TORONTO - Rogers Centre (52,230)

[isaidso]

Originally Posted by www.sercan.de

You can talk about the usage but not about rumpurs in the NFL or current games (like in other topics)

The situation with the NFL does pertain to usage as do other events that occur within Rogers Centre. Don't you see how this is open to interpretation? What about the word 'Skydome'? Is that permitted, or is that considered a political issue that deals with naming rights and corporate involvement in sport? I don't want to take away from the thread, but it's all very vague as to what is fine and what isn't.

[www.sercan.de]

You can talk about Bills to Toronto.
But not about how the franchises in the NFl works.
Than the threads starts to became more and more offtopic etc. (Sport thread)
The same happened with the wembley stadium thread.
Deleted more than 300 messages.
"England lost vs Croatia"
"Yeah Croatia is the best
"England won't play at Euro "
etc.

[Jim856796]

Remember when the Toronto Raptors played at the Rogers Skydome before the Air Canada Centre was constructed? The Skydome must seat up to 30,000 for basketball, but I don't know what the configuration looked like.

[isaidso]

image hosted on flickr

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2130/...04f548.jpg?v=0

image hosted on flickr

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2384/...b76393.jpg?v=0

image hosted on flickr

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2329/...5b5bc8.jpg?v=0

The world's oldest professional football (gridiron) teams: Toronto busting through the Hamilton defense for a touchdown.
image hosted on flickr

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3080/...bf28c3.jpg?v=0

[en1044]

delete

[Ganis]

Originally Posted by isaidso

The world's oldest professional football (gridiron) teams: Toronto busting through the Hamilton defense for a touchdown.
image hosted on flickr

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3080/...bf28c3.jpg?v=0

To bad they arnt popular and in the NFL.

[isaidso]

Originally Posted by Ganis

To bad they arnt popular and in the NFL.

I private messaged you since the thread starter doesn't want any discussion beyond talk about the building and mention of the tenants. Here's another Ontario original, baseball:

A full house at Skydome to take in Canada's summer time sport

http://www-tc.pbs.org/wgbh/buildingb...ky2_dome_1.jpg

Luminato Festival

http://www.citynews.ca/itsyourstory/..._luminato2.jpg

[hkskyline]

Some wrinkles in the Rogers Centre
FieldTurf are dealing some bad hops to Blue Jays infielders
28 April 2009
National Post

Scott Rolen likens the Rogers Centre turf to the fabled Boston Garden basketball court. When you build a playing surface in small pieces, the ball is bound to take crazy bounces, Rolen says.

The Boston Celtics' old parquet court, originally pieced together with 264 pieces of wood, famously contained warped spots where dribbles went to die. On the synthetic grass of Rogers Centre, baseballs can play cruel tricks on infielders.

"We have some Boston Garden parquet dead boards here," said Rolen, who plays third base for the Toronto Blue Jays.

Installed to great fanfare in 2005, the FieldTurf surface is starting to show its age, according to Rolen and his fellow infielders. Shortstop Marco Scutaro said he has encountered "bounces like you've never seen before." Second baseman Aaron Hill insists he should have snared a couple of grounders that he missed this season, but in the moment, he could be seen shaking his head and glaring at a spot on the turf.

"Something's going to have to be done about it," said infield coach Brian Butterfield.

Players and coaches are quick to add that stadium crews are doing everything they can.

"They do a great job," said reserve infielder John McDonald. "They put a lot of time and effort into that field. It's very much appreciated, but they've been dealt a difficult hand."

This is their hand: a playing surface built from approximately 1,350 trays of FieldTurf, taken apart and reassembled regularly throughout the year to accommodate concerts, trade shows and other events as well as baseball and football. Each tray is eight feet wide and 14 feet long. The synthetic grass sprouts from a blend of rubber pellets and sand.

Special machines and eagle-eyed workers collect the trays and stack them in storage for non-sports events, then put them back down and meticulously realign countless seams when the Jays return from a road trip. The wear and tear in such a process is obvious. The granular base can shift, causing uneven spots. Seams can loosen.

