Welcome to Snyder's Soapbox! Here, I pontificate about matters related to Major League Baseball on a weekly basis. Some of the topics will be pressing matters, some might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and most will be somewhere in between. The good thing about this website is that it's free, and you are allowed to click away. If you stay, you'll get smarter, though. That's a money-back guarantee. Let's get to it.
This last week or so, I've watched a good amount of non-baseball sports. It was great. Baseball is my passion, but I enjoy many sports. There's been a lot of basketball and football, both professional and not. I also watched an NHL game at Wrigley Field and rather enjoyed the brick-and-ivy theming.
In the midst of my admiring, something I long knew was a strong opinion of mine became as clear as it had ever been: Baseball has the best sports venues and it isn't even particularly close. Ballparks absolutely crush arenas, stadiums, fields, etc. for other sports.
"Ballparks are like cathedrals," said the immortal Crash Davis in "Bull Durham" and while it's nothing that we could ever prove as a fact, we know it to be true. Do you ever hear of another athletic venue being called a cathedral as if it is sacred? Yet we have that in baseball. Here's where we can take a quick second to thank the Baltimore Orioles from decades ago for Camden Yards starting the shift away from the cookie cutters that infected the game for a few decades. We got back to the cathedral era rather quickly after that.
Walking into these ballparks, there's a distinct feel of playing outside during childhood with the potpourri of the freshly mowed lawn and crushed brick covering the infield dirt. No other sport has that mix and it's perfection.
Something that you also get in sports like basketball and hockey is the fans right on top of the action. Not so much around home plate, but down both outfield lines and then obviously the outfield wall, fans are right there (just ask Mookie Betts). It gives an intimate feel to the sport that you don't get in football, for example.
Plus, how many sports have the feature of the most exciting play being the game ball entering the crowd? That's a home run for us. Field goals and/or extra-point kicks in football sometimes go into the crowd, but usually they just hit a net. Balls and pucks going into the crowd in basketball and hockey are out of play. As are tennis balls and soccer balls leaking into the stands. A golf ball ending up 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.
How cool is that?
The dimensions, including funky outfield wall dimensions that are in play, vary ballpark to ballpark. It is 302 feet down the right field line in Fenway Park and 353 feet in Wrigley Field. In left field in Boston, it's 310 feet, but there's also a little thing called the 37-foot wall Green Monster. Wrigley's wall is 355 feet away, covered in ivy with a basket that leaks a little over the playing surface to catch home run balls.
There's a 421-foot gap in right-center in Oracle Park, while Yankee Stadium is as short as 355 feet in right-center. Wrigley in the gap in left center is only 368 feet; Coors Field's is 398 feet. Dodger Stadium is only 390 feet to dead center while Coors is 415 feet and we used to see 440 in Tiger Stadium. We could even look back to 483 in the Polo Grounds, where it was only 258 feet down the right-field line.
You only get this in baseball. The dimensions of the playing surface are flexible! Imagine how weird it would feel if teams could put the end zone in weird spots in football with jagged entry points. Yet we kind of have that in baseball. It's a really fun oddity.
This is where I think baseball really separates itself. I realize there are venue rankings in other sports (college football and college basketball seem like the most prominent), but how often do you see people arguing stadium rankings in non-baseball sports? Baseball isn't close to the most popular sport anymore, but ballpark rankings still garner so much more attention than comparing Lambeau Field to Arrowhead Stadium. Baseball stadiums build around their quirks in a way that other venues just can't. Look at the way Oracle Park in San Francisco and PNC Park in Pittsburgh back their right field walls right up to water, to the point that players can hit home runs into the waves.
This extends to colleges and high schools, too. Just look at some of 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 "oddball" features. And when you get down to high school, get outta here. There's all kinds of crazy stuff. I played on a field with a highway just over the left-field fence (and, let me tell you, the 100th person every game screaming stuff out their window while driving by like, "you suck!" or "hey batter batter batter" was soooooo original).
Baseball stadiums get to be unique. That, along with everything else we've discussed, is why they're the best venues in all of sports.
