PART FOUR:
Other than the obvious, Fenway and Wrigley, Dodger Stadium is the oldest remaining ballpark in the game. The Oakland Coliseum is the second oldest with Angel Stadium coming in third.
All three of those ballparks are part of a series of symmetrically-based, cookie-cutter, ballparks which started in the early 1960s and continued into the 1980s. This series includes some of the most famous and most famously ugly baseball cathedrals the game has ever seen.
There is a certain beauty in the atrociousness of some of the 60s ballparks however. They were huge, round, and gleaming with single-color majesty.
The Houston Astrodome was one, dubbed the Eighth Wonder of the World, it was the first domed stadium and the precursor to many other parks that we, today, take for granted. Without the Astrodome we would likely have never had the Metrodome and thus wouldn’t have been so psyched to see it go.
Both Canadian roofed stadiums (Skydome/ Roger’s Centre in Toronto and Olympic Stadium in Montreal), Seattle’s Kingdome and later Safeco Field, the Ray’s Tropicana Field, Chase Field and Miller Park all have some degree of thanks to give to 1965’s Astrodome.
The newly completed Houston Astrodome. Photo: Public Domain Clip art
But the Astrodome’s roof wasn’t the only moderately interesting part about the stadium. Granted, it was just a round white warehouse with seats inside it. The first playing surface in the Astrodome was natural grass because Astro-turf didn’t exist yet. Have you ever thought about that coincidence? Astro-dome – Astro-turf… pretty obvious, but somehow it doesn’t click for many people.
Once the artificial grass surface was created, the invention paved the way for other numerous ground-breaking acts of idiocy… Like putting it in numerous ballparks whether they were domed or open-air.
Who was it that thought that sliding on that stuff was going to be tolerable for professional athletes? Those poor outfielders – Diving catch anyone?
With little more than a thin layer of padding underneath plasticized green carpeting, the Astrodome’s replacement for their sunless dead grass changed the way the game was played.
Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh. Notice the bright beautiful artificial turf in the outfield. Photo: Wikipedia
Even though it was full of disconnected seams capable of hyper-extending any man’s knees, many other ballparks from the late sixties though the mid-nineties replaced their natural grass with Astroturf or its brethren. Needless to say, the record books were changed forever.
Stole Bases on Turf:
If you look at numbers for base-stealers in the seventies through early nineties, you will notice that many of the most notable runners had turf under their feet for most of the jog to the next base.
(Rickey Henderson, a freak of Nature, is the key exception. Aside from brief stays in Toronto and Seattle, Henderson nearly always played home games on natural grass with dirt base-paths.)
Jose Reyes (78 in 2007) and Kenny Lofton (75 in 1996) were the last players to steal 75+ bases in a regular season. While they both played their home games on natural grass, from 1972 to 1992 all but one of the 14 players who stole more than seventy-five bases and won the NL steals title played their home games on a field with turf base-paths (Davey Lopes is the exception. He stole 77 in 1975).
There were also three other players who swiped more than seventy-five bags and fit that criteria except for the fact that they didn’t win the title – two of them did it in 1980. (In total, five men stole more than 75 bases in 1980 – counting both leagues. All but Henderson played at least half of their games with turf base-paths.)
With only patches of dirt/ clay as starting and ending points players were able to experience less give and get more traction on the artificial surface, thus speeding them up and making them much harder to catch. As a result, pitching coaches were forced to start teaching the slide step technique in order to speed up a pitchers delivery time. That took some velocity off a pitchers throw and gave hitters a bit more of an advantage – but was effective in catching base-runners.
The Cookie Cutters:
The expansion of baseball to the West at the end of the 1950s brought baseball to millions of new eyes. As baseball chose to expand itself in the early 1960s it decided to make room for its new fans by building bigger, multi-purpose stadiums in both its new sites and its old ones.
Giant sterile, round, or elliptical, horseshoe-shaped stadiums followed. There were no hills against the fences or crazy jogs in outfield walls to make up for the house the team failed to buy. There were only eight or nine-foot foam, padded plywood walls that looked exactly the same in Right as they did in Left.