Kelly Keyes, the stadium's vice-president of building services, likens the job to laying an enormous tile floor. The trick, she says, is to re-install it time and again, with many of the tiles in different spots, while keeping the seams snug and the surface level.

"It's quite challenging when you have 400 feet and everything has to be perfectly straight," she says.

The Tampa Bay Rays also play on FieldTurf at Tropicana Field. Minnesota's Metrodome has it, too. Unlike the Rogers Centre format, however, those surfaces were installed in long, wide rolls, and they are permanent.

When FieldTurf was installed before the 2005 baseball season, it was hailed as a quantum leap from the rock-hard AstroTurf it replaced. The surface was softer and thus easier on players' bodies. Batted balls bounced predictably. It was not grass, but it was close, players said.

"It was great," McDonald recalled. "What we're seeing now is normal wear and tear. There's nothing we can do about it. It's not something that should be complained about. Both teams have to play on it. You just hate to see something happen at a critical point in a game."

Something did happen in the Jays' fourth game this year. With a runner on third, Detroit's Magglio Ordonez hit a routine roller toward third baseman Jose Bautista. As he charged, the ball veered to his right and rolled past him for an RBI single.

In subsequent games, and during batting practice when Butterfield hits ground balls to infielders, players started noticing more bad hops than in years past. More conversations about "dead spots" ensued.

"Last year I thought it played pretty well," Butterworth said. "I think this is the worst it has been and the most difficult to play on since we've used this stuff. It's not the fault of the grounds crew. There's only so much you can do."

Bad hops happen on any field, but it is easier for groundskeepers to groom natural surfaces and for fielders to develop intimate knowledge of the areas they defend.

"An infielder's biggest ally is being able to trust in that next hop," Butterfield said. "When you can't trust that next hop, you kind of start playing defence with a little trepidation. You don't know what's coming next."

Keyes, who oversees field conversions and maintenance, agrees that the field is "not ideal." But she said the surface has the blessing of Major League Baseball officials and their counterparts from the National Football League (because the Buffalo Bills are occasional visitors).

Where possible, portions of the turf stay in place for non-sports events. For the U2 concerts in September, turf will be removed to accommodate the stage but field-level chairs will be set up on the greenery. Keyes says chair divots bounce back within two hours. "It's a very resilient field," she said.

When the turf is restored, staff check every seam with special measuring devices and drop a bead of pellets and sand where needed, she added. When the Jays are home, "we actually walk every seam pretty well every day," she said.

Her staff responds quickly to concerns from players and coaches. "That's the best feedback we get, because it looks good when we put it down, but we don't know for sure until they're are out there and actually using it."

FieldTurf guarantees the surface for eight years. Keyes says she believes it will last that long.

"It's not ideal," she said. "It's like a car. It's not working the way it was at the very beginning because then it was under ideal conditions. But we're doing what the manufacturer specified. It's still a playable surface. And again, we're a multi-purpose facility."

Butterfield, of course, is focused on a single purpose. He says a major-league field should give true hops.

"At this level," he said, "you never want to see games turn because of a bad bounce."

[hkskyline]

Former SkyDome isn't loved the way it used to be
The Canadian Press
3 June 2009

What a majestic sight SkyDome was 20 years ago when its gates opened for the first time, 11,000 tons of revolutionary retractable roof shielding fans from the weather and never-seen-before amenities overwhelming the senses.

Coming to the first-of-its-kind facility from the old Exhibition Stadium was like leaving the dingy bachelor pad you were ashamed to have people over at and moving into a mansion -- it was a place to strut in, a place that said you had arrived.

People strode through the gates in record numbers, World Series and Grey Cups were contested there, the biggest bands rocked the house and everywhere business people marvelled at the bubble at the base of the CN Tower that was a licence to print money.

"We were at the forefront,'' said Paul Beeston, interim CEO of the Toronto Blue Jays who was the club's president and CEO at the time.

