‘Glass house’ on drawing board

Thursday, May 20, 2004 | 11:14 a.m.

While Major League Baseball owners met in New York to begin discussions toward relocating the Montreal Expos franchise, the first details emerged of a stadium that would house the team if Las Vegas wins the Expos sweepstakes.

On a day when the Virginia Baseball Stadium Authority -- one of Las Vegas' chief competitors, along with Washington, D.C. -- tried to strengthen its bid, a Las Vegas public relations firm issued its first press release on the subject.

The fact sheet, titled "Bringing Major League Baseball to Las Vegas," by Brown & Partners, noted a proposed $420 million, 40,000-seat, retractable dome stadium.

For more than a year, specific stadium costs have not been publicized.

HOK Sport, the Kansas City-based architectural firm that started the modern era of stadium design with Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore in 1992, has been retained.

In an exclusive interview with the Sun, an HOK executive revealed the materials that might highlight its construction, what it would look like and how it could reflect the city.

"It's beyond what's been built, that's the best way to describe it," said Earl Santee, a senior principal HOK architect. "It's the next generation of ballpark design ... it will be fairly transparent, with a big amount of glass.

"We will want people to drive by and be able to see into the building, see what's going on and see that there's a baseball game that day."

Think of a baseball version of mostly glass Reliant Stadium in Houston. Comerica Park in Detroit, SBC Park in San Francisco, Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia and Minute Maid Park in Houston all have outside areas from which passersby can view games.

All were designed by HOK.

Land behind Bally's and Paris Las Vegas, both Caesars Entertainment Inc. properties, has been pegged as the site. Caesars would act only as a landlord.

According to Santee, HOK is restricted from releasing any drawings or rough artistic stadium renderings that it has already produced.

"We have a concept design that is basically putting a very iconic building in Las Vegas," Santee said. "The guts of the building are traditionally laid out for baseball. It will feel very much like a baseball building.

"But for the first time, someone asked us to make it convertible for other events. So it will be a combination of a conventional baseball-seating bowl mixed with iconic Las Vegas."

That leaves no room, Santee said, for a brick foundation or motif that typifies traditional ballparks such as Camden Yards.

"I don't know how to describe it, but we won't put a lot of time into the skin of the building," he said. "It's more about image, on the brand name. It will be more about the bigger object than the detail."

To get to that phase, Teamscape and the Las Vegas Sports and Entertainment Co. (LVSE) must first acquire the Expos. Relocation was a 2 1/2-hour topic Wednesday during the first of baseball's two-day quarterly owners meetings in New York.

As expected, the nine-member relocation committee did not whittle a list of six Expos suitors to two or three. MLB president and chief operating officer Bob DuPuy, also a relocation committee member, said that will be achieved within a month.

Besides Washington and northern Virginia, the other candidates include Norfolk, Va., Portland, Ore., and San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Northern Virginia's group on Wednesday sent a letter to all 30 clubs stating that the group had completed funding plans for a ballpark near Dulles International Airport.

"We remain optimistic that we will identify the ultimate location of the Expos as early this season as we can," DuPuy told baseball's Web site. "We'll then work on the details of an ownership group and getting the process done, because we are entirely confident that the Expos will play somewhere other than Montreal for the 2005 season.

"Given what the process was and how we did it, obviously no community has been eliminated."

DuPuy said the Las Vegas groups made a "compelling offer" for the Expos, but he added that the city's strong link to gaming is a "serious issue."

Baseball's other 29 owners are running the beleaguered franchise, at a reported loss of about $30 million a year, for the third consecutive season. Forbes recently established the value of the Expos at $145 million.

The first Vegas-related press release and the stadium disclosures to the Sun countered the secrecy with which Teamscape and LVSE have conducted their business.

By contrast, a visit to D.C. by several relocation committee members two weeks ago was all but met with balloons and a parade. There were public comments made by all, including John McHale Jr., an MLB executive vice president and committee member.

"Unlike any other city, Vegas is extremely controversial," said a source, who requested anonymity. "There are a lot of quarters, whether moralists or whatever, who are not (so) gung-ho about Vegas. We (didn't want) to bring all the opponents out prematurely."

Teamscape and LVSE, formerly the Las Vegas Stadium Co., LLC, comprise a coast-to-coast team of investors who submitted a proposal of more than 100 pages to the relocation committee Friday.

Teamscape is led by entrepreneur Lou Weisbach of Niles, Ill., and includes Chicago Cubs broadcaster and former pitcher Steve Stone. Its main mission is the formation of a potential Expos ownership group.

LVSE is mainly concerned with stadium construction. Financier Robert Blumenfeld, of Pembroke Development in New York, is its primary investor. As he has for months, Blumenfeld declined to comment Wednesday.

Mike Shapiro and Eric Blatt of Centerfield Management Group, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, have been the main representatives for the Las Vegas factions in negotiations with Corey Busch, Selig's special relocation envoy.

The Brown & Partners press release highlighted the groups' proposal to permanently house the Expos in the new stadium by the 2007 season, meeting an MLB demand.

It also cited the "continued growth, unprecedented visitor volume and (an) ability to expand baseball's reach, popularity and revenue" as some of the Las Vegas advantages "not offered by any other city."

Tapping into the city's tourism industry, which Brown & Partners estimated at more than 200,000 on any given day, is considered a major attraction by supporters of the project.

According to one insider, its production was a major step that reflected the growing media interest in following the Las Vegas groups' efforts to land the Expos. "There had to be something in writing that contains the basic information," the insider said.

If the odds end up favoring Las Vegas, something like a small-scale, slick model might soon be unveiled.

"There will be a high degree of architectural lighting and some expressive steel," said Santee, the HOK architect. "All I can tell you is, we have a conceptual design for the established site we've talked about.

"We're excited about the opportunity of the design, and what it could be. In some ways, I think it's the next generation of ballparks."

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