Achi news desk-
TORONTO – Now that the finish line is days away on a nearly $400 million stadium renovation that has been all-consuming for the Toronto Blue Jays staff over the past few years, the overwhelming feeling for Marnie Starkman is…
“Pride,” the club’s executive vice president of baseball operations said Thursday after helping to unveil the new-look Rogers Center, even as work continued on the final touches before Monday’s home opener against the Seattle Mariners. “The reality of the project, we’re still saying 18 months in five months – that’s what it really was. All in all it was probably like a 4-5 year project that we did in two years.
“We were lucky we had the roof,” he continued. “A lot of other ballparks have to do this in the middle of the snow and the weather and that was one thing we could control. The second we could get in here, we started. PCL (the contractor) did an amazing job. Our staff did an amazing job. And it was round the clock. … We were so involved in the design and so intentional about the design. I’m so proud of that because you’re seeing it come to fruition.”
The second phase of the complete renovation was the lower seating bowl of the Rogers Centre, which had been essentially untouched since the opening of the dome in 1989, reorienting all the seats so that they now faced the pitch. The chairs were widened, with cup holders, the slope was raised to improve sight lines, the stairs between sections now have rails and anyone five foot eight or taller will no longer have to worry about legroom.
Visually, the stadium now looks intact after the Frankenstein season in 2023 that featured the old bowl with a completely redesigned outfield. As for how it plays, we’ll see, but now there’s about 3,000 square feet less dirt, although it’s more concentrated around the playing field now, a new version of the same turf they’ve had it the last three seasons and new high, angled walls leading to the outfield that could create an interesting bounce on balls driven down the lines.
There are also new food and drink items, further adding to how the whole feel of the place is being changed.
“I’m excited for people to experience the bowl differently,” Starkman said. “We didn’t make any changes to the hall, but the change of bringing in the bowl opened up the hall. The (new) drink rails. You’re going to different ballparks and that’s the point, walk around and experience it. You don’t have to sit in your seat all nine innings.
“Our old ballpark, that’s all we had to offer, the seat. That’s what I’m most excited about.”
The changes have shrunk the dome’s capacity to around 38,000 seats, a figure that varies up to around 40,000 with outer area tickets and private suites, although the number of accessible seats has increased by 18 per cent, with new lower drink rails in singing the lower bowl.
A key revenue driver will be the 1,600 new premium seats behind home plate, 210 of which are in the TD Lounge area which will be visible on television behind home plate and is very similar to r premium seats behind the plate at Yankee Stadium. (Work continues on three premium clubs which are expected to open mid-season, as planned).
That is no coincidence as Starkman along with Anuk Karunaratne, her former co-VP who left this off-season to join the St. Louis Cardinals, and several other staff have traveled to dozens of sports venues to help inform their decisions.
The new dugouts, for example, are a nod to Minnesota’s Target Field, Atlanta’s Truist Park and Globe Life Field in Texas. The new seats were borrowed from what the Cubs did at Wrigley Field. The premium seats and lounges were informed by what the Yankees did as the Blue Jays collaborated with the same concessionaire, Legends.
At the same time, “We’re still in Toronto and there’s still a different way to experience sports here,” Starkman said. “Some of the premium, we took inspiration from ballparks, but we also looked at the city. We’re competing with King Street and all these other facilities that are not the same as Texas and Atlanta and Arizona and some of those places. So there were little bits and pieces of things that we took as we went along. The brick that we put behind home plate, we wanted a little bit of character, but we knew we weren’t a red brick place, so it was like, okay, let’s make it our version of that. So many teams were so helpful in sharing that information. We appreciated that and it was very helpful in the design process.”
Blue Jays players and visitors will have new clubs, with the home team getting all the bells and whistles. Finishing work on both continued wildly on Thursday to get everything done in time for Monday.
Starkman called this a generational renovation of the dome and there are still smaller projects ahead, with president and CEO Mark Shapiro saying in the spring that key areas of opportunity include some sort of children’s area and areas that recognize a team’s history, if not the focus of one place. Hall of Fame club.
Ben Nicholson-Smith is Sportsnet’s baseball editor. Arden Zwelling is a senior writer. Together, they bring you the most in-depth Blue Jays podcast in the league, covering all the latest news with opinion and analysis, as well as interviews with other insiders and team members.
“We need to obsess every year about how we continue to modernize this place,” Starkman said, as the club anticipates the current iteration will create a 10-15 year runway where decisions have to be made. a bigger picture about the future of the dome.
Before the Blue Jays began this renovation, the idea of embarking on a larger-scale, sports-anchored real estate project was explored, but that is a huge undertaking that requires years of planning.
Considering what’s next isn’t imminent, but it’s on the horizon.
“I don’t really have a time frame,” Shapiro said during the spring. “I think, okay, we’ve done this, we’ve addressed what we had to address, we’ve modernized the fan experience, we’ve modernized the player experience, we need to turn our attention to the Dominican, think about our facilities there, some of our minor league facilities, continue to do normal capital planning and projects and maintenance. But one of the things we will need to think about is long-term planning. So that just means research, that means understanding alternatives and a plan. It’s just responsible business to think about that. …
“We will continue to maintain and approach capital so that you (the dome) would be a new ballpark. But we also have to think about the lifespan and normal course of business. “
For now, the Blue Jays and their fans have a new stadium to enjoy, the most significant change to their customer experience since the dome first opened.
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