Nationals Park

All summer, I've had this post started and sitting in my draft folder. I guess at least this way I'll get it out before the World Series is over:

Washington, D.C.'s new baseball stadium - Nationals Park - opened this spring, giving the capital's new team a brand-new stadium after three years of playing in the crumbling confines of RFK Stadium. The beginning of the season brought high hopes for a decent team and a signature park.

Unfortunately, neither wish was fulfilled.

The team has been miserable, hit by injuries and a lock to have triple-digit losses. The park isn't quite as bad as the performances it has housed, but it, too, certainly is a disappointment.

The pre-opening promotional materials hyped the park as continuing in the best tradition of the post-Camden Yards "retro" parks. But the best features of the truely old parks and the new crop of imitators are the intimacy and charm - two aspects completely missing from Nationals Park.

The D.C. area offers many architectural gems the park could have played off. It could have incorporated aspects of the Capitol dome, the only major landmark visible from the stadium. It could have put in subtle classical touches, maybe some columns to mimic the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials. Alternatively, it could have made the most of its location in a former industrial area, and gone with an exposed brick-and-steel construction which has worked for several of the other new parks.

Instead, the decision was apparently made to go with another option. The architects appear to have toured the city of Washington, and decided the most exciting style along the streets were not the classical symbols of government. Instead, they went with the buildings that housed the actual workers of that government - the park appears to have been based on the style of the hulking concrete Federal offices that blot the downtown landscape.

The outside of Nationals Park is a solid wall of white concrete rising out of the street, broken only by a few windows on the back side of the team's offices and luxury suites. On the one side where the seats end at street level, offering a view outside the stadium to the surrounding streets, the single-worst aspect of the park destroys what could have been a redeeming street plaza.

Right where the left-field upper deck ends, in the middle of what would have been the line of sight toward the Capitol and the National Mall, stands a five-story parking garage.

It is the most visible feature of the park for the vast majority of fans who arrive at the stadium via the nearest Metro station, and it's just the most glaring example of the way good things have been overshadowed by the areas where the stadium doesn't live up to the potential.

The view of the Captiol, for instance. Thanks to the parking garage in left-field, the dome is only visible from a handful of the upper upper-deck seats. The team also made a big deal of the decision to plant a row of cherry trees along the plaza in left field, which would in theory provide an iconic view in early spring when the pink-blossomed trees dominate the scenery along Washington's streets. In reality, the handful of trees are too few to draw the eye, except as out-of-place oddities.

There are bright spots, especially in the conveniences for fans.

There are enough different concession options that I heard someone describe the stadium as a "baseball field surrounded by a food court." The description wasn't meant to be complimentary, but when you attend a game as a fan it is nice to have more options than just the usual hot dog and pretzels. The options include several local vendors and there are some decent values to be had (for a stadium).

The high-def scoreboard is large enough for a clear picture everywhere in the park, without dominating the scene. The display got better as the season went along - at first, it was occasionally hard to find such obscure information as the score of the game, but by the end of the season they found a way to include the necessary information along with the flashier offerings.

In the end, though, what stands out about Nationals Park aren't the things that work well. It's all the ways in which the park could have been good, but just isn't.

nearing the end

Sunset at Nationals Park
Originally uploaded by slack13

I'm out out Nationals Park for one of the last games I'll see this season (my personal countdown has me working four more games).

I won't really be sad to see this season gone - the Nationals have rarely been pleasurable to watch, and I'm about done of the long days I end up with when I work a day job and a night game. When I do a full three-game series, like this week, my sleep total takes a serious hit.

But I've had a chance to be out at the park for probably more than 20 games this summer, and I've also seen games in Baltimore and Seattle - a good summer all around. I need to put up a few more park reviews, I suppose.

A preview of the Nationals Park review: this photo shows one of the nicest aspects of the park - the view of the Capitol - and also gives a glimpse of the worst aspects of the park - the parking garage in left field that blocks the view for everyone that's not in the upper upper deck.

surprise

Saturday was perhaps the first true spring day of the year in D.C. With the sun shining and clear skies, we decided it was a good time to go check out the construction progress at the new baseball stadium.

