Shane Deegan is a self-professed “baseball park guy.”
He’s also a visionary … and a layer of bricks.
The 42-year-old grew up loving baseball. Deegan was regularly inspired — not as much by the play on the field, but by the parks themselves. He and his dad made trips to parks across the country including Boston’s Fenway Park, Chicago’s Wrigley Field and Camden Yards in Baltimore.
But Deegan has always had an eye for Seattle’s T-Mobile Park, even before it existed.
One day in 1994, Deegan and his dad trekked to the North parking lot of the Kingdome with a measuring wheel in hand to see if a baseball park would fit. “We were like, ‘We could do it, we could really fit a park here.’”
Twenty-eight years later, Deegan’s vision can be seen from his living room couch in Mukilteo, where an intricate Lego replica of T-Mobile Park now is on display next to the Christmas tree.
From the banners draped over the right-field bleachers to the mowed stripes in the outfield grass, Deegan’s 12,000-piece creation showcases the Mariners’ home park in staggering detail.
“When my daughter and I started building Legos a few years ago, I always had my eye on it,” Deegan said of his T-Mobile creation. “It’s something that would be a challenge on several different levels and then matching that passion for baseball parks made it a perfect thing to build.
It’s not exactly Ray Kinsella’s “Field of Dreams,” but as soon as Deegan built — and shared — his “masterpiece,” people came in droves to his Twitter page to see and share the Lego T-Mobile Park.
Deegan says he’s surprised by how many have latched on to his creation — with the initial tweet drawing more than 4,000 likes.
With the help of his 6-year-old daughter, Dottie, Deegan said the endeavor took about 60 hours to complete. The two worked with a pile of plastic pieces collected from years of Lego sets — and supplemented that with specific pieces purchased online.
What’s more impressive is the fact that he built the model park from scratch.
“A lot of the Lego MOC [My Own Creation] community, a lot of the designers will digitally design it and render it first so you can kind of go back and work through it digitally,” Deegan said. “The fun for me is puzzling it out with the pieces I have in my hands and going, ‘I’m gonna build this’ and get to a point where I go, ‘Oh, it didn’t work. I’ve got to rework that part; I’ve got to break it back down and try it again.’ ”
Deegan says he measured the dimensions of the left- and right-field foul poles, and from there “it’s just eyeballing, and a lot of trial and error.”
From the smooth green tiles of the bleachers and the studded plastic bricks of the outer wall, the details in Deegan’s display are impressive. If you look closely, you’ll even see a gold Lego man outside the home plate entrance meant to replicate the statue of Ken Griffey Jr.
“It’s a lot of Google images,” he said. “I looked through the seat map to get the dimensions right and just sort of flipped through my phone to find a picture of the east side of the stadium in the back.”
Deegan says the challenge — and the fun — is “how to articulate something that doesn’t otherwise exist in the Lego space.”
The roof, which moves on a track, posed a challenge. He initially wanted the top to move on its own with a motor, but the roof was too heavy. Deegan says he has to move the roof by hand — a detail that noticeably irks him.
“I might reopen this one and build it a little bigger to build the motion stuff I wasn’t able to do,” he said, already imagining his next project.
For Deegan, whatever frustrations the project presented were overwhelmingly outdone by the joy of spending time playing — and creating — with Dottie.
After a 25-year break from building Legos as a kid, Deegan says he got back into building a couple of years ago when he bought his daughter her first set. Deegan, with Dottie by his side, has created various Seattle-themed projects such as Pike Place Market, Husky Stadium and Dick’s Drive-In. His next endeavor likely will be the Paramount Theatre.
“It became something we could do together,” he said. “It’s incredible parallel play. We can both exist in our own world at our own level and have fun together.”
Of course, Dottie’s attention span isn’t quite as long as her dad’s. And her goals might differ slightly.
“Her challenge to me all the time is, ‘When do we get to play?’ And I say, ‘Well, the building is the play. We’re doing it,’ ” Deegan joked. “In her mind she’s like, ‘No, no. I’ve got an Anna and an Elsa and a horse. Let’s really play.’ ”
The good news for Dottie? She gets to play with the creations all she wants once they’re finished.
“When I finish a build, when we’re done with it, I turn it over to her and say, ‘OK do whatever you want, this becomes yours,’ ” Deegan said.
Deegan’s Lego T-Mobile Park will be getting a small remodel soon, as T-Mobile staff sent him magenta lighting for the sign. But until then, the creation will serve as Elsa’s castle.