Penmarc is absolutely the most promising area in the general vicinity of DTR for a mega-project like a sports stadium. The thing about baseball stadiums is that pretty much without exception they are always built either a) in the parking lot of the old baseball stadium or b) on subprime real estate that can be acquired cheaply. Obviously option A doesn’t exist in Raleigh, so that just leaves option B. That’s why I think you can throw out the Cargill site as a possibility for a sports stadium: there’s no way that professional sports team would be willing to spend what it would take to outbid the rest of the private sector for that land, and it would be horrifically irresponsible for any arm of government to fork over taxpayer money for such a prime piece of real estate just to give to a pro sports team at a reduced cost.
But Penmarc is the sort of not-yet-prime real estate where sports stadiums tend to go, and then stuff gets built around them. Even then, there are hurdles that would need to be worked out, though. You’d need to do a lot of work on the roads in the area. In practice, “Yeah, we’re going to build our new stadium right next to the FlowServe building” is not going to be appealing to either MLS or MLB, so that would likely need to be worked out. (But, yes, all the land you would need for the actual stadium could be acquired from a single family, which is a plus.) And something on the scale of an MLS stadium would probably work better there than an MLB stadium, I’m thinking.
You guys are forgetting about the latest newly minted “billionare” from Raleigh, Tim Sweeny, founder of Epic Games. Think they estimate is worth now around $7.2Billion.
So Raleigh has 3 Billionaires:
Jim Goodnight - approx: $10B
John Sall (SAS co-founder) - approx. $5B
Tim Sweeny (Epic Games) - approx $7.2B
This doesn’t include Temple Sloan who sold Carquest to Advance Auto, Jim Goodman, the Holdiing Family (First Citizens Bank), Steve Malik (NCFC). All of these guys are probably well over $500MM in net worth. Temple Sloan may very well be close to a Billion. Frank & Julia Daniels sold the News & Observer for $400MM. He inherited the paper from his father so doubt there was much debt.
Yeah but is sports important to them? It can help if you offer naming rights to the neighbors around them. If I were a billionaire I would love to have a neighborhood named after me.
Like it or not, they “will” be getting the money. They will begin construction in 2020. The Wolf Pack and Hurricanes will continue in this facility for another 20 years…and then and only then will we see a change…again, imho
There could be! The best views of a baseball game are from behind home plate, so the vista you’re mainly concerned about is what it looks like from behind home, looking out past the pitcher and beyond the outfield.
Rule 1.04 of Major League Baseball’s Rule Book states that “It is desirable that the line from home base through the pitchers plate to second base shall run East-Northeast.” (You can’t have the batter facing west into the setting sun, nor would you want fans to.) For that reason, in most MLB stadiums, that line does run in this direction, and if you look at the proposed Penmarc stadium at the MLB Raleigh website, they wisely have the theoretical batter facing northeast as well.
At this orientation, your view to straightaway center field wouldn’t be much to Instagram–you’d be looking at the eastern half of Raleigh. But looking out to left field, you’d have a nice view of the Raleigh skyline. So you’d probably design it to have your seats and scoreboard in right and center field, taking away that vista, and leave a more-or-less unobstructed view of DTR in right field.
Hypothetically speaking. (Speaking of idle hypotheticals, Bank of America Stadium is just to the west of downtown Charlotte. If you tore that down and replaced it with a baseball stadium, you’d have some magnificent views of the city. Just saying.)
Tom Dundon has already publicly stated he wants a ‘downtown arena’. He doesn’t like the current structure of the PNC lease where NC State and the Centennial Authority (stacked with NCStater’s) have too much say in the building even though the only represent maybe 25% of the usage and revenue drivers. I know City leaders want the arena downtown as well.
Would love to think this $200MM # is just the beginning of a discussion where you can argue for 'just $150MM" more we can have a brand new downtown facility that would have a MUCH greater economic impact that a building sitting in a vacant parking lot with absolutely nothing to do around it…not to mention every other city and even small town (Fayetevile, Asheville, High Point, Kinston) have all made major investments into putting any sports facility in and around their city centers.
If Dundon wants a downtown arena he’s free to pay for it himself. Maybe he shouldn’t have pumped $225 million into a minor football league and he could have built an arena instead.
One of the most recent arenas to be built was Little Caesars Arena in Detroit, which cost a cool $860 million back in 2015. So $350m is definitely not going to cut it.
Thanks for noticing this! (TBH, I was hoping someone would). I sketched those four ballparks with a few different things in mind: sunset orientation, skyline view over outfield, large-enough tracts, proximity to DTR infrastructure/attractions, and ingress/egress using mass transit, that, by the time MLB were to expand, would be MUCH more robust here.
The sun never sets north of 23.5 degrees north of the equator (the Tropic of Cancer). The entire Continental US—where all MLB parks are—lies north of that latitude, so sunset is always in varying degrees of the southwest sky, depending on the season.
So, since most games are played in the evening, MLB wants ballparks oriented such that the batter—and the majority of the fans—aren’t staring into the setting sun.
Most parks are oriented this way, unless some weird geographical constraint requires it to be another way…or if the stadium has a retractable roof/dome.
Also, that’s why, IMO, the best ballparks are located in the SW parts of cities, so that 1) you get the setting sun behind (most) everyone, and 2) you get skyline views in the outfield. It’s why I chose the four sites for the sketches. They’re all in the south or west parts of DTR, the home plate corners are all in a south or west direction, and the city skyline is situated behind the outfield wall for all sites.