We expected to take a look through the fence, walk around the perimeter and be on our way. As we came up to the main outfield gates, there was one other man standing there who had the same impulse. As construction workers walked around us, generally ignoring our spectating, one came over and asked if we wanted to see the view from the seats.

Turns out, it was Greg O'Dell, CEO of the D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission. He was out on a Saturday checking out the park (and, I think, waiting for someone with more clout than us who wanted a personalized tour). Apparently he had a few minutes of downtime, or he was hoping to build some PR karma, and decided to give the random fans a personal, comprehensive tour of the stadium under construction.

The view from the outfield seats turned into the view from the suites, progressing from the simple club level to the box suites to the super-exclusive club down behind home plate, complete with a lounge with one plexiglassed wall overlooking the players' batting cage underneath the seats and, in another area, the press conference room. Then down further, to an area without a field view. The locker room, the training area.

The stadium seems generally ready for Opening Day, although there was still plenty of construction debris to clean away. I imagine there will be slight odds and ends that don't quite get finished up by the first game, but the important stuff - the playing surface, the seats, the scoreboard - certainly look good.

I should be seeing quite a bit more of the stadium this year as a fan and as working press. The unexpected preview wasn't a bad way to spend Saturday afternoon.

Coors Field

In honor of the Rockies' World Series run, another in my intermittent series:

I don't remember the first time I saw a game at Coors Field. I'd guess it was in spring of 1998, or possibly the year before. I'd guess I've probably been to more games in Coors than anywhere except the old Busch Stadium, since I tended to stop in Denver on my way back and forth between home and school when I was in college.

I know for sure I was in Coors for the
1998 All-Star game and Home Run Derby. We sat in the very top row deep above right field for the All Star game. I don't remember much about the game itself. I do remember a few moments from the Derby - Mark McGuire hitting a ball 500 feet off the front of the Rockpile center-field bleachers, Ken Griffey Jr. coming out after he'd announced he wouldn't be competing, a few Jim Thome home runs landing just one section away from us.

Coors gained notoriety for the thin air and home runs (and now the humidor) but the stadium itself doesn't get enough mention.

Sure, it's just one more of the retro-wave parks (and when I was in Cleveland, Jacobs Field seemed to be a near-exact copy, with a white stone exterior instead of brick). But Coors has character and a sense of place.

The stadium's location was near-perfect. It sits on the edge of downtown. A walk to the park is through LoDo (lower downtown) amid bars, lofts and a crowd of fans. But being on the edge of downtown (behind the park are railroad tracks and the interstate) means the large parking lots behind and below the stadium don't break up the landscape.

The best touch, however, was the decision not to add upper decks above the left field seating, giving a clear view of the Rockies past the scoreboard. The row of purple seats in the upper decks, marking one mile above sea level, are a nice touch as well.

The stadium is spacious and clean, without an over-abundant feeling of shiny, plastic surfaces you can get with some of the newest parks. And I've heard tell you can pick up some Rocky Mountain Oysters if you look hard enough, although I've never found the particular concession stand.

Until the last month or so, the Rockies have rarely been a team which seemed destined for greatness, although they were rarely completely lousy. The consistent mediocraty brought the crowds down from the record highs of the first few years, but the crowd at the games is generally knowledgeable and quick to cheer. I'm sure the atmosphere this weekend will be electric (although if Colorado drops Game 3 it'll be a pretty fatalistic crowd on Sunday). I'd like to be among the throngs inside, but if I have to make do with being part of the throngs outside it won't be so bad.

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.

kingdome

Mariners scorecard
Originally uploaded by slack13

When I started my posts on baseball stadiums I'd intended to eventually get around to writing about every park I've attended a game in. As so many other things, I keep putting these off. Not sure if they'll be of much interest to anyone else, but I like the excuse to dredge up my memories.

The first game I ever saw was in 1991 at Seattle's Kingdome, in Seattle. The stadium left much to be desired. It was a bleak concrete building with artificial turf on the field and artificial lighting flooding down from the ceiling. But for a 13-year-old baseball fan who had started to fanatically follow the game on TV and had been immersed in books on the history of the game, it was more than good enough.

