Arizona Diamondbacks put down a new synthetic grass surface at Chase Field last season that's ... [+]
The Arizona Diamondbacks have decided to focus on Chase Field as their place to play in the Phoenix area, certainly for the present and perhaps even for the long-term, club president Derrick Hall told Boomskie on Baseball in a wide-ranging interview Saturday.
“We had urgency before because we didn’t control the stadium. We didn’t book the stadium. Now we do,” Hall said during the team’s annual Fan Fest, which moved back into the 22-year old facility in downtown Phoenix this weekend from its spring training complex in Scottsdale.
“Now that we do all that we can slow down a little bit. There’s no time crush. We’re going to continue to look here. We’re going to kick the tires around Maricopa County. But we’re going to stay here. My focus is on Arizona. And we’re going to do everything we can to stay at Chase Field.”
The D-backs have been exploring building elsewhere in the county since May 9, 2018, when the Maricopa Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 to settle a lawsuit, giving the D-backs the right to move elsewhere in the area in exchange for managing and maintaining the existing 48,519-seat facility.
The parties were in dispute about who was responsible for upkeep of the stadium and what maintenance charges should be shouldered by either public dollars or the team. To that point, the D-backs subsidized a new-age artificial turf surface last season to successfully replace the problematic grass, and have hosted a number of non-baseball events.
But that exploration to move has slowed considerably.
“We’ve kind of tapped the brakes on that,” Hall said when asked about looking around the county. “Let’s figure out what’s going on here. Not only with what we have going on immediately booking the stadium, but making sure we understand that business, which we’ve gotten really good at. Let’s see if we can logistically work with this. What does it look like to retrofit this place?”
The D-backs have plenty of time. The ballclub’s lease with the county expires after the 2028 season, but the D-backs can move elsewhere in Maricopa County before then without penalty.
After that preliminary kicking of the tires, the D-backs may have decided there’s no place like home, either from a cost or aesthetic perspective.
“The way downtown is going, the way our relationship with the city and county and state is going, we’re going to do everything we can to stay here,” Hall said. “But we’ll see. There’s a lot to do. For us to stay, you know the new model is mixed-use. A smaller ballpark. Higher ticket demand. Make sure you have enough mixed-use around you. You have hotel, restaurants, entertainment. So, if there’s something we can do here we’re totally looking at it.”
The D-backs already have a lot around them to northwest of the ballpark in what’s dubbed the Legends Entertainment District, which includes the nearby Talking Stick Resort Arena.
The home of the NBA’s Phoenix Suns is currently undergoing a $230 million renovation funded by a $150 million City of Phoenix contribution, and $80 million from the team, which is also building a $50 million practice facility elsewhere in Phoenix.
The problem for the D-backs is that they don’t control the ancillary business that has already grown organically around the ballpark.
The current model is to build ballparks and football stadiums at the center of such year-round mixed-use developments, like the Battery Atlanta that was built by the Braves adjacent to what is now called Truist Park and opened together north of downtown in 2017.
That concept is at the core of what the Oakland A’s are trying accomplish as they inch closer to constructing a new ballpark and adjacent mixed-use village at the Howard Terminal site just north of Jack London Square on the waterfront in downtown Oakland.
The D-backs have looked around the county for just such a site, and thus far haven’t settled on anything.
But there is moribund land beyond the garages and parking lots to the south of the ballpark the D-backs could certainly develop with the help of the county, city and local landowners.
For example, the Giants are in the process of building a $2.5 billion mixed-use project in San Francisco on a 2,000-spot parking lot across McCovey Cove to the south of Oracle Park called Mission Rock. That ballpark opened in 2000 and since then businesses, restaurants and residential complexes have grown organically to the north and west of the facility without any gain for the Giants.
Since 2005, the Giants have been working with the Port of San Francisco, the City of San Francisco and the State of California to lease the land and raise private funds for the project which will include low-cost housing, restaurants, office space, and a five-acre park on the bay.
The Giants received permission from the Port late last year to begin building the first of seven phases. The initial shovel was expected to be turned in January, but that now has been pushed back to March.
The entire build-out is slated to take seven years, the Giants say. Stay tuned.
This is not impossible for the D-backs to accomplish south of Chase, but it’s a huge process.
“We’re looking at all that,” Hall said. “We just want to have 365-day activation, make sure we can drive other revenues that can help us compete. That’s what other teams are doing. That’s the model now. That’s what everybody needs to do, especially the smaller markets that are trying to compete with the larger ones.
“Right now, that is it. We need to find that footprint around here.”
