TORONTO — During the sixth inning Tuesday night, George Springer lined a grand slam 413 feet to left-center, breaking a tied game as the nearly 40,000 fans around him broke into bedlam. On most fields, this electric moment would create a souvenir for one lucky spectator somewhere over the outfield wall. But not at the Rogers Centre. Not in Toronto, where, as he circled the bases with his right arm in the sky, Springer watched his ball disappear into the “abyss.”
At least that’s what Toronto Blue Jays president and CEO Mark Shapiro calls it. It’s the gap between the outfield wall and the first row of seats that gives way to a level of service that rings around a stadium first built more than three decades ago as a multipurpose facility — not a ballpark. An arena that can be converted from a baseball configuration to a soccer configuration and vice versa. A place where concerts, ice dances and monster truck rallies can take place. An engineering marvel that lives up to its era and has since aged horribly.
It’s a sight Shapiro hopes to never see again, starting in the 2023 regular season, when the Blue Jays plan to complete the first phase of a $300 million, privately funded, multi-year Rogers Center renovation project that will put the first sod as soon as his team’s current season ends.
“It’s been a long time coming,” Shapiro said. “When the fans come into the building next year, sit down [200-level] the seats and the seats below, with the Canadian flag flying in the field, it will be a dramatically different look. A dramatically different view. And a different playing field. But this will only be the beginning. There’s going to be a season or two that will redefine the whole lower league and really turn this stadium into a ballpark.”
While the full renovation will affect nearly every part of the stadium’s interior, including a complete overhaul of the 33-year-old building’s lower bowl, work this winter will focus primarily on the Rogers Centre’s outfield.
The stadium’s bullpens will be elevated off the field and surrounded by both traditional and seating bleachers, as well as viewing platforms that will allow fans to watch players warm up to enter games. Several new fan concourse areas will be added around the 100 and 200 levels, while the outfield seating closest to the field will extend forward to the reconfigured field walls.
“It’s going to create a really unique opportunity for our fans to encourage our relievers and potentially discourage — that’s the kindest word I could use — our opposing relievers,” Shapiro said. “I think they will enjoy some of the hometown flavor as our fans will be on top of the visiting bullpen.”
In the right field corner, where many of Rogers Center’s current seats do not face the pitcher’s mound, the club plans to tear up rows of seats and create a series of decks around the foul pole that will accommodate future fan concourse areas. Illustrations of the club show a bar in the right field corner and seating in the field walls.
The outfield seats in the 500 level will also be removed, making way for two new ticket-free areas overlooking left and right field where fans can congregate and watch games. One of the areas will be family and the other will have a bar.
Changes to the 500 level won’t be limited to the outfield, however, as every seat around the upper bowl — currently the same ones installed when the building opened in 1989 — will be removed and replaced.
Below the surface, the club will build a new family area and 5,000 sq. ft. weight room for its players, as well as locker rooms for staff. The ultimate goal is to recreate the environment and facilities that Blue Jays players and staff have access to in Dunedin, Florida, where the club recently opened a state-of-the-art player development facility.
“When we think about player facilities, we think about, ‘How do we provide our players with resources, tools, technology, spaces and really a design that promotes championship culture and expectations?'” Shapiro said. “We want it to be clear — as the players go out into the brotherhood of Major League Baseball players — that this is the best place to play.” It’s clear we care about them. It’s a recruiting tool for us and a retention tool for our players.”
Ultimately, these player facilities will include a redesigned clubhouse, sleep and yoga rooms, hydrotherapy areas and more. But many of those upgrades will wait until the next phase of renovations in the 2023-24 offseason, when the club plans to demolish and replace Rogers Center’s entire 100-level indoor bowl.
That would remove much of what was contained in the abyss where Springer’s grand slam fell — a maze of concrete and steel structures that ran around the stadium and facilitated the rotation of the Rogers Center’s lower bowl when it still hosted football games . All of that infrastructure has been idle since the CFL’s Toronto Argonauts left Rogers Center for BMO Field in 2016. And right now, it’s the biggest obstacle to the Blue Jays building new fan areas and player facilities inside the 100 level.
“It’s hard to even imagine,” Shapiro said. “We’re going to remove all that steel, all that concrete, and create a whole new level of 100 that has premium spaces and clubs, that has much better vantage points on the playing field. It will be closer to the playing field and create more interaction with our fans. And then it will bring the opportunity to complete and completely reimagine the player experience down there.”
The Rogers Center renovation is being piloted by Populous, the same architectural firm that designed the club’s new facility in Dunedin. The project aims to buy the Blue Jays over 10-15 years to provide a longer-term solution for its aging stadium, the seventh oldest in MLB. The work will be done in phases over future winters, pausing during the regular season so the Blue Jays can play their home schedule without interruption.
The Blue Jays originally envisioned splitting the renovation into two offseasons, completing about 30 percent of the work this winter and the final 70 percent in the winter of 2023-24. But the club now outlines the project as one that will be “phased over the next two to three off-seasons’, suggesting some work could shift to the winter of 2024-25 if construction is delayed or contractors face supply chain issues.
The club has made several smaller-scale improvements throughout the building in recent years, including replacing the playing surface in 2021 and installing a new 8,000-square-foot video board ahead of the 2022 season. But this will be the first major renovation of Rogers Center since the stadium opened.
And it won’t be the last. As soon as the work is complete before the 2024 or 2025 regular season, Shapiro says the club will begin the planning process for a new, long-term facility — either within the current Rogers Center footprint or elsewhere in the city.
“It’s a medium-term solution,” Shapiro said. “We still have to have a long-term solution at some point.”
During the ongoing renovation process, the building’s capacity will be reduced as the current seats are converted into fan gathering spaces. The club is still working on the final number, which it will be when the project is completed, but it is expected to reach somewhere between 40,000 and the stadium’s current capacity of over 49,000.
The renovations will also likely affect the Rogers Center as an offensive environment. The Blue Jays have yet to reveal the specifics of the stadium’s new field dimensions, but we do know that it will be an asymmetric boundary and that the fences will protrude slightly to accommodate the raised bullpen.
The club’s analytics department spent some time modeling how the changes could affect the results of balls in play, looking for an alignment that would not dramatically alter the competitive nature of the Rogers Centre. But the unique angle and heights of the new outfield fences are expected to result in some difficult bounces for outfielders to appreciate.
An interesting wrinkle is that the Rogers Centre’s foul territory — currently the second largest in MLB — will be reduced to bring fans closer to the game during the next phases of the renovation. Not only will this have a positive impact on the fan experience – it will likely have a positive impact on runs scored. Fewer foul balls will lead to strikeouts, extending plate appearances and giving hitters extra chances to get pitches in play.
But more important to fans in the end seats at Rogers Center are the balls that don’t land in play. The balls like Springer that fall into the abyss. Starting next season, those balls will find a pair of hands.
“That won’t be a problem anymore. Every home run hit in the outfield will be in our group of fans who will be hanging out on the outfield fence,” Shapiro said. “It will be a drastically different look on Opening Day in 2023.”
Editor’s note: One of MLB’s 30 teams, the Toronto Blue Jays, is owned by Rogers Communications Inc., which also owns Sportsnet.
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