The Third Floor | Don't Fence Me In, pt. 1 (49.17)

[mragland]

4.12.2049 – Unincorporated Los Angeles County

Grant is late for the meeting. He finds a chair against the wall of the conference room, intending to keep a low profile. He doesn't get a good look at who is in the adjacent chair, but sits down anyway, and … 'damn it,' he thinks, 'it's Bob.' Grant does not care for Bob. Bob from marketing. Bob the ever cheerful and well-rested. Bob who would not shut up about the need for popular, marketable players, so the team could sell more Stars-licensed baby booties or whatever.

Grant decided to become a very attentive listener as the speaker began his PowerPoint presentation, to avoid any interaction with Bob. Grant glanced at his phone to see what the subject of the meeting actually was. 'Examination of Future Construction in and Around Dunn Field Using Computational Fluid Dynamics and Remedial Measures,' he read.

“Balls,” he said, louder than he intended to. Grant folded his arms and settled in.

“We're not going to go very deep in the weeds of the physics behind the report,” said the speaker from the engineering firm, Dr. George Takashi, P.E. “We address some of that in the appendices for the curious. The illustration we are now looking at shows Dunn Field in its current configuration, along with the new hotel, mixed use tower, and parking deck in their completed state. Here we assume wind speed and direction of a typical day, around 5 mile per hour from the west. The blue lines indicate the flow of air. Obviously, we are concerned with what's happening above the ballpark, so let's zoom in on that area.”

The image changes. A featureless Dunn Field, the color of tapioca pudding is surrounded by an unruly set of blue lines. Grant furrows his brow. Takashi promised to not go into the weeds, but there was some technical talk before he brought it home.

“This might look a bit alarming, but keep in mind that the wind speeds are fairly low. We're not in Kansas, after all. Nevertheless, what you see here are a set of vortices over the stadium. The net effect of this air flow, with respect to baseballs in the air, would be negative. You could expect balls to fly not quite as far as they would have otherwise. We've worked with your architects to come up with a plan to offset this effect on batted balls. And with that, I'll hand this off to Amara.”

Amara was another engineer. She worked for the design firm the club basically had on retainer at this point. She presented their proposed changes to the stadium.

“We were tasked with keeping your stadium's park effects within certain parameters once neighboring buildings are finished early next spring,” said Amara. “In order to achieve this, we have completely remade the outfield area.”

Her slide was a rendering of Dunn Field after proposed changes. There were some gasps in the room when it came on. It was quite a change.

“We've had to do away with a great deal of outfield seating in order to open up the stadium and encourage desired air flow. The benefit of this is that it does reveal a view of the Sierra Pelona Mountains to the northeast. Billboard advertising, scoreboards, and video board are moved down. This design calls for removing the electronic scoreboard and replacing it with a manual scoreboard. This goes for the out of town scoreboard as well. The batters eye, and the outfield wall in straight away center field are now one in the same. The height of the center field wall is twenty-five feet, similar to old Chase Field in Phoenix.

“This portion of the outfield wall can double as a billboard between innings with the installation of manually operated signage, so there is no net loss of advertising space.”

“Thank, God,” said Bob, quietly.

Various images of the proposed new outfield flashed across the screen in succession.

“The left-center and right-center walls are slightly shorter at twenty-three feet,” continued Amara. “Left field and right field walls are six feet high to the poles. Fence distances are adjusted to bring park effects within desired, symmetrical parameters. You can see a summation of distances and our simulated park effects on page seven of the report. I'll go ahead and open the floor for questions.”