Frequently Asked Questions
Here at BASEBALLPARKS.COM, we receive a lot
of e-mail, and we try to respond to every single message we receive. A high percentage of
the e-mails pose specific questions to us about ballparks. Here are questions --
and our answers -- for some of the most common queries:
- How do they make those patterns in
the grass on the field?
Without a doubt, this is the question that
has been posed to us more than any other. The secret? It's how
the grounds crews mow the grass. The mowers that they use often have a
heavy "roller" attached to the back. This bends the blades
of grass immediately after they've been mowed, and the angle of the blades
then causes light to reflect in a certain way. The grounds crew will typically mow-and-roll
the outfield in a straight line away from the
infield for one row (this makes a light-colored stripe), then back toward the infield for the next
row (making a darker stripe).
Or they will create criss-cross patterns by mowing the rows at right angles
to each other. If you pay close attention, you will sometimes notice a
different pattern in the infield grass than in the outfield (often the
mowers used in the infield are smaller), or a different pattern one day/homestand
to the next (because they don't want to mow the grass exactly the same way
every time -- just like you shouldn't mow your lawn using the same pattern
each time). For a great example of this "pattern" effect,
see the photo of Camden Yards below.
By the way, if you really have a
big interest in this area, David Mellor, Fenway's groundskeeper, has written a
book on the subject called Picture Perfect : Mowing Techniques for
Lawns, Landscapes, and Sports.
- Where can I buy aerial photos/prints/posters of a particular
ballpark (or ballparks in general)?
Probably the
second-most-asked question we receive. Because
we've been asked questions like this so often, the Webmaster of
BASEBALLPARKS.COM has opened a "sister" site, called the Grand
Slam Mall. It offers for sale posters, photos and prints of ballparks. Check it out.
- Where can I find seating charts for Major League ballparks?
On many of the individual park pages on the Get Tickets Here website, you'll find color seating charts for the various big-league stadiums. You'll also find them at each team's official website, which you can reach at mlb.teamname.com (just substitute the actual team nickname for "teamname" in the URL).
- Is there a map that shows where all of the baseball teams in the
U.S. are located? I want to plug pins into such a map to show where
I've seen games.
Another question we get all the time.
The most useful map of its kind -- and I carry a copy with me everywhere I
go -- is the North American Baseball Travel Map from White Star Press
and Benchmark Atlases. They do a pretty good job of updating the map
every year, too. It is also available at the Grand
Slam Mall, in the Merchandise store. Also, there is a wonderful map that the Baseball
Hall of Fame helped produce called the The World of Baseball.
In addition to having a map showing where all the teams are located and the
birthplaces of countless baseball luminaries, it provides a lot of
fascinating information on how other countries have supplied so many Major
Leaguers, the evolution of the baseball glove, the literature and music of
the sport, and much, much more. It can also be purchased at the Grand
Slam Mall.
But probably my favorite representation of ballparks on a map, of sorts, is the Touring The Majors Poster that we published ourselves. Check it out.
- Please settle a bet. I say that some stadiums have pitchers mounds that use hydraulic lifts to retract it into the ground. True?
True. RFK Stadium, that the Washington Nationals abandoned following the 2007 season, had this feature. It was important when they needed to convert the baseball configuration into a soccer field. I've read that Dolphin Stadium (Miami) and Rogers Centre (Toronto) both have this, too, since both venues host pro football and MLB.
- What dimensions should we use/how many acres should we allot for
building a new youth/high-school baseball field?
I have no
earthly idea. BASEBALLPARKS.COM pertains to Major and Minor League ballparks
only, so we don't purport to know anything about fields for amateur
baseball. However, we typically direct e-mailers with questions about
high-school parks to www.hsbaseballweb.com.
Also, www.baseballnews.com has a
bent toward amateur ball so you might find this to be a good resource, too.
- I have to do a school project on __________ (fill in the blank with
something about ballparks) and I want to know what resource I can go to that
will allow me to be lazy and look up every fact that I could want?