Alas time has not been kind to what is now known as the Rogers Centre, not so much through wear and tear but more in terms of perception. These days the building gets criticized more for what it isn't rather than appreciated for what it is, and it's seen in some parts as a dinosaur, a relic of the stadiums past.

Much of the blame for that belongs to Camden Yards, the Baltimore Orioles' baseball-only gem that opened in 1992 and triggered a revolution to retro-style ballparks that tapped into the nostalgia of the game's past.

As more and more teams have moved into similar new stadiums, each with its own quirks and charms, the generic, one-size-fits-all mould of the Rogers Centre increasingly lost its lustre. Marvel at the roof faded, and the building slowly turned into little more than a utilitarian venue that guarantees events will go on rain or shine.

Any appeal beyond that, seems lost after a few visits now.

"Politics is the art of the possible,'' said Paul Godfrey, the former Toronto Blue Jays president who was instrumental in getting the project started in 1984 as the city council's chair. "The possible at the time was to build the best baseball facility we could that could also accommodate football and other events.

"If you were doing it now would you do it differently? Sure. But it's just like houses. The houses they build now are a lot different from the ones they built 20 years ago.''

Hard as it is to imagine, the Rogers Centre is the ninth oldest building in baseball and, with the Minnesota Twins and Florida Marlins slated to soon move into new ballparks, it's set to slide further down the list. And while four other ballparks also have retractable roofs, no team has moved into a multi-sport facility since the Blue Jays did in 1989.

Things might have been different if Camden Yards had been built as a multi-purpose facility, something lead architect Joe Spears says was seriously considered by Baltimore's stadium authority, which hoped to lure back the NFL after the Colts left for Indianapolis.

But Spears says the Orioles pushed for their own venue, arguing that the stadium authority should build for the team it had, not the team it sought, and eventually that's what happened.

"Baseball is a pretty nostalgic game and the thinking between us, the Orioles and the stadium authority was that fans would embrace a building similar to the ones they went to with their parents,'' says Spears, a founding and senior principal of Populous who has worked on several other big-league parks, including Cleveland's Progressive Field.

"It's really a genuine place but it does remind people of the places they loved growing up. When it opened the other teams in Major League Baseball really took notice that this was pretty marketable.''

The Rogers Centre used to have that kind of pull.

The four-piece roof and its three moving parts designed by architects Rod Robbie and Michael Allen remains awe-inspiring, but things like the 33-metre-wide and 10-metre-high Jumbotron, centre-field restaurants (there are two, one mostly unused), and hotel rooms overlooking the field no longer capture the imagination.

[hkskyline]

The SkyDome at 20: Taxpayers still feeling the sting
4 June 2009
The Globe and Mail

It's incredible, when you think of it. Toronto is about six hours down the 401 from the fattest white elephant in Canadian history, Montreal's Olympic Stadium. The Big Owe stands as a concrete reminder to cities everywhere of how sports stadiums can lead to disaster for taxpayers.

But did that stop us from building one of our very own? Not a bit. Toronto in the 1980s was panting to make its name as a “world-class city.” The result was “the world's greatest entertainment centre,” the SkyDome, yet another example of the edifice complex run mad.

When a group of business titans and backroom boys led by Bay Streeter Trevor Eyton proposed building a new sports palace in Toronto, they swore it would be nothing like Montreal Mayor Jean Drapeau's colossal folly. In one sense, they were right: our retractable roof actually works.

But the promise that it could be built by private enterprise with little public money proved as false as Mr. Drapeau's claim that the 1976 Olympics could no more run a deficit than a man could have a baby. (“Allo, Morgentaler?”) The cost of the dome grew from the original estimate of $125-million to $278-million to nearly $600-million. And – surprise! – taxpayers were on the hook for at least half of it.

In 1993, the provincial government sold the concrete pile to a private company (chaired by Senator Eyton) for $150-million. It was sold again for $80-million in 1999 under the supervision of a bankruptcy court. Finally, in 2004, Ted Rogers and his Toronto Blue Jays snapped it up for $25-million, about four per cent of its cost.