It would be several more years before I'd have the experience of walking out the tunnel to my seats and seeing the sun gleam off an emerald grass field. But my first game impressions are still shining and glorious in my memory.

If I saw the same game today, the atmosphere would mostly inspire apathy. It was a Wednesday afternoon game (I didn't actually remember the day of the week - certain details have been supplied by the wonders of internet box scores). The official attendance was about 19,000, which seems high. Even then, I knew the crowd was sparse; in my mind I think 12,000 would be a better estimate. We arrived well early and took seats behind third base (I wonder what those seats cost at the time?). I'm not sure if we actually were there for batting practice, but I remember having a lot of time to take in the details: the expanse of seats, the crisp colors of the uniforms, the size of the scoreboard. We picked up souvenir miniature bats. I ended up with a scorecard which I still have. I can go back and look over my attempt at keeping score (I was lost on how to denote a first-inning pinch runner). I don't remember the details of what happened on the field. Before I found the scorecard I knew the game was against the Red Sox, I knew Ken Griffey, Jr. hit a home run and I was pretty sure the Mariners won.

I remember even at the time not having a great grasp on the play-by-play; leaving the stadium, I was a bit disappointed in my brain for not remembering everything exactly, and instead having more general impressions. A few moments, however, were vivid then and still easily accessed. The crowd noise going from indifferent to what (at the time) seemed insanely loud after Griffey's home run. We were right in front of the Red Sox bullpen, and crowded with other kids along the front rail to try and get autographs. I had no idea who Tony Pena was, but I knew that was the name of the Red Sox' backup catcher who was signing autographs, and who stopped just before he worked his way to us.

(I also learned a lesson that day, one my parents probably would prefer hadn't been as long-lasting.
My father parked our minivan in a two-hour spot during the game. When we returned to the vehicle, there was a ticket on the windshield. Us four kids (aged 13-7) who simply understood tickets were bad, were concerned. Our parents deflated our anxiety by remarking, "No one pays parking tickets in a city they're not from." Or at least one you're not going to soon return to. It's a lesson I've adhered to.
My parents got notices of the ticket for many years after. Seattle would send them a notice every year or two a year saying the ticket was delinquent and adding penalties to the total. Until one year the notices just stopped coming. There's no chance of them taking that van back to Seattle, so I'd say they're safe.)

The next day my father, brother and I went back to the Kingdome, this time for a night game against the Tigers. The tickets this time were free, thanks to collecting a quantity of Raisin Bran box tops. The Tigers that year were known for free-swinging power hitters: Cecil Fielder, Rob Deer (I didn't have to look up those two. I did have to look up to find out Mickey Tettleton was also on his way to hitting 31 home runs). I remember we got to the park a bit late; we probably didn't see Fielder hit a first-inning home run. I don't know if we saw Rob Deer hit a second-inning homer.

I do remember watching a late home run win the game for the Mariners. In my mind, it was Harold Reynolds hitting the winning home run in the ninth inning. According to the box score, it was Alvin Davis putting the Mariners ahead in the eighth. Either way, I remember watching the ball from the upper deck, seeing it fly on a low arc along the right-field line and just fair into in the stands. I've seen a lot of home runs since, but few are seared into my memory like that one.



(Looking here, I see the Mariners' average ticket price in 1991 was $7(!). Hot dogs were $1.50; beer $2.50. The Kingdome might not have been great, but at least it wasn't also unaffordable.)

correction

After seeing another game at RFK this weekend, I discovered the Nationals allow their fans to follow the out-of-town scores.

There isn't a dedicated out-of-town scoreboard, but the other scores are flashed up on some of the small video boards on the front of the upper deck throughout the game. Still makes it hard to see the game you're looking for with just a glance; you have to wait until it's the one on the screen. Kind of like waiting for a score on the ESPN ticker.

I'll take Wrigley's or Fenway's anytime.

(Oriole Park at) Camden Yards

the Warehouse
Originally uploaded by slack13

The Orioles may have one of the most repugnant owners in baseball (the Washington Post used the great phrase "locally loathed") and a team destined to always fall well behind the Yankees-Red Sox spending war, but their home park is still pretty sweet.

