Play Ball at Petco Park

New Baseball Stadium Has a Brick Building as a Backdrop

By Greg Aragon

The new $291 million home of the San Diego Padres will officially open on April 8 as a home team full of hope kicks off a new Major League Baseball season against last year's Western Division champs, the San Francisco Giants.

The 46,000-seat stadium, called Petco Park, was developed by San Diego-based Hines Interest and built by San Diego Ballpark Builders, a joint venture of the Clark Construction Group, San Diego-based Douglas E. Barnhart Inc. and Roel Construction Co. of San Diego. Petco replaces creaky Qualcomm Stadium, the Padres previous home for 30 years.

San Diego-based Petco Animal Supplies Inc. purchased the naming rights in January 2003 for $60 million for 22 years.

"This is the best stadium in the country," said Jim McLamb, project executive with San Diego Ballpark Builders. "[Qualcomm] is not in the same ballpark as Petco."

McLamb, who is also a vice president of Bethesda, Md.-based Clark, has been heading the project since it broke ground nearly four years ago. Construction was actually halted by the judicial system for 18 months until a local judge dismissed a law suit seeking to discontinue the project.

"From the construction manager to the Padres, from the builders to the subcontractors, we kept our focus and worked as a team from day one," he added. "You kill your snakes as you find them."

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He said one rattler reared its head in the first year of the construction phase.

"We had some steel erection and fabrication issues where the bolts didn't fit together exactly correct and we had to re-work them in the field," McLamb said just days before handing off the project to the owners. "We had Thornton Thomasetti out of New York (engineer) and American Bridge (structural steel subcontractor) out of Long Beach come down to the job site and work through the issues in a matter of days."

The key to overcoming problems like these is to have project team members "on-board" at all times because "you don't usually find those types of things until you're hanging steel in the field," he added.

Dan Neufeld, project manager with Perris-based Coreslab Structures, also had a nut-and-bolt perspective of the ballpark. "It was an extremely complicated job because it had lots of different joints and angles," said Neufeld, whose company employed 20 detailers and 50 production people to fabricate and erect the stadium's precast concrete risers, stairs, walls and slabs. "But everything seemed to fit together real well."

Petco Park is located on 18 acres in the South Embarcadero/East Village section of downtown, an area that San Diego's Centre City Development Corporation classifies as a "neglected neighborhood."

"I think it's an exciting new opportunity for the city of San Diego," said Derek Danziger, a CCDC spokesperson. "Not only is it going to provide a wonderful community resource for people to come down and enjoy baseball, but it is also going to prove to be a catalyst for that whole neighborhood."

The park features an asymmetrical playing field. For a better view of the game, all box seats in right and left field face the infield.

The stadium has open-air concourses -the trend in the circulation flow of today's ballparks. Its towers and terraces provide panoramic views of San Diego Bay, the downtown skyline, Balboa Park and the Cuyamaca Mountains.

Petco Park's exterior is clad in approximately 160,000 sq. ft. of "Padres Gold" sandstone that was custom-made in India. The stadium also has seven lounges scattered throughout the park and 55 spectator suites.

Its most unique aspect, however, may be the 95-year-old Western Metal Supply Co. building attached to its southeast corner, 334 ft. from home plate.

After a thorough renovation, the venerable red-brick building now houses the Padres Team Store on the first floor and provides views of left field. The second and third floors provide suites for group parties; the fourth floor features a restaurant with patio dining and great views of the field below. And on the roof, bleachers and standing space yield an uncommon perspective of the diamond 80-ft. below.

Anaheim-based Marina Landscape employed about 80 people to plant more than 8 acres of grass, trees and shrubs throughout the project. Stephen Guise, Marina's director of business development, said his firm's favorite part of the project is a 102,000-sq.-ft. playing field made up of sand, peat moss and Bulls-Eye Bermuda sod.

Marina also landscaped the bullpens, volleyball areas, indoor hitting and pitching areas, greenbelts in front of the stadium and a parking garage on the northeast corner of the stadium.

The firm installed hundreds of large, palm trees in hard-to-reach places. "We had to have multiple cranes to move some of the plant material and trees up into the third and fourth stories of the buildings," Guise said. "Some of these trees were in 60-in. boxes and stood about 20 ft. tall. That's no small feat."