission style” architecture, as the Padres and the folks at one-stop ballpark-shop HOK would have you believe, it’s mission style the way that most contemporary California development is mission style, which is to say, stucco with some palm trees around it.
Inside, the most distinctive features are two long and seriously fucking blinding lightboards that encircle the field at terrace level, the kind you see now at basketball and hockey arenas, which at various points during the game blinded spectators with luminous advertisements in varying shades of neon ultramarine, and culminated during the final innings in a shrieking, solar-eclipse-through-binoculars yellow, the malevolent signature color of malevolent namesake sponsor Petco. Overstating the impact of these lightboards on my ability to enjoy the game would be next to impossible. To reproduce the effect at home, sit in your easy chair watching the match-up of your choice on TV while a friend shines directly in your eyes one of those billion-candlepower searchlights my dad has mounted on the top of his truck. Less than ideal, you’ll discover.
Consequently, there’s not much I can tell you about the game, which seemed to be taking place on a nearby field that I could never quite get over the feeling of being apart from, terrific sightlines, angled seats, and intimate atmosphere notwithstanding. Afterwards, it being Memorial Day, a fireworks display and Lee Greenwood did their best to transport us all to a parallel universe where no American could conceivably condone atrocities in a faraway land or take grinning pictures to commemorate his or her involvement in said atrocities. Psssh.
FINAL SCORE: Rockies 7, Padres 1
Peter Hughes
