KANSAS CITY — Kauffman Stadium remains a gorgeous place to watch a ballgame.

Sunk into a sea of asphalt in Jackson County, Missouri, some things at The K have changed since it opened in 1973: the name, the color of the seats, the spaces beyond the outfield walls. Essential parts remain: the fountains, the crown-shaped scoreboard, the upsloping green of the hills that give the home of the Kansas City Royals the most pastoral feel of any Major League Baseball venue.

The K is situated in the Truman Sports Complex, next to Arrowhead Stadium, where the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs have played since 1972. Your feelings about that location might depend on how you view the relationship between baseball and the cities in which it is played. In Kansas City, that relationship might be about to change.

In 2021, so long ago that Bobby Witt Jr. had not yet debuted in the majors, Royals owner John Sherman announced a search for a new venue. The search continues. If all that mattered were the aesthetics of watching a game, or the drive-and-park convenience, the Royals would stay put. But in 2025, that’s not enough.

“We’re after more than a ballpark,” said R. Brooks Sherman Jr., the Royals’ president of business operations (no relation to John Sherman).

The aspirational model these days is the Truist Park/Battery project in Cobb County, Georgia. Teams want the ballpark and the additional revenue streams of an adjacent village.

That requires land, but if just any land would do, the Royals would not be looking elsewhere. The area around Kauffman Stadium, 7.8 miles from downtown Kansas City, has never developed. Location matters. While the Royals haven’t declared where they want to go, they have been clear about what they want.

“The Battery is the best example in our minds,” Brooks Sherman said. “But you look around the league and you’ve seen all these (examples). San Diego, what it did for the Gaslamp (Quarter)) there. Washington, D.C., Colorado are great. We want to be additive to wherever we go. We want the live, work and play environment.”

The live, work and play dynamic. Those other venues have that but in different settings, from the urban core (San Diego, Denver) to a rehabilitated blue-collar district (Washington) to the suburbs (Atlanta).

These are contexts the Royals are sifting through now, making them a test case for ballpark development trends. If The Battery is the model, just where should that model be turned into reality elsewhere?

In “Ballpark: Baseball in the American City,” author and architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote that a ballpark, “evokes the tension between the rural and the urban that has existed throughout American history.”

That tension has played out through the different eras of ballparks in the game’s history. It’s playing out now in Kansas City. How might this drama be resolved here, and what might that mean when other MLB teams look to the future?

Here are three Battery-inspired models the Royals are considering, and how they currently work — or could work — for your favorite team.

Model 1: The suburbs

Royals’ option: 119th and Nall, Johnson County, Kansas

Sherman’s announcement about a stadium search reeled off an urban-centric wish list. But the Braves’ project throws a monkey wrench into any assumptions about what that means. For the first time in a long time, a baseball team moved away from the city and not toward it. The Braves wanted the full live, work and play effect dynamic of a city, so they built their own.

This puts nether regions such as 119th Street and Nall Avenue in play. The Johnson County site once housed the campus of the Sprint World Headquarters. According to WalkScore.com, the area has a transit score of zero.

A few months ago, an affiliate of the Royals acquired the mortgage of the property, though it has yet to assume ownership. The team is giving itself options.

The 119th and Nall location is about 19 miles from Kansas City’s city hall and sits 37 miles from Kansas City International Airport. To get there, you drive. If this arrangement becomes the new standard, that’s a lot of driving. Kansas City, not just the suburbs, has been car dominant for decades, far from a unique story among baseball’s markets. Every city wants transit, and to varying degrees has acquired it, but in most cities cars remain king.

“We don’t have the greatest public transit, so we have to make it easy,” Brooks Sherman said. “It’s a driving environment. We have to make it easy for folks to get in and out. But we also think that the come-early, stay-late aspect of this, with a development that surrounds the ballpark, will be helpful for that.”

According to our urban-centric location metric (see accompanying chart), Kauffman Stadium ranks 29th among current venues (and last in walk score). Moving to this even-more-distant location would drop the Royals into last place. They might stay there forever, unless the vagabond Athletics decide to move into the middle of the Nevada desert.