The whole sorry saga is worth reflecting on as SkyDome, now the Rogers Centre, turns 20, a landmark officially reached yesterday. The first lesson is that places of mass entertainment, like hockey arenas and baseball stadiums, should never be built with or supported by public money. If a sports team thinks it can attract more fans and make more money by building a new stadium, let the team put up its own dough. Then its invariably wealthy owner carries the risk (and reaps the reward) of the enterprise.

In SkyDome's case, the suits who pushed the thing knew that they were being backstopped by government. So the builders splurged on a health club, a hotel and, yes, a retractable roof, vastly inflating the cost.

For a fleeting moment, it looked as if their subsidized bet might pay off. In the early 1990s, the Blue Jays alone were pulling four million fans a year to the dome. Today they are bringing in about half that many.

Other draws have tailed off, too. The Air Canada Centre attracts many of the pop groups and other acts that used to go to SkyDome. Basketball's Raptors are ensconced at the ACC and there is always talk that football's Argonauts might flee the dome, if they don't fold instead.

Although it still gets some big acts, such as the Jonas Brothers and Coldplay, coming this summer, it has been reduced to playing host to events like this summer's Canada Kabaddi Cup. (The dome's publicists call Kabaddi a “unique and thrilling” game of Indian origin and prehistoric antecedents that may have been invented as a way to practice warding off wild-animal attacks.) Overall, the number of event days at the dome is down from its peak of 302 in 1997 to around 200 today.

To give the place its due, the dome is still neat in some ways. The retractable lid dreamed up by Toronto architect Rod Robbie and Ottawa engineer Michael Allen is a marvel, opening or closing majestically in 20 minutes. The stadium's fathers may not have been able to do their sums, but they had the smarts to put the dome downtown rather than in deepest Downsview, helping enliven the city core on game and concert days. But it's a lousy place to watch ball, especially when it's half full and takes on the feel of a vast mausoleum (with overpriced beer).

If present or future owners ever come begging for more cash, pushing the usual line about vast “spinoff” benefits for tourism and job creation, governments should boo them off the field.

[hkskyline]

Time for Rogers Centre to start giving back
5 June 2009
The Globe and Mail

TORONTO -- It is no longer just about baseball. Instead, it is telling that on a weekend devoted to celebrating the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Rogers Centre, its primary occupant is looking for a president and chief executive officer who can mine some untapped revenue outside of the place.

In the words of the man who is spearheading the search, current Toronto Blue Jays president and CEO Paul Beeston, what he is looking for in his replacement is “a visionary.”

If the guy's more about Coldplay than double plays, well, that's cool.

“There's no question it's a three-part job,” Beeston said yesterday. “One of them is the Blue Jays. But you'll also have to deal with the [NFL's Buffalo] Bills potentially on two league games, and you have a stadium that needs to be filled as many nights as possible to generate revenue. You don't have to look too far down the street [at the Air Canada Centre] to see how to maximize revenue.”

Ask Beeston about the first thing that comes to his mind when somebody mentions SkyDome or Rogers Centre and he says: “The Blue Jays' home. And I don't apologize for that.”

But that's not enough any more. The stadium that has borne the Rogers name since February of 2005 – after the late Ted Rogers and his eponymous communications company purchased it for $25-million – needs to start walking double-time to keep in step with the new realities of its corporate ownership.

It is a profitable building, according to Beeston, but the next president of the Blue Jays will ultimately be the person who moves the place forward in the next 20 years.

When the Minnesota Twins move into their new facility next year, the Rogers Centre will become the eighth-oldest major-league ballpark, two years younger than the next-oldest, Miami's LandShark Stadium (formerly Joe Robbie/Pro Player/Dolphin Stadium).

Boston's Fenway Park (1912) is the oldest, and like four of the other facilities older than the Rogers Centre, it is a baseball-only facility (save for one-off NHL outdoor games). Only the aforementioned LandShark (home to the NFL's Miami Dolphins) and McAfee Coliseum (home to the baseball's Oakland A's and the NFL's Oakland Raiders) can be considered multiuse facilities.

