 
Major League Ballparks: Then, and Now By Paul Gutierrez
The natives, as they say, were more restless than usual.
It was one of those suffocating, humid New York summer days, the kind of afternoon when the hairy, sweaty guy - the one in the too-tight shorts and belly-revealing tank-top - juggles a tray full of beer as he ambles his way to the seat next to you in the cramped right-field bleacher seats at Yankee Stadium.
So the guy squeezes himself in, rubbing up against you as the booze, when not seeping out of his pores, spills on you as he cheers for his beloved Yankees with the rest of the self-dubbed Bleacher Creatures. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, an inflatable beach ball counteracts the scene, bouncing merrily from row to row as it approaches your place in the madness. Your neighbor, despite being two bites into a hot dog wrapped in a soggy piece of plain white bread and his hands full of suds, prepares to take a swing at it. That is, until someone a few rows up pulls the ball from its flight and angrily places it on the concrete ground.
A beach ball? At a Yankee game? In the Bronx? Fuhgeddaboutit!
Not content with merely pulling the ball out of the sky, the fan reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small knife, stabbing the suddenly deflating ball with one swift stroke that has the Bleacher Creatures cheering. Now they can go back to their business at hand - jeering the visiting team’s right fielder with blue epithets that would make Andrew “Dice” Clay cringe.
“We don’t do dat stuff here,” the guy says to no one in particular, as he folds up his pocketknife and displays the slain beach ball. “This is Noo Yawk!”
Ah yes, the atmosphere and ambience of a baseball game at a major league stadium.
Yes, there is a special allure between fans and the stadiums that house their teams. It’s a love-hate relationship that stretches from the genesis of the game, as a form of cricket, to its modern identity as today’s National Pastime. But more and more, team owners will tell you, today’s stadiums are not as much fields of dreams as they are fields of survival for their teams. The teams, the bosses say, need the additional revenue that accompanies a new or renovated stadium to compete with escalating payrolls.
Still, crowd participation has always been a part of baseball, ever since the first curious onlookers stood around and watched a baseball game at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1846, according to Ballparks, by Robert von Goeben.
“By most accounts,” von Goeben wrote, “the first ball field popped up in New Jersey, which is ironic since the Garden State has never had a major league team in the modern era. The upstart New York Knickerbockers sought a playing ground for their new game, and landed just across the Hudson River in Hoboken. The team settled in a green pasture known as Elysian Fields. Named after a happy otherworld for heroes favored by the gods in Greek mythology, the site was perfect not only for its floral beauty, but for the nearby taverns. On June 19, 1846, the first recognized baseball game took place as the Knickerbockers and the New York Nine slugged it out. The New York Nine won handily, 23 to 1, and celebrated by feasting at the expense of the losers.”
With two Gotham teams apparently playing the first-ever baseball game on a diamond in New Jersey, how ironic is it, then, that the Yankees have made noise recently of uprooting from the Bronx and setting up a supposedly more lucrative shop across the Hudson?
With fans growing weary of standing around or catching games from the uncomfortable confines of their buggies and carriages, the idea of placing bleachers or grandstands for fans came into vogue. The first true stadium to house fans was constructed in Brooklyn during the Civil War.
According to “The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary” the etymology of a ballpark, or stadium, stems from that time, when “the first such enclosed playing area was Union Grounds in Brooklyn, N.Y., which opened on May 15, 1862. The enclosure was invented and designed by William Cammeyer.”
According to von Goeben, the electricity created in Philadelphia by Shibe Park sparked a ballpark-building frenzy throughout the nation. Between 1909 and 1923, new concrete-and-steel parks rose in Detroit, Boston, and Pittsburgh, while Chicago built two stadiums and New York City erected three venerated parks - Harlem’s Polo Grounds, Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field and the Bronx’s Yankee Stadium.
Fenway Park, in Boston (which opened on April 20, 1912); Wrigley Field, in Chicago (April 23, 1914); and Yankee Stadium (April 18, 1923) are all still in use today and revered as the classics.
Believe it or not, Dodger Stadium, which opened relatively recently, on April 10, 1962, is now the fourth-oldest stadium in the major leagues, though it underwent a Hollywood-style facelift prior to the 2000 season.
The dark ages of stadium building occurred in the 1960s and early ‘70s, when multi-purpose and monolithic monstrosities with seating capacities upwards of 60,000 sprung up. Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium, Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium, and Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium, which all opened between June 30, 1970 and April 4, 1971, were so similar to one another that you’d have had a hard time telling where you were if dropped into any of these three sterile, Astroturf-clad doughnuts.
Houston’s Astrodome, the first domed sports facility, ushered in the dreaded artificial turf era, after the original grass planted in 1966 died when two of the dome’s eight transparent panels had to be painted to protect fielders from the glare of the sun. By June, the rug was in place and the Philadelphia Phillies were in town, not looking forward to playing on the fake stuff.
“If cows don’t eat it,” Phillies third baseman Dick Allen said at the time, “I ain’t playing on it.”
Unfortunately, he would, and turf would be as much a craze in the fashion-faux-pas ‘70s as polyester suits and disco.
But the latest trend has been to build small, more intimate parks in congested city civic centers, giving a certain retro feel while affording all of the modern luxuries. Since 1989, 15 teams have opened up new stadiums - Milwaukee’s Miller Park and Pittsburgh’s PNC Park, both hosting their inaugural seasons this year, being the most recent additions. That’s half of Major League Baseball’s teams ditching old haunts for new stomping grounds that either hearken to the days of Ebbets Field, strive to recreate the intimate atmosphere of Wrigley Field’s ivy-covered Friendly Confines or Fenway Park’s venerable Green Monster, or hope to recapture the history and ambience exuded by Yankee Stadium.
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Oh sure, the House that Ruth Built can be a rough place for the uninitiated, but so can placid Dodger Stadium in terminally tanned and laid-back Los Angeles. There, the crowd, which arrives late and leaves early, boos you if you don’t take part in batting the beach ball around, or for failing to rise and throw your arms in a rhythmic motion for the Wave.
The forefather of today’s huge and magnificent stadiums came to fruition with the opening of Philadelphia’s Shibe Park on April 12, 1909. It was the first ballpark to be constructed of concrete and steel, and its lavish brick facade would be revisited by many of today’s retro-feel stadiums, including Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, Coors Field in Denver, and Pacific Bell Park in San Francisco.