Customer Reviews

Stadium Games: Fifty Years of Big League Greed and Bush League Boondoggles

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New York and most every major city has been through some sort of stadium game of late. But no state has such a rich history of sports hijinks as Minnesota. Weiner does both an entertaining and informative case study of that would be interesting and enlightening for any fan, reporter or elected official in any city that has a franchise or is trying to lure one. Weiner shows that the games off the field are as fun to watch as the ones on.

This 500 page book could easily have been half as long, and twice as effective, with a good editor. Weiner is a newspaper reporter that obviously became drunk on the idea of not being held to time & length limitations as he usually is in the newspaper. He is very repetitive and it takes away from some of the very sound ideas that he proposes. Skim this one.

Jay Weiner caught hold of an idea that has plagued Minnesota sports for almost 50 years: the fight for stadiums. Minneapolis/St. Paul just can't keep teams in their respective areas, and apparently build ugly, uninteresting stadiums for professional sports teams to play in. Jay Weiner could've made this book great, but he, like the city of Minneapolis, couldn't keep the fans coming back for more. He tends to drag along and introduces some irrelevant players in the games for Minnesota sports stadiums. There are some very good sequences, but he tends to build some of them up with mindless dribble. He did seem to have the inside track on all stadium related information, and used that to his advantage. He also kept someone not from the state of minnesota or a non-fan of the minneapolis sports scene interested in the teams. But, in the end, Mr. Weiner just can't keep me entertained. The story just doesn't get you excited to turn the page,and I tended to skip pages of useless information. I'm sure somebody out there would enjoy this book, but they would probably have to be a fairly bland person.

This book is a primer for preservationists. Pittsburgh lost Forbes Field,Oakland--a classic baseball only venue..Pitt just demolished Pitt Stadium, & 3 Rivers stadium, a 'cookiecutter' of Cinn.,Ohio will be gone..for TWO! more such.Only major city to lose 3 stadiums