Somewhere along the way, Major League Baseball stopped building ballparks and started installing stadiums. Maybe it was the glut of money from luxury suites. Maybe it was the arms race of scoreboards and sushi bars. Maybe it was just inertia. But whatever it was, it killed the vibe.
Every new stadium is the same now. Brick facade. “Great sightlines.” A tribute to local cuisine. Suites stacked like cordwood behind home plate. A kids’ zone where no one’s watching the game. The outfield walls are cookie-cutter curves, designed by committee to ensure fairness and optimize ad space. There’s always a team store the size of an Apple Store. There’s usually a rooftop bar where no one knows the score.
We call them ballparks, but they’re not parks anymore. They’re hospitality suites with a warning track. Frankly, it’s boring.
Baseball used to be weird. Ballparks used to be characters. Fenway has a Monster. Wrigley has vines. Dodger Stadium has catacombs. But the new ones? They’ve got a Shake Shack.
What happened to asymmetry? To personality? To a home field that wasn’t just familiar, but frightening? It used to matter where you played. A deep center field in Detroit was a different game than the canyon in right at Yankee Stadium. You adjusted your roster, your swing, your pitching plan. Now, you just plug in the GPS and pray for good weather.
So let’s get nuts.
If Salt Lake City gets a team - and make no mistake, they’ve got a real shot - don’t give them Camden Yards Lite with a ski lodge behind center. Give them something holy and insane. Build left field into the side of a mountain. Let the ball disappear into alpine fog. Maybe the warning track ends at a temple. I’m talking spires, bells, incense, the full experience. Call it the Church of Baseball. You hit one out to left, you better mean it.
Nashville? That city sings, so let it sing loud. Build an outfield wall that is a stage. I don’t mean a cute backdrop - I mean a functioning performance venue. Summer nights under the lights, with a band on the wall and baseball in the gap. Picture Kacey Musgraves finishing her set and watching a double clang off the bass drum. You want to fill a stadium 81 nights a year? Give it a heartbeat. Let the music rattle the bats.
Portland could go full moss-and-rainforest with a center field wall draped in living greenery. Make it humid and slow, a park where doubles go to die. Put a waterfall in the bullpen. Hire a druid as the groundskeeper.
Charlotte? Build the ballpark like an old NASCAR track and leave turns three and four in the concourse. Use the banking as seating. Every foul ball screams past a retired pit box. Give the mascot a car with no muffler. If baseball wants fans, meet them where they are: loud, local, and unrepentantly strange. Midget races (the cars, I mean) when the team’s on the road.
We don’t need more perfect parks. We need quirks. We need stories.
Bring back the Polo Grounds dimensions: 485 to dead center. Put it in Vegas and watch launch-angle revolutionaries cry in the dugout. Right center’s a zip code away; left field line is a poke. The ball ricochets like a pinball and nobody can blame Statcast. Make Aaron Judge run 450 feet just to wave at a triple. Make pitchers earn their ERA the hard way.
Or go Baker Bowl. Give us a stadium so tight it needs a waiver from OSHA. Right field wall? Forty feet tall, 275 feet away. No one bunts anymore because it’s always 11–10 by the sixth. Pitchers fake injuries on travel day. Hitters set new personal bests just taking BP. Make it loud. Make it dusty. Make it mean.
Not everything has to be optimized. We’ve data-driven ourselves into a cul-de-sac. Fans know the spin rate but couldn’t describe their park beyond “nice views.” Teams play in tech demos with retractable roofs and HVAC systems. It’s sterile. It’s safe. It’s not what baseball is supposed to be.
Build me a park where the foul poles lean. Where second base is higher than home. Where the wind shifts every night and the shadows bite in the sixth. Give me a park that should get it’s own episode of Welcome to Night Vale. Give me heartbreak. Give me the kind of stadium where curses are born. Let the NFL have boring round stadiums that surround a defined rectangle. There’s weird high school fields all over the country. Own it.
This isn’t nostalgia. This is character. Ballparks are supposed to matter. They’re supposed to shape the game. Camden Yards matters, largely because of the warehouse. Outside that, it’s kind of standard, depending on where they build the left field wall in a give year. Petco Park matters, because they didn’t move the building in left, but they could have made center field epic. Even Oracle, linear corporate name and all, gave us splash hits and seagulls. But most of the new batch were just clones. You can swap logos and no one would know.
So here’s the challenge to the next expansion city, to the next ownership group, to the next architect with courage: break the rules. Please. Break the mold and build a park that breaks games. Don’t give us another beige, retractable, climate-controlled, 38,000-seat compromise.
Give us something unforgettable. Something stupid. Something sacred. Something ours.
Give us baseball’s soul back.