Another very common request. An excellent -- that was recently updated wonderfully, in fact -- is Green Cathedrals by Philip Lowry. The book that I used to recommend the most often
is Ballpark Sourcebook: Diamond Diagrams by Oscar Palacios, Eric
Robin and STATS, Inc. Unofrtunately, I don't think it's in print any longer.Sometimes an outfit like Amazon.com can find out-of-print books like this
one for you. For other useful books on ballparks, see our Favorite
Baseball Books page.
- Is ___ (fill in the blank with the name of a
Major League ballpark of the past or present) considered to be a pitchers'
park or a hitters' park?
This is a tough one to answer,
especially since some stadiums favored pitchers some seasons and hitters the
rest of the time. If you are looking for "park factors" that show how many runs, home runs, etc. happen at each park, go to ESPN's listing. Just please keep in mind that part of a park's ranking is going to reflect the offensive fire-power (or lack thereof) of the home team, which generates roughly half of the at bats there during a season. Also, a great book by Oscar Palacios is very
helpful in this regard. It's called "Ballpark Sourcebook," but it hasn't been updated in a number of years now. Also, right here in BASEBALLPARKS.COM, I provide a chart that lets you compare
key characteristics of all of the parks used in the Majors since 1900. The Ballpark Chart provides (where it is available) the outfield dimensions,
the outfield-wall heights and an interesting statistic called Area of Fair
Territory (AFT). The AFT figures gives you some idea of whether
hitting home runs was easier (a lower AFT figure) or harder (a higher AFT
figure), and whether the park probably yielded more extra-base hits than is
typical (a high AFT).
- What about the park for the St. Paul Saints/Souix Falls Canaries/Any
Other Independent League Team? Why don't you mention it, because it's
a great ballpark?
Again, this site is solely about parks in the
Majors and the "real" Minors. I put the term
"real" in quotes not to offend fans of the independent leagues,
but to try to differentiate between the minor-league teams
"affiliated" with Major League clubs and those which aren't.
We used to be able to say such leagues belonged to the National Association
of Professional Baseball Leagues (NAPBL), but now that organization has
discarded that name and just calls itself Minor League Baseball. There
are great Web resources for the indy leagues, though. Try Bill Tyler's
excellent, thorough guide to the Northern League at www.nlfan.com.
Also ballpark aficionado Charlie O'Reilly's site includes
descriptions of lots of indy league parks: http://mysite.verizon.net/charliesballparks/stadiums.htm.
- Who coordinates trips/tours to see ballparks around the country?
While a number of companies do a very good job of this (and they are listed
in a separate section of the Favorite Baseball Links page),
BASEBALLPARKS.COM has aligned itself with the largest, and we think best, of
these vendors. In fact, they host "BASEBALLPARKS.COM
Road Trips" for fans across the country.
- How many Major League Stadiums have natural grass instead of
artificial turf?
As you've probably noticed, the trend is strongly away from the fake stuff. Three teams have replaced artificial turf
with real grass (in their existing stadiums) in recent years, with even Cincinnati
doing so for their last two years in Cinergy Field (needless to say, the
city's new Great American Ballpark has real grass). In addition, when the Phils left the Vet to move next door to Citizens Bank Park, they also were trading in the fake stuff for the real stuff. That means that now all 16
National Teams have the real thing. In the American
League, once Seattle's terrible Kingdome was mercifully replaced by Safeco Field, only three of the 14 stadiums have an artificial
surface. The three offenders are Minnesota; Tampa Bay and Toronto
(gee, is there a common element with these three stadiums?).
When Minnesota moves outdoors in 2010, their new park will have real grass, and if St. Petersburg agrees to build a new waterfront park for the Tampa Bay Rays, it will probably have natural turf, too. I don't think Toronto has any plans to convert, so it could well be the only one of the 30 MLB stadiums with artificial turf.
- On which side of the field should the home dugout be located? How many Major League parks have the home dugout on the first-base
side?
