The Ballparks: PNC Park—This Great Game

But Pittsburgh was built on steel, and PNC Park wasn’t going to be constructed with stone alone. Along the exterior, navy blue steel does more than peak its way through the Kasota; it vertically slices through with stairways, peers over the top with an upper-deck concourse façade and breaks through at the park’s entry gates. Yet PNC Park’s true showtime elements of steel are its two rotundas, intentionally skeletal in scope and wrapped by an outer spiral walkway that feeds fans to and from their seats. One is prominently located behind the left-field foul pole and proudly shows off its alloy; the other, which welcomes fans behind home plate at the park’s main gate, is more hidden behind the stone—a request of the Pirates after the initial thought to expose the rotunda more openly to the outside looked too chasmal. That wasn’t all; both rotundas were originally drawn out with roofs later criticized as being too “futuristic.” HOK heard the commentary, said, “Okay, we get it,” and fixed things up.

The Pirates’ other directive to HOK was their desire to make the ballpark highly intimate, to keep even the furthest seats as close to the action as possible. Some considered this an ode to Forbes Field, but they forget that the first row at Forbes was once 120 feet behind home plate. At PNC, it’s a mere 51 feet. While that’s to be believed, the same cannot be said for the Pirates’ claim, on their own web site, that the furthest seat is only 88 feet from the playing field. Maybe 88 feet higher than the elevation of the field, yes—but the truth for the guy sitting in Row Y of the upper deck is that he’s actually more like 180 feet away from the action.

Excusing the exaggerations, PNC Park is intimate. It’s the first major league ballpark consisting of just two levels since Milwaukee’s County Stadium, built nearly half a century earlier. This was conveniently achieved by sliding the luxury suites under the upper deck, while morphing the middle “club” level seen at other new ballparks into the front of the upper deck, separated and sunken down a few feet from the cheaper seats above. The total capacity of PNC Park is just over 38,000, the second lowest in the majors; it’s a number arrived at not so much to heighten the intimacy factor but to also decrease supply and, therefore, increase the potential demand for tickets. Which works great, except when your team is losing year after year as the Pirates did for the first 13 seasons at the ballpark.

Staying Dry.

Being under the .500 mark is one thing; being underwater is something entirely different. The Pirates have been far more successful trying to avoid the latter. Aware that a swollen Allegheny River occasional wreaked havoc immediately around or even within two previous local ballparks—Three Rivers Stadium and Exposition Park (1891-1908)—the Pirates set out to make sure that PNC Park would always remain dry, even in the event of the biblical 500-year flood. Beyond the bank of the river, there’s the public walkway; beyond that, there’s a natural grass berm that slopes up some 10 feet; beyond that, there’s a second walkway covered by PNC Park limestone, opened by its signature arches and protected by an inner 10-foot wall that serves as the park’s last line of defense against invading floodwaters.

PNC Park has been carefully constructed so that potential floodwaters from the adjacent Allegheny River cannot spill over a series of defenses (as shown here beyond the riverwalk) and flood the field and lower seats. (iStock)

The expansive outfield concourse that stands atop the barrier wall is uncovered to maximize the glorious views of the Allegheny and downtown from most every seat in the house. The Pirates also chose to house their dugout on the third base side so the team would get the nicer view; one would have thought that it would have been wiser to instead plant the visiting team there, have them fall in love with the skyline and take their focus off the game at hand.

Other potential obstructions were also dealt with. None of the ballpark’s seven light towers, patterned after Forbes Field, were placed in center or right field so as not to block the view. The Pirates also had a vision, during construction, to use the open space to build a 70-foot long, 50-foot tall Pirate ship—much like the one built at the home of football’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers—and use it as a combo funhouse/baseball skills hangout for younger kids, with cannons to go “boom!” and scare the bejeezus out of the toddlers on board whenever a Pirates player went deep. Mutiny nearly ensued; the fans and media alike assailed the idea as too Disney-like. Tom Sokolowski, the director of the nearby Andy Warhol Museum, chipped in with his two cents and 15 minutes of fame by blasting the ship idea as a “cheesy fiberglass Good Ship Lollipop” that would “dumb down” the North Shore. Between the criticism and the lack of corporate funding, the Pirates mothballed the idea.

As with Oracle Park, home of the San Francisco Giants, PNC Park’s proximity and placement near water conjured up visions of players overshooting the right-field bleachers and reaching the Allegheny. But it’s a longer haul to the aqua than at Oracle; in fact, only twice has a player slammed one the minimum of 453 feet into the river, the first being Daryle Ward in 2002. Had the Pirates somehow held onto Barry Bonds all those years, he certainly would have been the first; when Bonds and the Giants first came to PNC in 2001, he belted six batting practice balls into the Allegheny on the fly. (In 42 real at-bats at PNC, the disputed home run king hit .429 with seven homers—all of them dry.) As it was, it took 13 years for anyone wearing a Pirates uniform (anyone, being Garrett Jones) to reach the river.

PNC Park has been carefully constructed so that potential floodwaters from the adjacent Allegheny River cannot spill over a series of defenses (as shown here beyond the riverwalk) and flood the field and lower seats.