When teams choose a site, they are projecting. One projection is what cities and their surrounding communities will become in the future. Another is how people will choose to get around, and what will fuel their ventures. Options are good. Multimodal transit is the ideal. You also need people to want to go there — and not just for baseball. A key part of the Battery’s success, and what other markets want to replicate, has little to do with the revenue from game days.

“It’s not the 81 days you’re playing baseball, it’s the 284 days you’re not playing baseball,” said architect Lamar Wakefield of Nelson Worldwide, whose design credits include The Battery and who is working on the reimagining of the area near Citizens Bank Park in South Philadelphia. “We know how to do that. We’re place makers. Everyone wants to reach as many in their fan base as they can.”

Any team thinking of making a move to the suburbs for its own Battery has to take a careful look at what is different about its market from Atlanta, which in some studies has been measured as the most sprawled-out large metro area in the country. Atlanta also has a metro-area population nearly three times that of the Kansas City region. The dynamics are not necessarily transferable.

Ballparks take on the characteristics of the area around them and serve as icons of their cities. A lack of aesthetic association with the city of Atlanta is, along with the absence of transit, one of the chief nitpicks with the Braves’ project. You feel it when you visit from elsewhere. If you stay on site, you feel as if you were never in Atlanta. This is why Goldberger coined a word to describe the Truist/Battery project: “Urbanoid.”

Nevertheless, if the Royals follow the Braves’ example and flourish, baseball’s owners might not worry about any of that. They will worry about finding the space to create a live-work-and-play baseball Shangri-la of their own.

Teams this model currently works for: Braves, Rangers

Whether or not you think the Braves should have left the Summerhill neighborhood — which has boomed since the team left — there’s no questioning whether the Truist/Battery project has succeeded, during the baseball season and outside of it.

The Rangers’ suburban locale makes more sense than in any other MLB market. The downtowns of Dallas and Fort Worth are both growing, but they are about 33 miles away from each other. The power brokers in Arlington have talked about urbanizing the area around Globe Life Field, but it’s awfully low density. Still, this location makes the most sense for the most people in one of the country’s most entropic, car-centric regions.

Teams this model could work for: Angels

The Angels have been in the same location for nearly six decades and have been working to redevelop the site for years. They recently extended their lease at Angel Stadium through 2032 and surely hope to have a Battery-like dynamic in the works by then. Baseball has worked well in Anaheim for the most part, and there’s no reason to think that won’t continue in a future iteration.

Other than this subset of teams, it’s hard to see the suburban option as preferable for any other market, including Kansas City.

Model 2: In the city, but not downtown

Royals’ option: North Kansas City

When we think about baseball’s classic venues — Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, Ebbets Field, Forbes Field, Tiger Stadium, Crosley Field, Shibe Park, Polo Grounds and others — they have been neighborhood parks.

This model fell from favor as American cities became increasingly surrounded by suburban sprawl and cars became the dominant mode of transit. Fenway and Wrigley were the only classic parks spared the eventual wrecking ball, and many still mourn the loss of the others.

North Kansas City, where the Royals have reportedly submitted a term sheet that outlines their needs, would be a throwback to the neighborhood park era.

The potential site is 3.6 miles from Kansas City’s city hall but it’s in Clay County, not Jackson County. The site’s renderings spotlight the downtown skyline a few miles to the south. Sports architects are urbanist by nature, so you often see that kind of setting in their imaginings. Each type of site suggests something unique.

“They’ll all be different because a lot of it’s just the demands of the client,” said Earl Santee, the legendary architect from Populous, whose résumé reads almost like a register of baseball’s highest-profile stadium projects. His next stadium project will be No. 20. “My job is for them to pick a site and then I’ll give them the best possible project.”

The Clay County rendering depicts a version of North Kansas City that isn’t currently there. It’s a blue-collar neighborhood with a population of less than 5,000, per the 2020 census. There isn’t as much industry as there used to be, so there is a lot of post-industrial property ripe for development to the south, toward downtown. Enter the Royals.

The town itself is charming in an almost classic Main Street sort of way, even though it is nestled into an urban location only a few miles from downtown. The streets are dominated by independent businesses, one of which is the Kansas City institution that is Chappell’s Restaurant & Sports Museum, where you see, among other relics, one of the Oakland Athletics’ championship trophies, a gift to restaurant founder Jim Chappell from eccentric A’s owner Charlie Finley.

