The team that mistook its stadium for a hat

WHENEVER A NEW major league baseball stadium opens, it's hailed as an emblem of progress, a palace of sport, an engineering wonder, a centerpiece of the community, and an immense improvement over its predecessor. In recent years, it has also become mandatory to apply such overworked expressions as "state of the art," "intimate," and "old-fashioned ballpark with all the modern conveniences."

Historically, even underachievers such as San Francisco's wind-cursed Candlestick Park and the multi-sport concrete ashtrays of the '70s have drawn opening-day accolades—and, of course, so have the good ones. When Safeco Field opens, it will get similar, reflexive rave reviews. Mariners president Chuck Armstrong has already declared it "the best ballpark ever built."

But the reality of the place is rather more complicated: It is a mix of virtues and flaws, of architectural integrity and contradiction. It combines intelligent minimalism and absurd retractable-roof excess in a design that is confidently original in some places and timidly derivative in others. It marries clever economies with extravagant waste to produce the most expensive stadium in America and the most expensive baseball-only park in the world. Its $517 million price tag is more than double the figure that politicians and the Mariners first floated when they were seeking support for a new stadium. (See accompanying article on stadium economics.)

Spectacular cost is one of Safeco Field's two outstanding features; the other is simply that it's outdoors. After 225 seasons under the Kingdome's concrete roof, the Mariners and their fans will achieve parity with Tacoma, Everett, and Yakima by playing on real grass in the open air and sometimes even in the sun.

This is the first time that a major league team has ever moved from an indoor stadium to a quasi-outdoor one, although a similar migration will occur in Houston next spring, and may also eventually take place in Montreal and Minnesota. On magnificent sunny days such as July 5 and 6, when the Mariners held open houses, this change of venue will strike many people as well worth all the cost overruns and perhaps even all the arrogance of the Mariners ownership; playing indoors on days like that has been a crime against nature and baseball. But most games will be at night, and sunshine is not guaranteed for the one-third that will start in the afternoon. Nonetheless, due to our latitude, most night games will begin in twilight or even low-slanting rays of sunlight. Thus the game will look better at Safeco, thanks to the natural light, the remarkably seductive greensward, and the city and Sound views available from many of the seats and concourses.

But physical comfort will be another matter. Fans at the Kingdome have become lulled into thinking that baseball weather is an unvarying 72 degrees with no wind, and they will not savor the windy 40-degree nights of April and May. At such times, Safeco Field may feel a bit like another West Coast bayfront ballyard, Candlestick Park. Four years ago, Armstrong assured me that the rolling roof would keep people warm in such conditions, even though the ballpark was to be unheated and an open left field would let the cold air enter easily.

The fact is that the roof is primarily a costly and unnecessary status symbol for the team owners. Eastern cities with far more baseball-season rain than Seattle do perfectly well in unroofed ballparks. Ironically, the Mariners' insistence on this nine-acre, 25-million-pound action toy—"Hey, we're just as important as Phoenix!"—is the major reason why the stadium is so badly over budget and the owners are on the hook for $100 million that they never planned to spend. Of course, if they manage to worm out of their oft-repeated promises to pay for their overruns, the irony will apply to us as well.

The roof is not only a superbly engineered waste of money. It is also a superbly engineered waste of space. It dominates the stadium, making it twice as tall and much more bulky than it needed to be. Its immensity fights the architecture of the ballpark, and its bold form, impressive in itself and suited to the nearby industrial district, is overscaled and simply not compatible with much of what sits beneath it. At first glance, it recalls the noble vaulted and skylit train sheds of 19th-century railroad stations, but while those brought illumination to their buildings, this roof is inevitably a bearer of darkness, since fly balls can't be tracked properly against a transparent or translucent background.

THE TIME AND money devoted to designing a moving roof and its substructure and foundations could have been spent more profitably on better materials and details, and on the architects' time to take the design further. The roof has sucked up resources—financial and temporal, tangible and intellectual—that should have gone into refining the architectural expression of the ballpark. The sometimes-irregular corrugated metal walls and exposed steel structure that make up much of the stadium's exterior, for example, are nearly perfect in their evocation of the pragmatic, ad-hoc character found on the secondary frontages of the classic pre-WWII ballparks. If all of Safeco Field were up to this standard, the best-in-the-world claim would have some standing. But its brick-clad First Avenue frontage, which corresponds to the fancier principal facades of the old ballparks, is not up to the standard of the old parks or even the better-faced retro parks of our time. It is a stage set without great character, capped by a primitive concrete cornice, and its home-plate rotunda, the park's exterior focal point, is poorly articulated.