With the skyline, river and Roberto Clemente Bridge providing a panoramic confluence of spectacle for PNC Park fans, it seemed almost inexplicable that Pittsburgh even considered other sites. But they did. Downtown locations were romanticized, but a viable pace of land was hard to come by. Outlying areas were dismissed as being too suburban. The floating ballpark concept, once idealized for Three Rivers Stadium, was once again floated but never set sail. The most serious discussion centered on the Strip District a half-mile east of downtown, where available land was aplenty and aging, elongated warehouses could provide a Camden Yards-like view. But the skyline won out. The North Shore location proved too clear a frontrunner.

Part of the lure of PNC Park’s ultimate location was that it could be accessed by any means. This has proven true, with the popular pregame exercise of fans walking from downtown across the Roberto Clemente Bridge, riverboat service ferrying folks from the far, Monongahela side of downtown and, starting in 2012, the long-awaited extension of light rail service across the Allegheny to the North Shore, with a stop between PNC Park and Heinz Field.

“You Were Right, We Were Wrong.”

As PNC Park gradually became reality and the locals began to get a strong sense that the venue was going to be something truly special, enthusiasm became unlimited. All 65 suites, some listed at three times the value of those at Three Rivers Stadium, were sold in six weeks—the fastest of any new ballpark to date. A franchise-record 17,000 season tickets were sold for the Pirates’ inaugural season at PNC Park, and 60,000 individual game tickets alone were sold on the first day they were available. One of the buyers who stood in line before sunrise had the last name of Yoho, as appropriate a name for Pirates fandom as Plank, Scallywag and Matey.

The rush for tickets led the Pirates to believe that PNC Park would follow in the footsteps of Jacobs Field, which had sold out game after game, year after year for the Cleveland Indians. Others weren’t so sure. “I don’t think they’ll pack the park,” said Pirates manager Gene Lamont as the team wound down their final season at Three Rivers Stadium. Lamont may have had an axe to grind; the Bucs had already informed him that his services wouldn’t be needed for their 2001 debut at PNC.

The crunch to build PNC Park successfully led to an accelerated construction schedule of 24 months; for one woman, that wasn’t fast enough. Weeks before the first official pitch, she somehow managed to drive her SUV onto the field and went for a spin, thankfully doing more damage to the warning track than the grass. She was arrested not only for trespassing but for driving with a blood alcohol content level of 0.20, twice the legal limit.

The more patient fans who legally filed into PNC Park for two sold out exhibitions fell immediately in love with the setting, the intimacy and of course the views; those in attendance who had voted against the ballpark were converted into apologists. They walked up to embattled mayor Tom Murphy and told him, “You were right, I was wrong.” One fan told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “I challenge anyone who was a naysayer to come here and see a game.”

The Pirates’ players thought a lot of their new digs as well, but worried that the panoramic eye candy would take the fans’ focus off the game. “The place has too many views,” lamented Pirates pitcher Terry Mulholland to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “Nobody’s watching us play. They’re all looking at the buildings, looking at the bridge, looking at the river, looking at other parts of the stadium. I don’t think anybody here even knows who’s on our team.”

For those who do focus on the action, they watch a ballyard that by and large favors the pitcher. If you’re a left-handed power hitter who pulls the ball, you’ll be fine; it measures 320 feet down the right-field line and 375 to the nearby gap. If you’re a right-handed slugger who favors the gap, you won’t be fine—unless you like a lot of doubles and the occasional triple. That’s because PNC Park registers 383 feet to the left-field gap and gets even deeper toward center, with a nook in left-center measuring 410 feet away from home.

And whereas Forbes Field had Greenberg’s Gardens, PNC Park has the Greenberg Wall, the backstop named after Pirates vice president Steve Greenberg—who thought it would be fun to drive catchers insane by placing the jagged brand of Kasota limestone behind home plate, forcing wild pitches to carom in unpredictable directions. (Greenberg, in case you’re wondering, is no relation to Hall-of-Fame slugger Hank Greenberg—for whom Greenberg’s Gardens were named after.)

The 21-foot, Roberto Clemente number-sized wall in right is home to perhaps the most detailed out-of-town scoreboard you’ll find anywhere in the majors. It doesn’t just show you the current score and inning of other games, it gives you the number of outs and number of men on base via a diamond graphic cornered by lights. Given its complexity, it’s hard to imagine that the scoreboard is manually operated by some guy in a booth, lest he be going delirious trying to keep up with the real-time progress of as many as 14 games at once.

The Buc Flops Here.

PNC Park might have been beautiful and new, but the Pirates who occupied it were nothing more than the same ol’ Bad News Bucs, losing the official home opener to Cincinnati, 8-2. The Reds’ Sean Casey, a Pittsburgh native who had a thing for famous firsts and lasts (he had the last hit at Milwaukee’s County Stadium and the first at its replacement, Miller Park), took things a step and many feet further when he drilled a home run for the first hit at PNC Park; never before had someone gone deep for a major league ballpark’s first knock. The ball was caught by a custodian working for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and he was willing to give the ball back to Casey—for $5,000. Grudgingly, Casey said no thanks. The ball was eventually auctioned off for $9,400.