Chappell’s would probably benefit by getting the Royals as a neighbor, but, then again, the Royals would be opening venues of their own. That kind of omnipresence is both the blessing and the bane of having a 21st-century baseball team as a neighbor.

“It’s 81 days and hopefully two and a half million fans,” Brooks Sherman said, regarding the transformational potential for the park development, wherever it goes. “Why not show them the best that you have and build around it and make it this vibrant environment? Be additive to the community all year long.”

A positive example of this is Nationals Park and the blocks around it, which rehabilitated a neglected area. This would have been a virtue of the ill-fated Howard Terminal proposal that once seemed the destiny of the then-Oakland Athletics.

“Some of the proposals that they were working on for the Howard Terminal waterfront site in Oakland were actually pretty good,” Goldberger said. “The idea of combining a ballpark with the larger transformation of an urban neighborhood that would be transformed anyway over time is actually a really good one.”

The North Kansas City site is not much to see now, just empty parcels and massive surface parking lots. There are potential issues in the need for significant infrastructure upgrades and more transit options. The basic reality is that the Royals’ arrival would transform the character of the area.

Baseball can certainly work in post-industrial neighborhoods like this, but the citizens there have to be on board. The Royals might decide they want North Kansas City, but the people there must want them back.

Teams this model currently works for: Brewers, Cubs, Dodgers, Giants, Mets, Nationals, Phillies, Red Sox, Yankees

These are all pretty self-evident successes. The South Philly location of Citizens Bank Park puts the Phillies in this class, and given the development underway around their venue and those of the city’s other major sports teams, they’ve only scratched the potential of the site.

American Family Field in Milwaukee merits special mention. It’s more suburban than urban in design, with plenty of surface parking to accommodate the renowned tailgating culture of Wisconsin sports fans. But it’s not that far from downtown. The Brewers probably could develop some of the parking area and beyond, but it has worked for them pretty well as it is, ballpark village or not.

Teams this model could work for: Athletics, Diamondbacks, Marlins, Rays, White Sox

The now-abandoned Battery-style Rays proposal in St. Petersburg would have fit this model, though the market is forever going to be a geographic puzzle since the two largest municipalities (Tampa and St. Pete) are connected by a long bridge.

At present, it’s hard to understand what the White Sox’s plan for a post-Rate Field future might be. The White Sox could have seized upon the chance to anchor The 78 development alongside the Chicago River, though for now that ship seems to have sailed. A ballpark on that property would have tied them with Toronto atop the urbanity ratings by our urban score method.

Miami’s LoanDepot Park is a fascinating stadium that hulks over Little Havana and doesn’t connect that well with the largely residential surrounding area. The transit scores for the venue are disappointingly low given the relative density of Miami.

Model 3: Downtown

Royals’ option: Washington Square Park

From the start, John Sherman cited “downtown baseball” as a possible outcome of the Royals’ stadium search. He told reporters, “Wherever we play, the process will result in meaningful community impact that’s real and measurable and result in economic growth and economic activity that benefits this region. The other criteria is that we have a positive impact on the quality of life for the citizens in Kansas City, with a particular focus on those underrepresented parts of our community.”

While the challenges of the Royals’ quest have kept pretty much every vacant lot in the Kansas City metro area in play, Sherman’s initial thoughts express an urbanist perspective. This is nothing new. Baseball and urbanism — or the rejection of it — have always gone hand in hand.

“All roads lead to downtown,” said Quinton Lucas, mayor of Kansas City, who advocates for a downtown venue. “And frankly, they’re all roads that can get you out of downtown efficiently after a game.”

Presumably, the Royals still have multiple possible downtown locations under consideration, but lately the buzz has been around Washington Square Park. From an urbanist’s perspective, it’s the full package.

Kansas City’s downtown remains a work in progress, but it is in a far better place than it was at the beginning of this century. The population in the city’s core has more than doubled during that time (estimates currently range in the 32,000 to 40,000 range) and is now larger than those of the downtowns of other MLB markets in more heavily populated metropolitan regions, including Atlanta. And there is plenty of room left to grow.

