Get me into MLB parks, and I’ve been to two so far this season, and you get me thinking, this extra dash of protective netting that you see in most of these big-league parks, that seems like something we should do at The Dish.
Camden Yards has 26-foot-high netting extending from foul pole to foul pole, basically, the mack daddy of all netting situations, from my research.
Fenway Park’s netting goes 12 feet, 8 inches from Section 9 to Section 79, basically covering the infield.
I’ll be heading to Nationals Park in a couple of weeks for my first of many visits in the 2024 season; the netting there runs from one section inside each foul pole across, so, better than Fenway, a smidge less than Camden Yards.
I haven’t been able to find the exact height of the netting at Nats Park, despite my best efforts on the Google machine.
I took another approach to trying to track down the specs for Disharoon Park, but couldn’t get anybody from UVA Athletics to get back to me on that, so all I can offer on our home park is anecdotal, based on where my season tickets are – Section 104, the second section down the right-field line past first base.
The netting doesn’t protect us in 104, and where there is netting, it doesn’t look to be all that high – maybe 10 feet up?
What we have at The Dish is comparable to what they have at Fenway, which is on the low end of what you see, safety-wise, in MLB.
I put in an inquiry to the PR folks at UVA to find out if there have been any talks internally about extending the protective netting at Disharoon Park, and if so, what the projected cost might be.
Radio silence, so I guess the answer is, no, this isn’t a priority.
Which, that’s a shame, because it doesn’t seem like it would cost all that much.
I’ve Googled the heck out of this to try to get a ballpark figure (see what I did there?) on what it would cost, and the best guess I can come up with is, somewhere in the range of $150,000 to $200,000.
That’s not nothing, but at the same time, UVA is spending $13 million on a new scoreboard for Scott Stadium, which is akin to putting a gold-plated toilet-paper holder in an outhouse, but I get it, if all you have is an outhouse, might as well make it as nice as you can.
The problem with UVA football isn’t that we didn’t already have an oversized scoreboard; it’s that we don’t win a lot of games, and we have way, way, way too many empty seats.
Now, I can’t say the protective netting that we have right now at The Dish is a problem, per se, but all it’s going to take to become one is a line drive to the skull of one of the paying customers that should have bounded harmlessly off a net and back onto the field.
UVA has a medical school, an engineering school and a law school that are all among the tops in the country; ask the folks there what they think, maybe.
And then, I mean, come on, we’ve got alums who can cut a check for better protective netting and not bat an eye.
The only thing missing here, the only reason this hasn’t already been taken care of, is, nobody has brought it up.
Well, here we go.
Share
Chris Graham