I headed to Camden Yards (officially Oriole Park at Camden Yards) this week to watch the Seattle Mariners, who are geographically much closer to my heart than these East Coast teams. I'd heard people rave about Camden Yards, but to be honest, I expected to be underwhelmed. Camden was the first in the new breed of parks, the stadium to end the ugly concrete era, but 15 years later half the teams in the league play in a stadium designed to rip off Camden's once-unique architecture. I figured this meant it would now inevitably feel somewhat diminished, its unique character absorbed and diluted by too many imitators.

A friend told me, just before I started the drive north, to be sure to get right-field bleacher seats, which he termed "the best seats in baseball." I'm not sure I can completely agree (bleacher seats in Fenway win for atmosphere, behind-home-plate seats just about anywhere win for immediacy, San Francisco's bay view seats win for scenery) but they are pretty damn good. Not only for themselves, but for the area just behind them.

The portion of Eutaw Street adjacent to Camden Yards isn't technically part of the stadium, although it's inside the stadium gates. It has become a pedestrian walkway (open to all when there's not a game going on) bordered on one side by the stadium and on the other by the old Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Warehouse. For games, the street is lined with food and drink stands and merchandise vendors.

The most celebrated of the drink stands is Boog's Barbecue, run by former Oriole Boog Powell. Boog himself was on hand to greet a line of customers and sign autographs. The food proved to be somewhat of a disappointment; $7.25 for a barbecue sandwich is a bit steep (I chose not to shell out an extra 75¢ for the beans and coleslaw sides) especially when the meat is pretty dry. However, it was well within tolerable limits for ballpark food.

Our seats were well above tolerable limits. We walked up and got second-row seats in center field for $15. Unlike some stadiums, the seats ran right up to the outfield wall, putting us right on top of the fielders (an excellent vantage point to watch Ichiro hang out).


The weather walking up to Camden Yards was the same as in a blast furnace; the Orioles announced a gametime temperature of 101 degrees, which was certainly a cheap ploy for sympathy (I'll believe the temperature was that high an hour before first pitch, when we were walking in, but a breeze and the sun going down actually cooled the air off considerable by the time the game started.

The game was marred by some sloppy play early, but the good guys ended up on top (just another disappointment for the home fans). I noticed the Orioles haven't shelled out the money to update the video board or changed the small scoreboards on the facades of the upper deck from lightboards to video screens, as have most other parks. I think that's more a case of cheap ownership rather than hanging onto tradition.

Somehow, Camden Yards manages to capture more of the pure baseball feel than most of the other new stadiums. Perhaps it's the fact it has had a chance to age, but it just feels like there's more character here than in most of the newer ballparks. In Philly and St. Louis, the stadiums are nice, but there's also the feeling that everything is too nice, too shiny, too packaged to really tap into the retro baseball feel the styling is aiming for. Camden Yards, with its warehouse, harsh lines and angles defining the outfield wall and brick-and-steel faces just seems to capture something many stadiums miss.

RFK

The Cheap Seats
Originally uploaded by edwardaggie98

I finally made my way out to RFK Stadium to see the Nationals in late July.

There isn't anything particularly remarkable about RFK. The Saturday afternoon game seemed to have a crush of people on the Metro and walking up to the main gate of the stadium. However, the crowd was well dispersed inside. The announced crowd was just shy of 32,000 in the 56,000-seat RFK (I can't imagine what the crowd outside would have looked like when the Redskins were playing here). Such a crowd will seem larger next season, when the Nationals move into a new 41,000-seat stadium in southeast D.C.

The Nationals did do one thing perfectly. The outfield seats are just $5, which makes a trip to the park an easy decision. It's the cheapest regularly-priced ticket I've seen since coming back to the States. It looked like that $5 ticket could get you a seat anywhere in the house, since I didn't' see any signs of ushers checking tickets. I didn't test the theory; our group talked about moving down, but ended up satisfied in our perch.

