Column: After this catwalk catastrophe, Trop must go
By JOE HENDERSON | The Tampa Tribune
Published: August 5, 2010
ST. PETERSBURG - Blow this place up and get it right next time.
I was thinking it and I'll bet you and a lot of other people were too as a day that could have been a celebrated comeback by the Tampa Bay Rays turned into a disaster.
After watching a potential landmark win snatched away by the worst feature in baseball's sorriest stadium, Rays manager Joe Maddon didn't just think it. He said it out loud, and it absolutely needed to be said.
"If you want one really good reason why there's a new ballpark necessary in this area, there it is," he said Thursday afternoon after his team lost to Minnesota because a pop-up in the ninth inning clanked off the "unhittable" A ring catwalk about 190 feet above the infield.
Did I say "unhittable?"
Well, that's what the engineers said when they opened this catwalk-covered catastrophe 13 years ago. They had done all sorts of tests that showed hitting any of the rings would be almost impossible.
We know now, though, that it took less than a week for the first batted ball to reach one of the four iron rings that overhang the playing field, and it wasn't long af
ter that before special ground rules had to be enacted to cover things that could "never" happen. One of those "impossible" things was a two-out pop fly from Minnesota's Jason Kubel in the ninth inning of a tie game.
This was shortly after Jason Bartlett's pinch-hit grand slam capped a six-run rally in the eighth that brought the Rays into an improbable 6-6 tie.
"As soon as (Kubel) hit that ball, I knew he hit it pretty good," Maddon said. "I looked up and it kept climbing and climbing."
The law of gravity means it then should have eventually started falling and falling, most likely into Bartlett's glove. But this is Tropicana Field, an equal opportunity Teflon-covered poltergeist of a ball yard. The ball clanked off the ring and Bartlett lost sight of it until it fell to the ground.
"I saw it hit the catwalk and the rest is history," he said.
Ground rules made especially for the Trop say that such a ball is considered in play if it lands fair, which it did. So instead of ending the inning, Minnesota got the eventual winning run in an 8-6 victory.
Since he came here five years ago, Maddon has made a point of trying to turn the Trop into a real home-field advantage. He laughs about the, um, quirky characteristics of this place and repeatedly has stressed that his players need to embrace their D
ome Sweet Dump.
Quite properly, he was asked about that.
"Winning or losing a game because the ball hits an object in the roof has never been something about what I admire about this place," he said.
The Rays generally play well here and have certainly benefitted from the gremlins in his place. To be fair, other parks have weird elements too. Fenway has the Green Monster. Wrigley Field has ivy. Balls get lost in the sun in outdoor stadiums. Once upon a time, Yankee Stadium had statues in center field.
There's just something fundamentally wrong with the Trop though, and it's time people stopped making excuses for it.
"It pretty much can't happen anywhere else but here in Major League Baseball," Maddon said.
A fitting major league stadium can still have the things people like about the Trop (air conditioning) without having play affected by some man-made erector set that dangles above the playing surface.
"I know it works both ways, but to lose a game in a pennant situation like that because of the roof truly indicates why there's a crying need for a new ballpark in this area, regardless of where they put it," Maddon said. "It just needs to be a real baseball field."
This isn't an endorsement to put a new stadium on a particular side of the Bay.
Nor is this any suggestion of who ought to pay the enormous cost of a new stadium.
But there are people who periodically argue that the Trop is just fine. They just lost the argument. The Trop is not fine. The Trop needs to be bulldozed, replaced by a stadium where the players – not flawed engineers – determine who wins and loses.
"We didn't really lose the game. I know it works both ways, believe me. We've benefitted from this in the past," Maddon said. "There was a time when it was kind of cute - 2006 and 2007 it was kind of cute when you might win a game or lose a game when the ball hit the roof or rafter or whatever, but it's not cute today. It's not cute."