Welcome to Snyder’s soap box! Here I pontificate every week on matters related to Major League Baseball. Some topics will be urgent, others might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and most will fall somewhere in between. The best thing about this website is that it is free and you are allowed to click. But if you stay, you will become smarter. It’s a money back guarantee. Let’s go.
Over the last week or so I’ve watched a fair amount of sports other than baseball. It was great. Baseball is my passion, but I love many sports. There was a lot of basketball and football, professional and not. I also watched a NHL game at Wrigley Field and I rather enjoyed the brick and ivy theme.
In the midst of my admiration, something I’d long known to be a strong opinion of mine became as clear as it’s ever been: Baseball has the best sports venues and it’s not even particularly close. Baseball stadiums absolutely crush arenas, stadiums, fields, etc. for other sports.
“Baseball stadiums are like cathedrals,” said the immortal Crash Davis in “Bull Durham” and while we can never prove it, we know it’s true. Have you ever heard of another sporting venue called a cathedral as if it were sacred? Yet we have that in baseball. Here’s where we can take a quick second to thank the Baltimore Orioles Decades ago, Camden Yards began to move away from the cookie-cutter that infected the game for a few decades. We then returned quite quickly to the era of cathedrals.
Entering these ballparks, one gets the distinct feeling of playing outside as a child with the potpourri of freshly mown turf and crushed bricks covering the infield dirt. No other sport offers this blend and it is perfection.
What you also find in sports like basketball and hockey are fans at the heart of the action. Not so much around home plate, but on both outfield lines and obviously on the outfield wall, the fans are right there (just ask Mookie Betts). This gives the sport an intimate dimension that you don’t get in football, for example.
Additionally, how many sports have the most exciting game feature being the ball entering the crowd? It’s a home run for us. Field goals and/or extra penalties in football sometimes go into the crowd, but usually they just hit the net. Balls and pucks that fall into the crowd in basketball and hockey are out of play. As are tennis balls and footballs that leak into the stands. A golf ball that lands in the crowd is out of bounds and costs the player a penalty stroke. We could go on and on. Yet in baseball, a fan can catch a game-winning home run and keep it.
Isn’t that cool?
Dimensions, including the awesome dimensions of the exterior walls in play, vary from stadium to stadium. It is 302 feet down the right field line at Fenway Park and 353 feet at Wrigley Field. In left field in Boston, it’s 310 feet, but there’s also a little thing called the 37-foot Green Monster wall. Wrigley’s wall is 355 feet, covered in ivy with a basket that runs a little above the playing surface to catch home run balls.
There is a 421-foot spread to right-center at Oracle Park, while Yankee Stadium is only 355 feet to right-center. Wrigley in left-center space is only 368 feet; Coors Field’s is 398 feet long. Dodger Stadium is only 390 feet from dead center while Coors is 415 feet and we were seeing 440 at Tiger Stadium. We might even go back to 483 in the Polo Grounds, where it sat just 258 feet down the right-field line.
You only get that in baseball. The dimensions of the playing surface are adjustable! Imagine how weird it would be if teams could put the end zone in weird places in football with irregular entry points. Yet we kind of have that in baseball. It’s a really fun quirk.
This is where I think baseball really shines. I realize there are venue rankings in other sports (college football and college basketball seem to be the biggest), but how often do you see people discussing stadium rankings in sports sports other than baseball? Baseball is no longer close to the most popular sport, but rough rankings still attract far more attention than comparing Lambeau Field to Arrowhead Stadium. Baseball stadiums are built around their unique features in a way that other venues simply cannot. Look at the way Oracle Park in San Francisco and PNC Park in Pittsburgh back their right-field walls down to the water, so much so that players can hit home runs into the surf.
This also extends to middle and high schools. Just look at a few These Backdrops Ranked by NCAA.com (Hello, Carroll B. Land Baseball Field, Point Loma Nazarene). There are some good ones here in their gathering of “weird” features. And when you get to school, get out of here. There’s all kinds of crazy stuff. I played on a field with a highway right over the left field fence (and, let me tell you, the 100th person at every game was yelling stuff out the window as they walked past, like “you suck !” or “hey, batter, batter.” was such original).
Baseball stadiums are becoming unique. This, along with everything else we’ve discussed, is why these are the best sites in all sports.