The seats are worth $5. There are a few quirks of seeing a game in RFK, not least of which is the fact every outfield seat is in the upper deck. The cookie-cutter stadium's rounded shape doesn't allow space for any lower-level or bleacher seats in the outfield, at least not in the current configuration. The yellow, wood-and-steel seats do feel properly worn. Cracks in the wood show through the paint job. The concrete deck shows its weather-stained age. For me, such touches generally add rather than detracting from the overall experience. Not enough to make up for the generally bland character of one of the last cookie-cutters still used for baseball.

The group for this afternoon game was far more interested the event as a social outing than the game itself, which also made for an enjoyable time. The game, as it was, had few moments of interest until the Nationals scored a few in the late innings for a 3-0 win. Not a positive result, as I was there primarily because the Rockies were in town.

I did notice one glaring absence from RFK. We sat up above the left-field foul pole, so I wasn't sure if it was below me and I just couldn't see it. But on our exit from the stadium, I walked down to the lower deck behind home plate and looked around. Nowhere. There wasn't an out-of-town scoreboard to be found. A deficiency I'm sure will be fixed at the new place.

what's-it's-name Park

I'm not necessarily opposed to all stadium naming deals. As long as the name isn't replacing a historically significant name and is on the stadium long enough to form a lasting recognition between the name of the stadium and the team which plays there, fair enough.

But there's a few problems with the current spate of brand-new ballparks with brand-new sponsor naming rights.

Stadiums in the first wave of the building boom have already moved on and changed from their initial name. I still think of the stadium in Houston as Enron Field, and I still refer to the Giants' park as PacBell.

The other problem is with so many new corporately-tagged stadiums, the names just blur together. I saw a game in Philadelphia just a couple weeks ago, and I had to look up the name of the stadium when I started to write this post.

The name (Citizen Bank Park) blurs away in my memory, and the park itself generally does the same. It has all the requisite new-retro styling. The concessions are varied and plentiful (and in a nice touch, a decent selection of microbrews are the same price as the big-name standards).

There are a few nice touches. The bullpens are both in centerfield, with the visitors' pen stacked a level above the home pen. When a visiting reliever is called into the game, he has to run down the stairs and past the Phillies bullpen staff to reach the field. Above the bullpens is a standing-room concourse, so fans can perch at the rails and look down at the pitchers warming up. It's like a balcony seat, with a pretty good view of the game as well.

There's also a few confusing touches. Television monitors are mounted above the back of the lower-level sections along the third-base line, so fans in the concourse or the further-back seats can see the action. There are no such monitors along the first-base side, even though the areas are otherwise symmetrical and I believe the price levels of the seats are the same.

I bought an upper-deck seat, but mostly stayed with the standing room crowd. I wandered the stadium, stopping to watch each inning behind the seats of a different section. (Ushers were stationed just about everywhere checking tickets, although I probably could have made it into a lower-level seat long before I actually did in the eighth inning).

The atmosphere reminded me of St. Louis. Same red-clad crowd, same general feeling of a baseball-savvy crowd. There was a surprising crowd of more than 42,000 for a Wednesday afternoon game. In a nice touch, the ushers prevented anyone moving from the concourse into their seating area during an at-bat.

The game was a good one, as well. Tied up late before the Phillies pushed past the White Sox for what was, in the end, an easy win.

Turner Field

Part two in what could be an ongoing series:

For my trip to Atlanta, one of my friends picked up a few tickets to see the Braves take on the Mets. Turner Field made a good first impression - the tickets for the upper deck were on Tuesday two-for-one special, which put them at $4 a seat.

The upper deck seats also pleasantly surprised - although we were only a dozen or so rows below the top of the stadium above third base, the view was decent. We could see the whole field, and the stadium was built up enough it felt like we were looking down on the field, rather than out at it. It's enough of a distinction. I've sat in stadiums where the upper decks were pushed away from the field, and you felt like you were separated from the experience. Turner avoided that problem (although it still doesn't compare to Tiger Stadium, my gold standard for close-to-the-action upper deck seats).

