Baltimore

On The Glory of The Real

Oriole Park at Camden Yards, 2009

Monday, May 25th, 2009

Toronto Blue Jays vs. Baltimore Orioles
Oriole Ball Park at Camden Yards
Major League Baseball, American League East
Baltimore, MD
1:35 PM


Outside of the Game:
My friend headed home in the morning, so I was on my own for the day. I had breakfast at the hotel again, and then headed out to the game.

Sunset on the Pike

My trip home after the game was surprisingly uneventful. Although traveling on the NJ Turnpike on the last day of Memorial Day weekend, it was smooth sailing all the way home outside of some congestion right after the shore exits.


The Stadium & Fans:

Home plate to Center field, Oriole Park at Camden Yards

For those of you not up on your contemporary ballpark history, Oriole Park at Camden Yards was the first in the line of the "next generation" of ballparks. Previous to Oriole Park, the trend in baseball venues for last two decades or so had been towards multi-purpose, suburban stadiums. Because they were multi-purpose stadiums, they were non-optimal for watching a baseball game, as the cavernous seating was remote from the field of play and they tended to look half-full due to the incredibly high seating capacity. Also, because they were suburban and dumped in the middle of nowhere, they were mostly car-only affairs, with people arriving just before the game and leaving right after as there was nothing else to do surrounding the suburban stadium.

Oriole Park was the first new baseball venue to buck that trend. It was a baseball-only park, designed for optimum intimacy and sight lines for baseball, with a commiserate loss in total seating capacity. It was also specifically designed to fit into an urban area, as most ballparks used to be. The resulting success was nothing less than a revolution in ballpark design that has affected the design of nearly every new ballpark since then, touching almost every team in the major leagues.

I had the unfortunate scheduling of seeing most of the copy-cat parks first before seeing the original article, so despite all the raves I had heard about Oriole Park, I was a bit skeptical after seeing the pale imitations. I have to say that I was very pleasantly surprised.

There are many things that set the real McCoy apart from its pale imitators. It was very interesting to see the features that were endlessly copied at ballparks across the country in their original, and quite superior, form. The most noticeable of these is the location. The decision to put it downtown in an available urban space feels a lot more natural than it does in its antecedents. The park was wedged into an existing space, and a street and abandoned warehouses were incorporated into the design. Adapting the shape and layout of the park to an existing urban environment feels organic, as opposed to a park such as San Diego, where the incorporation of old industrial buildings seems spurious given the sprawling grounds they clearly had available with which to work.

A street between the old buildings and the new park was closed to car traffic, and becomes the early-entrance gate for the park. A number of shops and concessions line the road, and there are often autograph sessions with current and ex-players also held in the alley. Home runs that made it to the road from ballpark are memorialized with brass markers where they fell, with a special marker on a warehouse wall where Ken Griffey Jr. became the only person to hit a ball that crossed all the way over the street and hit the warehouse wall on the fly.

The closed-off street provides entrance to the center field area for batting practice, while keeping the entrances to the other area of the park closed. The center field porch houses all the team's pennant flags and provides an area for people to watch batting practice. The other wings of the outfield seats are often packed during BP to catch flies or provide an area for kids to beg for balls from the outfielders taking fielding practice. After batting practice, the gates to the other areas of the stadium are opened, allowing fans to get to their seats.

The park is well laid-out, and there doesn't seem to be a bad seat in the house. The seats are all as close as possible to the field, so even the upper-deck seats are relatively proximate to the field. The layout of the stadium just looks and feels correct, and it is this level of symmetry is missing from later imitators. From the detail on the decorative seat grills to the overall layout of the park, it is clear that a lot of actual thought and planning went into the park, and the result is simply excellent.

Also especially nice was the fact that while there was a kids area, with park equipment and the like, there was no area for kids to play video games (baseball or otherwise), nor was their the seemingly ever-present "tiny Wiffle-ball field of the stadium," which I can appreciate in concept, but gets boring in its repetition in nearly every baseball stadium these days.

The only noticeable feature absent from Oriole Park was the "promenade" level, which gives a constant view of the field to people walking to their seats or from the concessions stands. While I can appreciate the idea behind the innovation, I can honestly say that Oriole Park does not suffer in the least by its absence. Also notably missing is the locked-down, upper-class only areas behind home plate that most of the newer parks are implementing. While there is a special air-conditioned section for box seats and the club level, it is easy to circumvent, and does not prevent access directly behind home plate as is the case at Not Shea, for example.

Baltimore fans have gained a reputation as die-hards, and that seems a fairly earned designation. Although the stadium wasn't full, it was a holiday when many people are out of town. And the fans in attendance didn't let something like constant rain from about the fourth inning on dampen their enthusiasm. At most parks, when the rain starts, usually about half of the fans will depart, with progressively more leaving as the game goes on and the rain continues. The Orioles fans retreated to under overhangs, but for the most part, the fans that showed up at the start of the game remained until the end of the game. Much as was the case at PNC Park in Pittsburgh, I can see how fans can keep packing this park even when the product on the field is not quite up to snuff in recent years.


At The Game With Oogie:

Delays

I again had selected mid-level seats to keep me out of the sun, but again, it served the actual purpose to protect me from the rain that fell through the last two-thirds of the game. I once again inadvertently bought tickets in the air-conditioned "premium" area, and outside of being on the third-base side, it was almost the exact seats as the ones we had at Nationals Park the day before.


The Game:

First pitch, Blue Jays vs. Orioles

The Blue Jays were in first place the day before, but a continued losing streak had dropped them to third in a day, and their woes continued against even the sad-sack Orioles. The Jays jumped out to a lead in the top of the first, but gave it away in the bottom of the inning. The Orioles took the lead in the third against the listless play of the Jays and would put the game out of reach with two runs in the 7th, winning 4-1.


The Scorecard:

Blue Jays vs. Orioles, 05/25/09. Orioles win, 4-1.

The separate scorecard was $1, or included in the $5 full program. It was relatively roomy cardstock fold-out, but the black background made it impossible to write any marginal notes. They also demanded the inclusion of information (in this case, the team records) that they did not provide on the scoreboard, so negative points for that.

Because the Blue Jays used an overshift on the Orioles' Huff (for non-baseball fans, an overshift is moving the infielders from their regular positions to locations stacked on one side of the infield to defend against good hitters who generally cannot hit to the opposite field), I had to come up with some new scoring terminology to record the overshifted position of the 2nd baseman. (I settled on an "o.")


The Accommodations:
I was at home sweet home this night, and ready to dread the workday Tuesday.

Click here to see all the photos from this trip.

2009 The Beltway