“There are times — too many of them — when it is hard, very hard, to be a baseball fan. I do not mean those days when your team has fallen to its rival by some ignominious score, though that is frustrating. I refer to something more corrosive, a breaking of the unspoken covenant between fan and team on which professional baseball depends. By this agreement, the fan pledges undying loyalty to his team, and in return, said team makes every possible effort to disguise the fact that said fan’s loyalty has been pledged not to a benevolent civic institution but to a mercenary corporate operation…
“Design, as idea and physical reality, is the locus of this fan-team covenant, and the ballpark the place of its maintenance and dissolution… In each case, the feel-good design is the lipstick on the pig of a massive commercial project, financed in large measure by the public and unabashedly aimed at liberating fans from the contents of their wallets.”
– Mark Lamster in “Play Ball,” Metropolis magazine, July/August 2009
