One thing that differentiates baseball from the other sports is that the playing field varies from stadium to stadium. In football, basketball, and hockey, the field/court/rink is exactly the same. In baseball, no two fields are the same (not anymore, anyway). There's something beautiful about the standard baseball diamond with very nonstandard outfields.
As I've said, my goal is to get to (almost) every baseball stadium. I have no desire to get to every basketball arena or every football stadium. The only football stadium that I would make a point of seeing is Lambeau Field (if you want to go to a Packers game, let's talk). But now, we have 30 Major League Baseball stadiums, and I want to see most of them in person because they're all different. This wasn't always the case. Fortunately the cookie cutter stadiums are a thing of the past. When I was growing up, the Phillies, Pirates, and Reds all played in the same stadium. At least they might as well have. And there were several other teams that played in stadiums that also had just about the same dimensions and shapes (Expos, Brewers, Rangers, Braves, Astros, A's, Cardinals, I might have missed somebody).
The great thing about having very different stadiums is the way they affect the game. Let's take two very different stadiums, Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium. In Fenway Park, there's a huge right field. In Yankee Stadium, there's a huge left field. If Manny Ramirez had been a Yankee, he probably would have played right field. There's no way Manny Ramirez could have played right field in Fenway Park. Then there's the Green Monster. The Green Monster creates homeruns and takes them away. Because it's so close to home, you could hit a high fly ball that just gets over the Monster that would be caught for an easy out in Yankee Stadium. Or you could hit a hard line drive that would be a homerun in Yankee Stadium, but isn't high enough to clear the wall in Fenway. Check my San Diego post for my rant about Ted Williams when I figured out that he would have hit 672 homeruns if he hadn't spent five seasons in the military. Ted Williams was a left handed pull hitter in Fenway Park. How many balls did he hit that weren't homeruns in Fenway that would have been homeruns if he had played his home games in Yankee Stadium? Let's just say it was 3 per season (sounds reasonable enough, it has to have been at least that many). That would be another 66 hypothetical homeruns to add to the 151 hypothetical homeruns I already gave him for his military service, which would get us to a record breaking total of 738.
Football, basketball, and hockey are the same games no matter where they're played. Baseball isn't quite the same game in Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium. So yeah, I love that the Red Sox can have a 37 foot wall in left field, the Astros can have a hill in center field (even though I think that's pretty stupid), the Cubs can have a brick wall covered with ivy, and the Padres can build a stadium where you can't hit homeruns.
By the way, this website is really cool. I particularly enjoyed checking out the stadiums that were before my time (Ebbets Field, the Polo Grounds, pre-renovation Yankee Stadium).
So all this leads me to my next few posts where I'll rank the stadiums I've been to so far. I've been to 13 of them. Will my rankings be biased? Absolutely.
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