SN Another challenge looming is renovating Rogers Centre to fully leverage the building. Where does that sit, and from a broader perspective, with Rogers Communications Inc. [which owns Sportsnet], planning an upgrade of its wireless network, is there the money for simultaneous large-scale projects?

MS I can’t answer a question for Rogers. What I can tell you is there’s an understanding from Rogers ownership, top to bottom, that there’s an appreciation of the need as well as an understanding that’s probably one of the biggest levers if not the biggest lever on the Blue Jays business model.

We have both an infrastructure need and a business-model need to renovate the stadium. We have presented proposals for that. They have been embraced by Rogers executives and by (CEO) Joe Natale and (CFO) Tony Staffieri, and everyone down. It’s just a matter of determining funding sources and timing. That’s not within our control, so we continue to operate the business and understand it’s a huge amount of money and we are the only major-league baseball team that is asked to completely privately finance a renovation of this scale.

I think our fans need to understand that. Every other of our 29 competitors receives some public funding for renovations of this scale, or bigger or smaller, even new stadiums. This burden falls completely on our ownership, so in light of that, it’s a big undertaking and one that needs to be thought about carefully in light of all the priorities out there.

SN The proposals you’ve made, have you presented multiple renovation plans at different price points?

MS Yes.

SN What’s the minimum you need for the business-model to function?

MS There’s no scenario where you’re not talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s just a question of the multiples of the hundreds of millions.

SN What’s the minimum you need to do to the Dome to sufficiently leverage the building?

MS Rather than give you a list of projects, I would say it’s taking the building from a 1989 experience, which was largely one experience from every seat with the only difference being the vantage point or perspective to providing a different set of experiences for different types of fans. One set of experiences is for the family that wants to come and provide a range of entertainment for their kids, but still allow the adults to watch the game; another from the young, vibrant, single group of people who live within walking distance of Rogers Centre that want to come to what is a really a cool bar that happens to be inside the building; to another set of fans that want to watch the game from a baseball purist perspective behind home plate from base-to-base and score the game; to another set of fans who are corporate and want to walk over from Bay Street to entertain clients and have a very premium corporate experience.

We don’t currently have the depth or differentiation between experiences. We have one experience for all those people and they have to adapt their own experience to that. Ultimately, to compete in the entertainment landscape and make it a compelling fan experience, regardless of whether we win or lose, even though we know winning will be the most important lever, we need to modernize our building, we need modernize our fan experience. Within each one of those buckets could be a series of projects as well as just infrastructure to keep the building standing.