You could expect two or three decks in every part of the ballpark, except for where there was four. As you parked your car a few dozen yards from the gate, you knew you were entering a stadium for a sporting event and not an ornamental warehouse or Romanesque museum; as in the case of some of the older parks. There were no office towers like at Shibe Park or stairways to the clubhouse sitting in fair territory like at the Polo Grounds.
Shibe Park's Office Tower. Photo: Library of Congress - Loc.gov
In my estimation, it was here that baseball became boring. The increase in stolen base figures – slightly more reminiscent of old fashioned Negro League baseball – tried to liven things up, but were only temporary.
Great players continued to appear in the batting orders, but going to their games had to be much different.
Pete Rose, Rod Carew, Mike Schmidt and Carl Yastrzemski came out of this post expansion era; so things couldn’t be all bad. But the old Fireproof Era ballparks were like a player all their own. They were unique, exciting, and gave the team a bit more character. But, to be fair, they weren’t always the most fan-friendly.
Remember in the introduction to this ballpark series when I mentioned buying ‘obstructed view’ tickets at Fenway? These new parks didn’t have those. There were no giant steel or iron pillars standing in the middle of seating sections. If you paid for a ticket you got a clear view of the game – even though some of the views might make your neck hurt.
This phase of ballpark construction did create the fan-friendly concourse idea which I will not say I don’t enjoy. The whole idea was to cater to the fans rather than the game. I can’t bash that concept either. However, it is hard to make every game’s fans happy at the same time.
Many of these new stadiums were meant for football, concerts, rodeos, or massive conventions as well as baseball. None of those other things play out the way a baseball game does. In which case, the seats weren’t designed to be for baseball-only viewing. So for those sitting along a baseline or in the upper deck where the seats are designed to look directly down at the 50 yard-line of a football field, you could wind up with a bit of a neck or back-ache from staring at an off angle toward home plate.
From the beginning of the 1960s though 1980, 18 new multipurpose, symmetrical, cylindrical or arciform stadiums were constructed. In the same time-frame, 10 new teams entered AL or NL pennant races.
A young Shea Stadium with its horrific horseshoe design. Photo: Forgotten-NY.com
Baseball changed dramatically during this time period; just as it had between 1909 and 1923. Like in the previous generation, America went through a war, they saw unprecedented changes in certain skill-sets, and saw some of the best pitchers in the game inflict their will on some of the best hitters who ever lived.
While those who like control and order and may have touches or obsessive compulsion may have loved these stadiums, I couldn’t be happier that baseball has moved into its fourth prominent stage or ballpark construction – and that the game has run away from these generic-looking eyes sores.
If you look at the aerial views of the remaining California cookie-cutter parks, you will see exactly what I’m talking about. You may agree that they’re hideous, you may not, but either way… that era is over and the new ballparks of today seem to be easily the best ever made.
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Nateworthy Notes:
In the time period of 1972-92, Rickey Henderson won 11 Stolen Base titles in the American League. In seven of those seasons he stole more than 75 bases. Two other players, one being Bill North of Oakland, won a title with more than 75 steals in this time-frame. But like Rickey, North was a grass guy. Willie Wilson of KC, who won the other such title with 83 (1979) and finished second in another year with 79, is the only player in the AL who supports the base-stealing/ turf hypothesis for the American League.
However, 18 occurrences of players who stole more than 75 bases and also played their home games on Turf in the span of 20 years seems to prove that the turf did make a difference of some sort. In no other era in the 20th century did players post stolen base figures as high as in the mid 1970s though early nineties.
Check it out: http://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/SB_season.shtml
Parks with Astro/ Artificial Turf:
Busch Stadium, St. Louis – Kauffman Stadium, Kansas City – Riverfront Stadium, Cincinnati – Candlestick Park, San Francisco – Three Rivers Stadium, Pittsburgh – Skydome, Toronto – Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome , Minneapolis – Olympic Stadium, Montreal – and Veterans Stadium, Philadelphia.
