Green monstrosities

Part 2

by Tom Scocca

But to the people who design new ballparks, the peculiarities of the action at Fenway are charming and exciting. Introducing an element of chance -- or "nonstandard game action" -- was an essential part of the idea behind the model for the new breed of parks, Oriole Park at Camden Yards, says John Pastier, a ballpark historian and consultant who advised the Baltimore Orioles on the project. The park, which opened in 1992 to overwhelming critical acclaim and perpetual sellout crowds, introduced the essential motifs of the neo-retro building craze. It revived the old city-lot pattern of architecture by being built flush against a gigantic old brick railroad warehouse, cramping the right-field wall. The rest of the outfield was laid out with straight lines and peculiar angles, emphasizing the resemblance to Fenway and its peers, while generous application of brickwork and ivy evoke the atmosphere of Wrigley Field.

The usual description of such features is "traditional." But the Orioles have no such tradition. Their glory years, from the mid '60s to the mid '80s, were spent on the symmetrical home field of Memorial Stadium, where they were known for playing clean, well-pitched ball, with scrupulous defense. Crazy bounces would have only detracted from it all.

When Oriole Park was being built, Pastier recounts, one of its biggest doubters was Hall of Fame outfielder Frank Robinson, then manager of the team. As Pastier tells it, Robinson objected to the uneven outfield measurements and expressed concern about his players' having to field the ball amid irregular contours. "You'd think he'd be responding to the possibility of excitement," Pastier says, adding that he felt that Robinson was "wearing his management hat." But Robinson starred on the old Orioles teams, for whom the ballpark was background, not part of the action. When the fans wanted excitement, he provided it with his bat.

The problem with letting the field dictate what happens is that it's hard to predict what the field will do. At Oriole Park, balls were expected to fly on out of the short right field and head for the warehouse, or else bounce excitingly off the oversized wall there. But the warehouse blocks the wind, so balls don't carry that way nearly as well as expected.

Instead, the soft spot turned out to be in the left-center-field power alley, where the wind blows out and the straight fence line shortens the distance; for a left-handed fly-ball pitcher, it may be as bad as Boston -- annual home-run totals for the park exceed Fenway's. The Sox shouldn't be surprised if their replica of Fenway's field, surrounded by different grandstands and possibly facing a new direction, plays completely differently.

And because the new school of design begins by seeking out features of the site that will constrain the shape of the field, it will be hard for teams to do anything about the unforeseen results. The old ballparks developed their shapes over time, moving fences in and out to reflect changing conditions, adding wind-blocking scoreboards or new grandstands. In 1940, for instance, the Red Sox decided to make home runs easier for a young Ted Williams by building new bullpens in what had been the deepest part of right-center field, reducing that dimension by a good 20 feet.

Oriole Park, built tight all around, has no such flexibility--indeed, Steadman, one of the park's few naysayers, claims that the field came out smaller than expected, and in a sort of secret homage to Fenway, the official distance measurements were exaggerated by six to eight feet. If the Orioles want to move the fences back to cut down on home runs (or on the park's other signature hit, the double that bounds off the rubberized warning track and into the stands), they'll have to jackhammer out a few rows of seats.

Maybe it would be worth all the difficulty to have a truly distinctive ballpark. But slavish devotion to making parks one-of-a-kind can have exactly the opposite effect. Pastier tells of preparing a brief for the Seattle Mariners, in which he was going to show team officials cut-out shapes of various new ballparks' outfields, to demonstrate an array of design options. Reviewing the cutouts, he says, he thought he'd made a mistake and copied Camden Yards twice -- "then it dawned on me that I had Camden and Jacobs [Field], in Cleveland." Though the two parks were designed with completely different arrangements of grandstands, bleachers, and scoreboards, Pastier says, the "irregular" playing fields came out almost identical to each other.

Nevertheless, the gimmicks continue to multiply, and to outdo one another in goofiness. The Texas Rangers' new Ballpark in Arlington was built on prairie, with no surrounding buildings to cramp its layout, yet an oddly placed bullpen makes the outfield wall jut inward (and an unnecessary, jumbo-size distance sign ensures that people notice the quirk). Pastier says he's seen one minor-league park where, for no apparent reason, the center-field fence bellies in. And the San Francisco Giants' proposed Pacific Bell Park will be only 306 feet up the right-field line, so that home runs can land in the bay.

Part 3

Tom Scocca can be reached at tscocca[a]phx.com.