Kansas City, there I went

It was several years before I experienced my second baseball stadium.

One of the benefits of going to school in central Missouri was the relative proximity of two baseball teams; the Royals and the Cardinals were each about an hour and a half away.

In my first few years of school, I was more likely to make the trip to Kansas City. The Royals were never any good, but that actually worked in their favor. Kansas City had the best ticket deal - you could buy half-price upper deck seats for (I think) Tuesday and Friday games. In practice, this meant for $4.50 you could sit anywhere in Kauffman Stadium, since I never saw an usher in Kansas City. (This spring, I discovered there are some ushers restricting movement, but only to sections about halfway down the left and right field lines. Want to sit behind home plate or in the first row behind the dugout? No problem. Want to sit halfway between third base and the foul pole? No way. I don't get it.) As a Mariners fan, Kansas City also gave me a chance to see a team I cared about occasionally.

The first game I remember seeing in KC was when the Mariners came to town late in the season and Ken Griffey, Jr., was sitting around 50 home runs with an outside shot to hit 60 (in the years before Sosa, McGuire and Bonds blew past the then-sacrosanct number). A group of nearly 10 of us piled into a couple cars for the drive down I-70, picked up our cheap tickets and found seats about five rows behind the first-base dugout. (This was probably late in 1997, although I'm sure I also saw games there in the spring of 1997 as well.)

Kauffman is rarely held up as a shining example of baseball architecture. That the team has been lousy for the last 15 years doesn't help. Neither does the dated design, straight from the 70s.
But I've always thought Kauffman got a bad rap. If the stadium outlasts the new stadium building boom, in a decade or so its reputation will rise based on nostalgia. Suddenly, it's going to be one of the last remaining "old" parks and it's certainly got an unique design. Before too long, I see a backlash against the new crop of parks, all of which are based on the same Camden Yards-style new-retro aesthetic. (It's currently the ninth-oldest MLB park, according to Wikipedia, and in a few years it'll be the fifth-oldest.) And when the backlash comes, Kauffman is going to be uniquely poised to pick up admirers.

And even now, there's something to be said for the park. Unlike most of the previous generation of stadiums, it was built for baseball and it has a design unlike any other park.
The seats wrap around the field, soaring high behind home plate. The top of the stands gently curves down to the foul poles, and the seats just barely peek out above the edges of right and left field wall.
Beyond most of the outfield, instead of seats, sit landscaped grass terraces, pools and fountains which dance after home runs. The large crown-shaped scoreboard in centerfield with the lineups spelled out in lights isn't high tech anymore, but in this era of HD video screens replacing scoreboards, the older light bulb scoreboards have a fraction of the same appeal as the hand-operated boards. (A companion on a recent trip to a game expressed regret at the fact full-video boards would usurp the old clunky animations on the light bulb boards).

The best part of Kauffman's design is also its greatest weakness. Because there are no seats behind the outfield, just a walkway and some concession stands above the terraces, everyone in the park can see out, beyond the stadium itself. Such a view in a stadium gives fans a sense of place, a sense of the character of the area the stadium is set in.

Unfortunately, the area the stadium is set in is the wasteland along I-70 in the city's western suburbs, surrounded by nothing but bare concrete parking lots broken up only by Arrowhead Stadium at Kauffman's flank.

If this stadium was moved to the location of parks in San Francisco (water view), Denver (mountain view), D.C. (monument view), St. Louis (arch view) or even downtown Kansas City, where at least you'd feel like it belonged to the city and was a part of its environs, it would be hailed as one of the good places to see a ballgame. If it was in downtown K.C. it wouldn't be a must-see in the way Fenway, or Wrigley, or even the corporately-named park in San Francisco is, but it'd still have a reputation as a pleasant spot to watch baseball.

Instead, it's ignored at best. The only excitement I can remember over Kauffman was when I was in school and a fan was hit by a bullet randomly fired from a car on I-70. That's right, go to Kauffman, worry about drive-by shootings! Not even Tiger Stadium had that problem.

As my college career wore on, I was far more likely to make the trek to St. Louis and Busch Stadium than Kauffman. I knew more people from St. Louis, for one, and there were far more reasons to go see the Cardinals: better baseball, the promise of memorable moments. My best baseball memories are still in St. Louis. The only stand-out memory of Kansas City is driving all the way to the stadium to see Randy Johnson pitch for the Mariners only to have the game rained out without a pitch thrown.

Still, I've got a soft spot for Kauffman, and it's not just pity. I'm confident the Royals owners are too cheap to get a new park, so I believe in a years to come more people will come to see Kauffman as I do, as a pleasant place to watch a game without the too-shiny corporate conveniences of the modern parks.