A ship in a ballpark? Here's what Delaware's Frawley Stadium could have looked like

• Ambitious plans for Frawley Stadium have resurfaced online, including a triple-decker beer garden and a ship in the outfield
• Amid turmoil and restructuring, the plans never came to pass
• The plans for the Wilmington Blue Rocks stadium remain a glimpse at what could have been

The pictures look alarming, or maybe exciting — a giant ship crashing into the right-field wall of Wilmington's Frawley Stadium.

The fantastical renderings, which washed up this year on the website of an Indiana architecture firm, look a bit like a Disney theme ride or a baseball disaster movie set in Wilmington — an alternate-universe rendering of the baseball stadium where the minor league Wilmington Blue Rocks play.

Next to the ship, a three-story beer garden comes festooned in patriotic colors, beneath a roof full of revelers. There's also a wrap-around concourse, where fans could see a game from any angle and take salutary laps around the field.

These pictures may have pointed context for Blue Rocks fans. For almost a decade, the Blue Rocks' owners have been promising a big future-forward stadium upgrade with the sort of wraparound concourse that Phillies fans take for granted at Citizens Bank Park — a big, spacious easy connection among all of the park's many offerings.

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An alert reader of The News Journal happened across these fanciful renderings of Frawley Stadium, which surfaced recently on the website of architecture firm Jones Petrie Rafinski, and wondered: Do these drawings depict the future of the Blue Rocks stadium? Will we finally get that wraparound concourse and the new stadium features we'd long been promised?

Well, perhaps not. Here's what we know.

Do these drawings represent the future of the Wilmington Blue Rocks?

Alas, these drawings are more likely a picture of an abandoned future — an alternate-timeline Frawley Stadium.

The renderings are almost a decade old, according to JPR architecture firm principal David Rafinski, who said the drawings may have newly appeared on their website because the firm regularly changes up its online portfolio. (A look at an internet archiving site showed that one of the Frawley Stadium renderings also appeared on their website in 2022.)

The Frawley plans appear to have been created in November 2015, according to some of the image file names.

This comports with Rafinski's memory of when his firm was commissioned by the Blue Rocks owners to reimagine a next-generation stadium with more room on its concourse, and maybe some apartments behind the outfield.

Those plans had been in the air since 2014, when new owners Clark Minker and Dave Heller took over a little minor league franchise called the Blue Rocks, and announced grand visions to "take this ballpark, which has great bones, to the next level."

By the next year, owners told Delaware Online/News Journal reporter Kevin Tresolini, those plans were taking shape as a $15 million-$20 million upgrade, with a 360-degree wraparound concourse connecting first and third base, they said. Maybe a kids' play area. Eye-catching features that could turn the Blue Rocks stadium into a true attraction. The new and improved stadium could come by 2016, maybe 2017.

"We were trying to solve some of the concourse issues," Rafinski said of his firm's proposal. "It was kind of crowded back there. And there were plans for apartment buildings in the outfield, a mixed-use development."

At that time, both funding and ambition were swirling headily around Frawley Stadium.

So what's up with that giant ship crashing into the outfield?

That big triple-masted ship on JPR's plans is a nod to the history of Wilmington, historically one of the eastern seaboard's great shipbuilding capitals ever since the Swedes began fashioning ships in the 1700s.

"We sat down and thought 'What's important to this area?" Rafinski said. "And so we were like, 'Let's go all the way back.'"

The ship is also a whimsical reference to the stadium's location along the Wilmington Riverfront, an area starting to see the fruits of a long revival as DPR put together its plans for the stadium. The team owners had also voiced a desire for a play area for children.

"So we just came up with a boat busting through the outfield wall, just to mess with the outfield wall a little bit, and make that a playground. I think... at one point. the sail was actually the scoreboard," Rafinski said.

What happened to these bold renovation plans for Frawley Stadium?

In 2015, the biggest obstacle was money. Projected renovations were budgeted at more than $15 million.

"Everybody’s hope is we can pull it off. It all comes back to money. Everything is positive. It’s just a matter of working out all the details and if we can raise the money we need. We don’t know what that is," said Joe McDonald, executive director of the Delaware Stadium Corp., which operates Frawley Stadium, in a December 2015 interview with Delaware Online/The News Journal.“We have a lot of different scenarios we’re working through right now,” team co-owner Minker said at the time. “We’re not there yet."

They never got there. After a lot of apparent momentum, the seven-figure renovation dreams eventually fizzled, Rafinski said.

"The plan kind of lost its legs," he recalled.

The team has in the meantime put $6 million into Frawley Stadium improvements, including upgraded seating, LED lights and a modernized videoboard, according to the team's website. But the more grandiose renovations were put off by the coronavirus, league policies and an uncertain future in the face of Major League Baseball's restructuring of the minor leagues, team owners told Delaware Online/The News Journal in 2023.

LAst year:Wilmington's Frawley Stadium is getting upgrades but will outfield concourse ever come?

“We still want to do it. We love Wilmington,” co-owner Heller said of the Blue Rocks' future at Frawley Stadium.

But the MLB instated several new requirements for minor league teams, including infrastructure improvements fans might never see, such as improved clubhouses; expanded athletic training and strength and conditioning rooms; and additional changing areas for coaches and umpires. Those improvements are where the team's money and energy have gone, according to Blue Rocks management last year.

Coincidentally, when The News Journal called Rafinski last week to ask about his firm's ambitious renderings for Frawley from eight years ago, he was in town to visit the stadium. But this time, he wasn't here to envision grand new plans for Frawley. He was here to audit its compliance with MLB's new requirements. (Rafinksi politely declined to comment on whether Frawley Stadium passed the audit.)

So what does it mean to look at these ambitious drawings now — an alternate future that never came to pass? The wraparound concourse? The triple-decker beer garden? The big boat crashing through the outfield?

They'll remain a tantalizing glimpse at what could have been — but also, maybe, what could be.

Matthew Korfhage is business and development reporter in the Delaware region covering all things related to land and money: openings and closings, construction, and the many corporations who call the First State home. Send tips and insults to mkorfhage@gannett.com.