Green monstrosities

Part 3

by Tom Scocca

The most disturbing product of the postmodern spirit promises to be the Milwaukee Brewers' planned Miller Park, conceived as an outsized replica of the Brooklyn Dodgers' old Ebbetts Field -- only with a high-tech retractable dome on top. The idea, Pastier says, is as ungainly architecturally as it is logically; the engineering requirements of the dome, he says, mean that this re-creation of a legendarily cozy park will be "an immense building," covering more ground than any other ballpark in history.

Miller Park's sprawl may be extreme, but it points up the oldfangled new parks' most striking departure from the ballparks they're supposed to be modeled on: the buildings, despite architects' talk about the coziness and "intimacy" of their designs, are in fact behemoths. They are being built according to new principles that effectively do away with the traditional ballpark experience. Monster or no Monster, the Sox' next ballpark will be nothing like Fenway.

For starters, if Oriole Park is any guide, it will be a lousy place to sit and watch a ball game. Or rather, it will be a wonderful place to sit -- at Oriole Park and the others, comfort is the fans' undoing. Today's seats are roomy and widely spaced, so there aren't as many of them per row as there are at older ballparks. This is one of the chief reasons Fenway can't be modernized. With up-to-date seat spacing, the current structure wouldn't hold anywhere near as many people as it holds now.

In other words, fewer and fewer people are taking up more and more space. At the same time, the slope of the grandstands has grown more gentle, and stadium designers have taken to putting the upper decks behind the lower ones, so no support pillars obtrude on the lower-deck fans' view. (Instead, thanks to the gentle slope, the heads of the people in the next row block the view, as in a movie theater.)

Once you add in extra room for luxury club-level seating and skybox suites, Pastier says, a fan in the last row of a new park is 50 percent farther away from the action than he would be in an old park (at the Chicago White Sox' new Comiskey Park, he adds, the front row of the upper deck is farther away than the back row was at the old Comiskey). Even old Cleveland Stadium, always described as "cavernous," put the average upper-deck spectator 47 feet closer to home plate than Jacobs Field does.

So what do the new parks deliver, if not a good look at the game? Certainly not spirit. Oriole Park, despite (or perhaps because of) its baseball-intensive décor, has the atmosphere of a prosperous shopping mall. Passions run low (so that fistfights, a constant at Fenway, are unheard of). This may be due to the fastidiousness of the place, or to the physical distance from the action, the subduing effect of the spread-out grandstands. Though the park is usually sold out, the crowd numbers don't translate into noise and energy the way they did in the tight concrete bowl of Memorial Stadium.

Whatever the cause, it's clear that the excitement that was supposed to be sparked by the irregular field layout is in short supply. To make up for the apathy, management has opted to engineer the ballpark experience a little more: the scoreboard gives the fans applause cues, and ubiquitous clusters of loudspeakers pump in loud music and sound effects during the game -- even while runners are circling the bases. Even the rare spontaneous ovations, as for a game-tying home run, are likely to be backed up by the strains of the theme from Rocky.

Boston baseball purists can tell themselves such stunts wouldn't go over here. But new parks aren't aimed at purists; arguably, they're not aimed at baseball fans at all. The biggest problem for fans at Fenway is the lack of affordable bleacher seats, but Pastier notes that newer parks are devoting less and less space to bleachers. And the sort of people who want bleachers are the 34,000 people who already go to Fenway. The Sox already have their money; what they want is to get more from the next 15,000 people.

In baseball's current big-money economy, Pastier explains, the goal is to maximize per capita spending at the ballpark, not crowd noise. The difference between old and new ballparks, he says, is like the difference between motels and hotels: one provides a basic service -- a bed for a night, a seat at a sporting event -- while the other offers customers a chance to spend money on a wide range of amusements and services. New parks are not athletic venues, they're entertainment destinations.

Of course, the Sox could fend off the worst of this by sticking with Fenway, warts and all, for a while longer. Pastier says that if team ownership had more modest financial goals, they simply could add a small upper deck -- the seats there, he says, would likely have the best view in the house, and could be sold as premium, club-level seating. Such an addition, he adds, could offset the hulking 600 Club, improving the park's looks. It wouldn't do much to alleviate the shortage of cheap seats, though, and the park would remain murder on left-handed pitchers and a haven for oafish sluggers. But at least Sox fans would be used to those problems.

Should management be set on a new ballpark, though -- and they certainly seem to be -- they still have a chance to break away from the herd, and away from Fenway's history of sloppy baseball. If they insist on delving into the past for inspiration, they should remember that Boston has another baseball tradition: "I think it ought to look like old Braves Field," says Steadman. Now BU's Nickerson football stadium, the former home of the Boston Braves was 402 feet up the lines when it opened in 1915, and 550 feet to the deepest part of center. "It was immense, it was tremendous," Steadman says. "Bring back old Braves Field. Then you'd have a ballpark."

Field of schemes

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