viz.

Image Credit: Steve Rhodes

I’ve always loved the moment in David Foster Wallace’s “Big Red Son” when he praises Las Vegas for being the least pretentious city in America. What an astute thing to say. Who among us could have looked at, for example, the Bellagio’s famous fountain, Paris Las Vegas or the Venetian and describe them as not pretentious? (The Wynn complex wasn’t built yet, but everything interior designer Roger Thomas has done there since confirms Wallace’s point.) The irony Wallace is highlighting, of course, is the fact that these institutions pretend to be nothing other than what they are: spaces smartly designed for people to come into and enjoy wasting their money. They don’t pretend to be otherwise. No Vegas weekender sees the Paris’ Eiffel Tower and looks for the Louvre, because that structure isn’t there to trick people into thinking they’re across the ocean: it’s there to encourage people to luxuriate in their extravagance. Wallace makes this point, I suspect, because deep down he was worried that a certain degree of pretentiousness in modern American culture is fostering a strong undercurrent of cynicism. With all the naïveté of Wallace’s ideal citizen, I’m hoping the Miami Marlin’s new stadium, aptly named Marlins Park, isn’t a great example of what Wallace was worried about.

Image Credit: Joe Skipper/Reuters

The 2012 Major League Baseball season will kick off tonight with the St. Louis Cardinals visiting the Miami Marlins. This is not a two- or three-game series. Instead, it’s one-game affair and an opportunity for Miami to show off their new ballpark. (As far as I know, the Cardinals were invited to open the stadium because they are reining World Series Champions.) The new Miami stadium is cozy. It seats 37,000 paying fans, which is a bit on the small side as far as these things go, but, as The New York Times noted over the weekend, the size is probably wise given the team’s history of poor attendance. Like many of the baseball stadiums that have been built in the past ten or fifteen years, Marlin’s Park is designed exclusively for baseball. This is in stark contrast with the stadiums that were built in the 1960s, with exteriors couched in the sleek lines of Modernism and interiors multi-purposed for a variety of different professional sporting events. In this way San Francisco’s AT&T Park, Cincinnati’s Great American Ballpark, and St. Louis’ Busch Stadium all hark back to an ideal represented in Fenway or Wrigley. At the same time, there are some features of Miami’s new Marlins Park that are unprecedented in new baseball stadiums of the past decade, and I’m left hoping a different age isn’t upon us.

Image Credit: Miami Marlins

Most of my complaints center around Red Grooms’ $2.5 million moving sculpture just over the center-field wall (see image above). Whenever the home team hits a home run in this stadium, the sculpture will flash and cutout marlins and sea gulls will slowly make their way around the ascending peninsulas. Moreover, here the outfield wall curves around the base of the statue, leaving a weird acute angle in the deepest part of the park. One has to imagine that Major League Baseball allows irregular outfield patterns because in the old days, when baseball diamonds were shaped by the landmarks of two intersecting streets, or the pattern of oak trees in a friend’s backyard, home advantage did in part stem from familiarity with one’s surroundings. But in the new Marlins Park, the outfield wall makes concessions for a moving sculpture which one of my friends concisely described as “Vegas.” Outfield walls should at least try to pretend that they’re making concessions for neighboring buildings…but a light show? In no way am I suggesting that all outfields should be regular, of course, but there’s a huge difference between varying fence dimensions relative to distance from the plate (the obvious example is Fenway) and the irregular pattern of Miami Park’s outfield wall.

I suppose there are precedents for this sort of thing. Whenever the Brewers hit a home run in Miller Park, Bernie Brewer slides down a yellow slide and into the Kalahari Splash Zone, often soaking fans below. In Houston’s Minute Maid Park, there’s an irregular hill in deep center (known as “Tal’s Hill” in honor of team president Tal Smith), which perplexes visiting players during the most critical moments of ball games. But I guess what’s intriguing about the outfield features in the new Marlins Park is how distant they are from the baseball I knew growing up. The statue reminds me of carnival games I used to see at the town fair. And I say all this out of complete respect for Red Grooms – he’s an important artist who has bills to pay just like the rest of us. After all, he had nothing to do with the aquarium that forms the backstop of Marlins Park: