The Political Whore

Earlier this week, we ran a graphic that opponents to the new Rays’ waterfront ballpark had doctored up to illustrate just how large they contend the Tampa Bay Rays’ retractable sail-like fabric roof will be, claiming it will block views from downtown condos and offices. The sail was highlighted in a yellow that came out in our print newspaper more yellow-green. While I thought it was clear that the Rays aren’t proposing a yellow canopy, and that it was just for the effect of highlighting the size of the roof, we weren’t precise about that and didn’t have room to print some other context for the roof design disagreement. The Rays’ senior VP on the project, Michael Kalt, wrote to clarify:

The rendering of the roof you published is patently misleading. We are talking about a transparent fabric that will be deployed, at most, for a few hours a day less than 90 days a year.

I wrote back to mention that I remembered hearing the Rays describe the fabric as not entirely transparent, that it has to have some opacity in order to block the sunlight and resulting heat and cool the open-air stadium in the Tampa Bay summer.

We are working with HOK to include images of the roof opening and closing in the virtual tour. It should take a few weeks. But your recollection is correct. We are trying to make it as transparent as possible while still ensuring that it reflects or diffuses heat rather than absorbs it (since most of our games will be in the evening, shade is somewhat less of an issue that reflectivity). This should result in a largely transparent fabric, and certainly not anything close to that lemon-yellow cartoon that you published.

In any event, the salient fact isn’t really the roof material. It’s that the roof itself will only be deployed a small fraction of the time: not at all for half the year (i.e., during the offseason), only 81-90 days during the other half of the year (i.e., during the baseball season), and even on those days, only for a few hours. That’s not to dismiss the fact that there will be some impact to waterfront views from a couple of adjoining properties during those hours. But we should be honest about the extent and duration of that impact.

A very fair point and one that did not fit into our cutlines in the newspaper. We should have done a better job describing it in the story, however.

Opponents make the point that the highest point of the sail is approximately 30 stories high, while the point where the sail attaches to the stadium seating structure is about 13 stories high. Members of the Preserve our Wallets and Waterfronts said they felt that Rays’ renderings downplayed the size and scope of the sail roof and showed it as being transparent (it is pictured in the open position so the sail fabric is not visible in any rendering); The Rays insist they have done no such thing, that they’ve always been open about how long the sail would be closed and open and its size, as demonstrated by the fact that they included the outlines of it in their renderings.

You be the judge; here’s the Rays’ renderings showing the roof and its outlines (images courtesy of the Tampa Bay Rays/HOK):

And here is the opponents’ rendering of the roof with the sail fabric up:

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