So “trendy” is not a word one would use to describe the Rogers Centre. Yet, neither is it quaint. There's so much public money and political capital and bitterness housed within its concrete soul that it's doubtful it's going anywhere in our lifetime.

Beeston says there are ways of physically altering the Rogers Centre to create ticket scarcity for baseball – think slightly wider seats and larger concourses and aisles – and it is nuts-and-bolts issues like that with which Beeston's replacement will need to deal.

For example, Beeston says candidly that the current 40-hour turnaround time to change configurations is simply unworkable. In a practical sense, it means the Rogers Centre cannot be booked for major events in the months of October and November because the days need to be kept open for baseball and CFL playoffs. (Stop your snickering.)

A start would be to begin using rolls of artificial turf instead of plates.

Public perception is what it is, but Beeston rises to the occasion, saying that for all the whining, the Rogers Centre is a place that “flat-out works.” And that, frankly, there's no place else in downtown Toronto where 50,000 people can gather indoors to see a grand event.

True. And all this talk about revenue generation ought to resonate with baseball fans because it is clear that with Ted Rogers's death last December, the Blue Jays will need to do more to pay their way – and the building is the key.

Leave aside the aesthetic comparisons to the retro parks like Camden Yards.

Through the late 1990s, after the bloom of back-to-back World Series had worn off, the Blue Jays didn't own the facility. Coupled with the dollar-exchange rate, it left them poor cousins to most of their U.S. baseball counterparts because they did not have access to the same in-stadium revenue as other teams. And it was that in-stadium revenue that gradually supplanted TV money as the driving economic force in baseball.

The Blue Jays have, literally, been playing catch-up all along. And now it's come to this.

Happy 20th, Rogers Centre.

[Bluejays753]

The thing I love about the SkyDome (Never calling it the Rogers Centre) is that it's unique. Most of the stadiums today are Camden Yards clones. SkyDome has a different feel. I just wish Rogers did more to improve the stadium to make it more fan friendly.

[Taller, Better]

I admit, I still call it the Skydome, too! I just love the place, and heck, would never trade it for a permanently open air stadium. Not in our Northern climate.

[JYDA]

People definitely take the roof for granted. Everybody wants an open air stadium for saturdays in the summer sunshine. Many forget that also means sitting through single digit temperatures with drizzle and a cold wind coming off the lake during spring and fall.

[HipHopCanada]

Originally Posted by SIC

I guess they just don't like throwball, which makes sense......since Toronto is an immigrant city.

That's a very ignorant thing to say.... and I believe that's the same reason why the Maple Leafs sell out EVERY single HOCKEY game despite being one of the worst teams in the league?

[CofRed]

Originally Posted by Ganis

To bad they arnt popular and in the NFL.

Was that necessary, maybe to the Americans there not but to Canadians the CFL is great, we don't judge the NFL so please don't judge our game.

Thanks

[Jim856796]

Why is it even called the Rogers Centre for, anyway? Why the heck does corporate sponsors who purchase naming rights of sports venues gotta take away those venues' good names? Shouldn't they have called this arena the Rogers Skydome?

[Bluejays753]

Originally Posted by Jim856796

Why is it even called the Rogers Centre for, anyway? Why the heck does corporate sponsors who purchase naming rights of sports venues gotta take away those venues' good names? Shouldn't they have called this arena the Rogers Skydome?

It's all about the money. Most stadiums have Corporate sponsors. But "Rogers Centre" in particular pisses a lot of people off. The SkyDome name was chosen by the public. Even worse, It was purchased by Rogers for next to nothing.

[isaidso]

Well, in the end the power is with the people. Rogers may plaster their name on the side, but if won't mean squat if we keep calling it Skydome. I will never call it Rogers Centre. Rogers cares little about sports or our culture, they only care about money. The public chose the name 'Skydome', and Skydome it shall remain.

[www.sercan.de]

Should i change the title to:
TORONTO - Rogers Centre / SkyDome (52,230)