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Like the old stickball days

Fans can swing away at the Trop's newest interactive attraction.

By MARY JANE PARK
Published May 17, 2006

Creators of the new interactive batting cage area in Tropicana Field's left-field concourse wanted a grittier approach.

"We wanted to try to capture the old spirit of baseball in this modern baseball stadium,'' said John Vitale, a St. Petersburg artist who collaborated on the concept with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and Mountain Dew officials.

The soft-drink company's current marketing strategy focuses on extreme sports, skateboarding, graffiti and other urban icons.

Vitale, who grew up in New York, said the artists' goal was to re-create a street scene in which youngsters who can't afford to attend Major League Baseball games conceive their own entertainment.

"We sort of deconstructed the sport,'' he said. "We're giving people a reminder of, like, 'Play where you are. Go out in your back yard, go back in your alley, and play the sport, whether you get paid for it or not.' If you didn't have a $5-billion stadium, what are you going to do? You don't have to make a billion dollars.

"We were trying to bring it back to the streets. We took the stickball approach.''

Darcy Raymond, the Rays vice president of branding and fan experience, said team officials began to conduct market research as early as last September with numerous fans, including a segment they call "Fred Fanatics,'' males who spend considerable time watching batting practice in the third-base area of the field.

They prefer "a very classic, traditional baseball experience,'' Raymond said, "a very old-school type of atmosphere."

From those findings, the organization decided to turn the left-field concourse into a street scene, with alcoves devoted to what Raymond calls "a classic baseball experience," areas that focus on Louisville Slugger bats, Topps cards, game trivia, and other activities.

Vitale and his brothers, Paul and Joe, and fellow artists Craig Anderson, Bask, Heinz Hinrichs and Frank Strunk III "scoured the streets of St. Pete'' for materials to use in the batting cage project.

The area features graffiti, dented hubcaps and trash can lids, corrugated metal walls, cardboard, a bed frame, netting, traffic cones, a vintage Lincoln Continental with a police light flashing behind it and a "chandelier" fashioned from old basketball shoes.

There's a rusty shopping cart that the artists purchased from a transient and filled with Mountain Dew cans.

Even in Left Field Street, the area inside the Trop where they assembled the work, was reminiscent of some New York neighborhoods, Vitale said, with the down escalator suggesting a subway descent.

The noise from stadium workers' rearranging seats and operating golf carts nearby complements the clangs and bangs of a gutter retrieval system created by Strunk, who is a metal sculptor.

The Vitale Brothers' work is familiar to Tampa Bay area residents in St. Pete Beach, at Mazzaro Italian Market, at Carmelita's Mexican Restaurants and in numerous homes and businesses where they have created murals and faux-finish wall effects.

They painted the new brick and concrete block textures on the Trop's concourse walls. In the left field area, John Vitale said, "the bricks get a little dirtier" as fans near the batting cage. "The light at the end of the tunnel is the bad side of town," he said, "the wrong side of the tracks at the very end.

"That's where our energy came from. It was just really cool to have that window of opportunity open to our local artists. We're still doing some tweaking on it. When it's all said and done, it's going to be one of the highlights there. I'm not bragging, but I am, actually.

"Never have (the Rays) given somebody this creative license. You know you're doing some good art when you've got about 80 percent of the people just loving it, and that's great. You've also got to evoke some controversy'' while respecting the corporate approaches of Mountain Dew and the Rays, who he said had "a decent budget in place" for the work.

The area is "real haphazard-looking. It brings out a little more aggression when you want to hit the ball, a little more urban feel.''

The interactive areas open an hour before games begin.

[Last modified May 17, 2006, 09:06:17]