Washington Square Park sits on the southern edge of the Crossroads Arts District, across the street from the Crown Center to the south and Union Station to the west. Main Street would run along the west edge of the park and features an expanding streetcar line. Amtrak rolls into and out of Union Station across the street. It’s likely that a move to the Crossroads would eventually put the Royals in the upper third of urban-centric parks.

This is an alluring vision and a possible blueprint for other markets because it imagines stitching a ballpark and the traits of a Battery-esque development into the spine of the city.

“We want the place to be active 365 days a year because we want the retail and the food and beverage to be successful year-round, not just when we’re in town,” Brooks Sherman said. “The way you do that is the density.”

Crossroads advocates have gone to great lengths to make the case that there is ample parking near the site, and that’s important. Still, the nature of the mixed-use baseball development should inherently ease parking concerns. With things to do around the ballpark, people come and go at different times, and anyone for whom transit is a better option than driving will use transit. This would not be an option in the suburbs in most markets, and certainly not in the Kansas City region as things currently stand.

“If you are trying to plant your flag as the center of culture, conversation and discussion in a community — as well as revenue, by the way — then you go to the densest areas that have all of it,” Lucas said. “I think that is downtown Kansas City, like it is a central business district corridor or at least the central cultural corridor of any American city.”

The footprint of the potential ballpark works well enough, but the site is constrained by the constraints of the street grid. Analysis done by Washington Square Park proponents shows the site is as big as or bigger than the footprint of several current venues, but a Crossroads-located park might feature a fairly short porch to right field. That might be fun for Vinnie Pasquantino.

The Royals are targeting a somewhat smaller capacity than The K, around 34,000, and a potential venue here could have much of the intimacy of the classic parks — including rooftop views from adjacent buildings. The site represents a design challenge, but Kansas City — as the world’s sports architecture mecca — has a home-field advantage in that regard. The outcome could be dazzling.

“It fits like a catcher’s mitt,” said architect Steve McDowell, principal at BNIM, who put together the renderings for the Washington Square Park site. “You can just kind of drop it in there so gently, which gives fantastic views downtown, to the north and all around, really.”

Teams like the Royals want their park to accelerate the progress of an improving downtown, not become a bubble within it, which is what has arguably happened in places such as St. Louis.

“While it might be a uniquely designed footprint, that also might give it a sense of character, like it’s been here forever,” said Brett Posten, co-founder of Highline Partners, a Crossroads-based strategic branding consultancy. Posten co-created the Washington Square Park website and has worked to catalyze community support around the effort. “Fenway is weird, and it’s great. There’s just cool stuff that happens in weird baseball, so we have the opportunity to create something with a little bit of character.”

This approach, if the Royals seek it, could become the next aspirational model in ballpark projects. It’s The Battery but in a city, not the imitation of one. Much of this takes some imagination, but whoever got anywhere without a little of that?

“There are a few goals to any stadium project,” Lucas said. “I think they are all met downtown. I’m not sure they’re met in all other locations. One is to be able to get site control of an area that allows live, work and play opportunities. You absolutely have that.”

Teams this model currently works for: Astros, Blue Jays, Cardinals, Diamondbacks, Mariners, Orioles, Padres, Pirates, Reds, Rockies, Tigers, Twins

It’s hard to argue that any of these downtown venues — all less than 2 miles from their respective city halls — have been disappointments. Not all have the full Battery-like dynamic going on just yet, but all of them could iterate in that direction over time. That’s been the stated goal of Orioles owner David Rubenstein, to generate development around Oriole Park at Camden Yards, the venue that kicked off the back-to-downtown phase of ballpark construction.

Teams this model could work for: Brewers, Rays, White Sox

The White Sox should still try to get involved with The 78, where MLS’ Chicago Fire are planning to build. In this case, soccer is leading the way, not baseball.

For now, in Kansas City, the ball is in the Royals’ court.

“People are (excited), and they want to help,” Brooks Sherman said. “And we said, ‘We’re getting there, and we’re going to need your help when we get to the right spot.’ We’re working hard, and we’ll get there in the right way.”