Giants hope spring home brings them all together
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — The baseball folks with those Harvard and MIT degrees on their walls need to devise a new metric called WORB: Wins Over Replacement Buildings.
The Giants and the city of Scottsdale could crunch the numbers to see whether the tens of millions they spent to build a 40,000squarefoot clubhouse, office and training complex at Scottsdale Stadium might translate into a win or two during the regular season.
As pitchers and catchers
reported for their physicals Tuesday, workers were still applying cosmetic touches to a building that was designed not just for comfort — although the new locker area rivals that of many bigleague ballparks — but also to foster communication.
That’s where manager Gabe Kapler comes in.
Although Kapler was hired too late to have any major say in construction details, the new building that towers over the staff parking lot down the rightfield line was designed to bring everyone closer together, be they the manager, players, coaches, trainers, doctors and executives.
That has been a Kapler mantra since the day he first donned his Giants uniform: success through collaboration.
Jon Knorpp, the Giants’ official who oversaw construction, calls it a “communal space” meant to enhance “staff cohesion.”
If all that sounds newagey, well, the Giants have newage executives and a manager who truly believes in the formoverfunction design.
“I think everything will be more intertwined, and that’s by design,” Kapler said. “We want to bring departments together, and we want to solve problems collectively as a group. Then we can take advantage of a very diverse group of thinkers.
“We’ll have more open discussions instead of having a medical discussion over here, a strengthandconditioning discussion over there and a coaching discussion over here. We’re actually having those conversations together because they all impact one another.”
The threestory building was approved, financed and designed before the new front office, manager and coaches came onboard using principles adopted elsewhere. Even the clubhouse shape, a long oval, is designed to elicit more conversations among players than the old space, a square room with obstacles in the middle.
Scottsdale Stadium had the oldest facilities in the Cactus League. The cramped clubhouse, manager’s office and coaches’ room were downstairs. The training room was upstairs and the weight room and player dining area were in a large tent in the parking lot.
The Giants wanted an upgrade. The city wanted to keep the Giants happy because of the money they bring to Scottsdale every year. An agreement signed last year that encompassed all the construction will keep the Giants in Scottsdale at least through 2044.
The first phase costs $50 million, mostly from construction of the clubhouse structure, but also improvements to mundane elements such as wiring and pipes. Fans will notice a new entryway and a few subtle changes. Next spring, they will see far bigger changes to the seating and public areas of the ballpark, which is part of the second phase.
Moreover, the Giants next spring will move their minorleague facility from the substandard Indian School Park to Papago Park, the former A’s complex, which will have more fields and an improved clubhouse as well.
The city paid about $35 million of the firstphase costs. The Giants kicked in $15 million.
“We were at the point with our minorleague facilities and our majorleague facilities where we were so far behind competitively, and so far behind modern facilities, that we had to make some significant changes,” Knorpp said.
Kapler illustrated one simple change within the new building at Scottsdale Stadium.
His office sits between a hallway and the coaches’ conference room. Kapler plans to keep the front and back doors open most of the time so coaches, staff and players who need to walk between the hallway and conference room can use Kapler’s office as a walkway — the baseball version of Silicon Valley executives who plant their desks among the employee cubicles so they are not isolated.
The building has a twolevel weight room, trainers’ offices and a training room all interconnected, with a door leading outside to a secondary practice field.
Players will lounge in a thirdfloor space that is not yet fully furnished but already has two PingPong tables.
Shortstop Brandon Crawford, who entered the building for the first time Tuesday, can see its advantages.
“In terms of communication, it’s easier having everything right here,” Crawford said. “In the past, if you were in the training room or the kitchen and weight room, and they needed you downstairs, it was a hike to get up to that area from the clubhouse or the coaches’ room just to get a hold of somebody, whether it was taking groundballs early or even if they needed you in the game.
“It all makes more sense having things all right here together.”