The game was decent - an easy Braves win, but the lead was built up inning by inning, to keep people interested.
It wasn't a perfect day to watch a game - smoke in the air from Southern wildfires made my throat feel like I'd been swallowing sandpaper by the end. The overall experience at Turner, however, was pleasant.
The stadium is, like all the other stadiums built in the last 15 years or so, built on the Camden Yards neo-retro model. Lots of brick and green-painted steel. All nice, but there is only one feature of the ballpark that truely stands out and captures your attention. The center-field video screen scoreboard presented a sight to behold.
Apparently the high-definition screen was the largest in the world when it was installed, or at least is one of the largest you're going to find. The picture is about 80 feet tall and 80 feet wide, and unlike old-school video screens, the picture jumps out at you no matter what viewing angle you're at. (Well, I didn't sit directly in front of it, so I can't vouch for the close-up, directly-underneath view).
The big screen was complemented by something I've noticed elsewhere - in the two years I was out of the country most stadiums seem to have replaced the runs/hits/errors lighted scoreboards that used to sit somewhere on a narrow front of the upper seating decks with similarly narrow video screens. The screens show the scoreboard info during the action, and advertising or promotional info between innings.
The gadget-geek in me loves the high-def screens and video boards. The baseball purist in me isn't sure what to think - the old light boards weren't particularly aestheticly pleasing. As long as Fenway doesn't replace it's hand-operated board (and at least a few of the new parks keep their hand-operated out-of-town scoreboards as an homage) I can't think of a reason to decry the change.

in with the new Busch

Caught a game at the new Busch Stadium yesterday, pushing the stadium total to 14 (a number that should jump rapidly soon, since I've only seen a game at one east coast stadium.

None of my Cardinal fan friends have been overly enthusiastic about the new stadium. Essentially on the exact site as the old one, the new Busch was designed with the same "retro" aestethic as every other new stadium since Camden Yards. The biggest knock against the old stadium, from a fan's perspective, was that it was a cookie-cutter round cement structure, just like the ones in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and other cities that built stadiums in the 60s or 70s (I'll have a chance to revisit the cookie-cutter look soon, at RFK). The biggest knock on the new park is, as one of my friends puts it, it's a "new Cookie-cutter". Since the elements designed to give the park "character" are the same as every other new park out there the park actually is devoid of any character.

Valid point. But I still prefer the new park to the old one. Got to see a day game in the bleachers yesterday, even if the weather wasn't perfect. Clouds hung in the sky most of the day, and the ninth inning was broken up by a 49-minute rain delay. The temperature reading behind home plate stayed in the high 70s, though, and for a few of the mid innings the sun beat down.
I reached my seat with a $5 hot dog and $8.50 beer in hand and looked around the stadium. Granted, there isn't any unique distinguishing feature to this park. But the brick facade and iron roof supports rising above the upper deck just look nicer than the old concrete ring of arches, even if every other park uses them.
Just being shiny and new and having 11 different kinds of concession stands will wear off. In 20 years, there might be calls for a new park as this stadium style falls out of favor. But it's going to age at least as gracefully as the Old Busch, and probably a little bit better.
For my money, there are two very important reasons this stadium is better.
1. It's obviously a baseball park. By the time I saw a game at the old Busch they'd torn up the artificial turf, put a grass bank in the outfield as the hitter's backdrop (a feature kept in the new park) and set up a shrine of rememberance in a few upper deck centerfield sections, featuring the team's Championships and retired numbers. They made it look probably as nice as you could make a cookie-cutter stadium look. But that didn't change the fact it was orginally built as a multi-purpose stadium. And it didn't change the most glaring deficiency of the old Busch, which was fixed with -
2. You can see out of the new stadium. The tiers of seating decks, skyboxes and club sections wrap around the field from foul pole to foul pole, but the pile of seating decks has breaks, visual interupptions, to allow spectators some view of the surrounding city. St. Louis has one iconic view - the arch. Now you can see it from parts of the stadium. The only place you could see the arch from the old stadium was if you climbed to the top row of the upper deck and looked out. This sounds like a small thing, but to me it's important for a stadium to have some sort of geographical identity. The new stadium might now have much unique character, but neither did the old one, and at least now you can tell with a glance which city you're in.



(A last point: Busch Stadium policy allows fans to bring in their own drinks, and I believe food. But the only place this is mentioned on the Cardinals website is on an "A to Z" guide of Busch Stadium under the letter I. For inspection (of bags). Obviously not a policy they're hoping people stumble upon.)