There is no right or wrong answer as to
whether the home dugout should be on the first-base side or the third-base
side. The Major League Baseball Rulebook is silent on the subject. Therefore, let's examine where Major League dugouts are located these days. In the National League, far more are on the first-base side (12 to 4). In the American League, though, it's split evenly, with seven on each side of the field. Even the two oldest parks
still in use differ on this point: the Cubs sit on the third-base side
at Wrigley while the Red Sox inhabit the first-base dugout at Fenway. Can a trend be spotted, though? I think so: the five parks that have opened most recently (Cincinnati, San Diego, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Washington) all have the home dugouts on the first-base side. Below, President Bush has emerged from the first-base (home) dugout at Nationals Park to throw out the ceremonial first pitch prior to Opening Night at the brand-new park. At RFK Stadium, the Nationals' dugout was on the third-base side.
- In which ballpark was a tarp first used?
Yes, we do
get some interesting questions here at BASEBALLPARKS.COM. While there
is no way to know for sure, here's what two different resources have to
say. One says that the St. Louis Browns were the first pro baseball
team to use small tarpaulins to protect the areas around home and the bases
from rain. Another source relates a much more colorful story: in
the 19th Century, bales of cotton would often be covered by tarps to keep them dry. The
owner of the Minor League New Orleans Pelicans spotted this practice at a
loading dock in Louisiana in 1887 and decided to try it out at his
ballpark. That next spring, the Reds played an exhibition game in New
Orleans and liked the idea so much that they started using a tarp to
cover the infield on rainy days in Cincinnati. When other National League teams saw
how such a tarp could keep an infield in playable condition, all of the
other franchises started doing the same thing. Is this tale
accurate? Who knows!
- What Major League park has the shallowest outfield
wall?
It might not surprise you that it's Fenway Park in
Boston, but it's probably not the side of the park you might expect. It is 302 feet down the right field line at Fenway (the location of
the so-called "Pesky Pole"), compared to 310 feet down the
left-field line (with its 37-foot-tall "Green Monster"). The
distance of 302 feet is the shortest currently in the Majors, although by no
means is it the shortest ever (252 feet to left at the LA Coliseum and 258
feet to right at the Polo Grounds come to mind). The next shortest
home-run poke currently in the Big Leagues is 307 feet down the right-field
line in Pac Bell Park in San Francisco. By the way, the shortest
distance to dead center field in the Majors is -- surprise! -- also Fenway,
at 390 feet . . . although the wall flares out to 420 feet from home in
right center.
- What is the oldest ballpark still in use?
There are a
couple of possible answers for this. If you are talking about all professional ballparks, then
for years I've felt that the technically correct answer is Rickwood Field in Birmingham. It was built in 1910, making it older than Fenway.
The Birmingham Barons of the Southern League vacated the park in 1988, but
the Barons still play a game called "The Rickwood Classic" there
each year. It is a beautiful, wonderfully maintained treasure of a
ballpark. However, recent research has uncovered that at least the field
at Wahconah Park in
the western Massachusetts town of Pittsfield may have been around since
1892. Although a number of gaps (i.e., seasons where there was no pro
team playing there) exist over the years, it appears pro baseball was played
on this field 116 years ago. If, on the other hand, you are asking about which pro park has had a continuing
tenant for the longest period of time, then that would be Boston's Fenway
Park, which opened in 1912 (the same year as the now-forsaken Tiger Stadium)
-- two years before Wrigley Field in Chicago opened, and four years before
the Cubs started playing there.
- Why don't you like Fenway Park more? It's an American icon,
for crying out loud!
Yes, Fenway is filled with atmosphere and
tradition, but I don't rank it as highly as other older parks.
Remember, this site gives the author -- and the visitors -- a forum to voice
opinions and provide rankings of ballparks. Different ballpark fans
can rank their favorite parks differently, and in my humble opinion, I don't like Fenway's shape (way too many seats in right field, and too many
poles getting in the way of seeing the field) or the way it
feels like such a bandbox. But, if you must, you pleasant Red Sox fans can go
right ahead and send me more e-mails about how I have it all wrong . . .
If your question wasn't answered above -- or if you want to write about
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