How to Build a Ballpark

You might want to ask some ballplayers…

If you live here in Kansas City you’re probably already aware we’re talking about building a brand new downtown ballpark and I originally wanted to write about whether or not we should do that, but I’m still doing research on the subject (which sounds a lot more scientific than “looking up random stuff on Google”) so that article will have to wait, but in the meantime here’s an article about what we should do if we decide to go ahead and build a new ballpark:

Talk to some ballplayers.

Which a number of ballpark designers clearly failed to do and we’ll start with the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, former home of the Minnesota Twins:

All you had to do is look up at the white fabric ceiling which also had little round lights that kinda looked like baseballs to know they didn’t ask a ballplayer what color the ceiling should be.

Pittsburgh’s PNC Park offers fans a majestic view of downtown Pittsburgh which looks pretty cool until the sun sets and reflects off all that glass and for an inning or two makes it hard for the batter, catcher and home plate umpire to see those 100-MPH fastballs headed in their direction.

And as you might imagine, seeing baseballs traveling at high speed is way up there on the list of things ballplayers worry about.

Right here in Kansas City they decided to add brightly lit field-level scoreboards and during night games they make it hard to see what happens in front of them and I had one third base coach from a visiting team tell me the only way he could tell if a ball was caught in front of the right field scoreboard was the reaction of the fans; if the fans cheered the ball had been caught and if the fans sounded like they’d just been kicked in the crotch by Aaron Judge, he knew the catch wasn’t made.

Players are also opposed to T-Shirt and Hat Giveaways if the shirts and hats are white because if every fan is wearing white it makes it hard to see the ball.

Go easy on the quirks

Back before team owners figured out they could get taxpayers to build them ballparks, they had to build them on their own and shape the park to fit the piece of land they owned which is how you get weird quirks like Fenway’s Green Monster:

There’s a public street right behind it, so if you can’t make left field deep, you make the left field wall high.

And if you owned a piece of land that sloped, you might wind up with a sloping outfield like the one in Cincinnati’s Crosley Field.

So the old ballparks had weird quirks imposed by the limits of the property, but then we started flattening land and ripping up homes and businesses so we could have our very own baseball teams and built those round stadiums that had no personality. Then some ballpark designer thought, “Why not add some quirks even though we don’t have to?”  which is an OK idea unless you go too far and add something really dumb like Tal’s Hill.

That was a centerfield incline in Houston’s Minute Maid Park which somebody who didn’t have to catch fly balls thought was cool, but centerfielders hated it because when you’re running full speed and hit an incline it’s a great way to do a face plant. And if you look closely you can see they also thought it was cool to have a flag pole in play so when you did that face plant you had something really solid to hit your head against.

A Royals coach once said Kauffman Stadium “plays fair” and when I asked what he meant, he said the stadium’s uniform design meant ballgames were decided by the players abilities, not some weird quirk that made a ball take a funny bounce or a centerfielder falling down or a pop fly that hit a catwalk.

OK, so those are some ballpark features that ballplayers don’t like; if you ask them – and if we build a new park we should – what do ballplayers want?

Good dirt

Tim Bogar is currently the bench coach for the Washington Nationals, but once upon a time he played shortstop for the Astros and they came here to play the Royals and after he finished a three-game series I asked him what he thought of Kauffman Stadium and Tim said:

“Good dirt.”

Which goes to show you ballplayers experience ballparks in different ways than fans, so they care about different things and when I asked what “good dirt” meant, Tim explained:

Infielders spend a lot of time smoothing out divots left by base runners because they don’t want to get a bad hop on the next grounder and after three days of baseball Tim said he never found a single divot and if you ask Royals groundskeeper Trevor Vance about his dirt he’ll tell you the formula which I’ve forgotten which is no surprise because I just spent a week looking for my garage door opener.

But if we build a new ballpark, we definitely need Trevor to supply good dirt.

No snakes in the grass

When you watch a game on TV or from a ballpark’s upper deck you might see patterns in the grass and they make those patterns by cutting the grass in different directions and the parts that seem lighter are bent one way and reflecting light and the parts that seem dark are bent the other way and casting shadows which looks cool for fans but might screw up a ballplayer trying to field a grounder.

Watch a baseball bounce across a checkerboard field pattern in slow motion and you’ll see the ball slightly change direction every time it hits a different section of grass and that slight zig-zagging is called “snaking.”

I’m actually not sure what grass patterns players prefer – maybe the one that looks like sun rays because once a ball is in one of those sections it probably travels in the same direction – but I never asked players about that and now I wish I had.

And in no particular order…

Large dugouts and clubhouses: Fans love the old ballparks like Fenway, but players complain about the small clubhouse and dugouts because back in 1912 the players weren’t as big and were OK with wooden stools in front of a locker and now players have captain’s chairs and couches in their clubhouses and if you watch a Red Sox game you’ll see players trying to find a seat in a dugout originally built for players the size of the Lollipop Guild members.

No on-field bullpens: Some bullpens are in foul territory which means an outfielder going full speed might trip over a pitching mound and when a pitcher warms up they put a fielder behind whoever has his back to home plate and now that I think about it, that’s usually the bullpen catcher because if somebody has to take a line drive to the back of the head, it’s easier to find another bullpen catcher than another top-of-the-line reliever.

Also…

At one point the Royals had their bullpen in left field which the relievers hated mostly because they were trapped down there and couldn’t leave the pen, but the right field bullpen has a tunnel that allowed them to get to the clubhouse, plus one reliever complained about the left field pen because it had: “No drunk girls from Rivals.”

Rivals is the sports bar near the right field pen and the relievers could talk to over-served girls and maybe get a phone number and in left field the relievers mainly got to talk to 12-year-olds who wanted their baseballs signed.

Convenient equipment rooms, indoor batting cages, video rooms and bathrooms:

When a player breaks a bat or needs to get another glove because the one he’s using snapped a string or wants to watch his last at-bat, they prefer to have all that stuff close by so they don’t have to run halfway across the stadium to see the pitch they just struck out on.

In every ballpark I’ve ever visited, there was a bathroom right by the dugout, so I really don’t think ballpark designers will forget this, but I included it as an excuse to tell the story about the tearing down of Old Comiskey Park in Chicago and me finding out that fans could buy seats from the park and put them in their den (right up until their wife found out and then they could put them in their garage or possibly a nearby dumpster) and me suggesting that a local restaurant owner buy the urinal from the bathroom right outside the visitor’s dugout.

The original Comiskey Park opened in 1910 so all the great American League players used that urinal and I thought the restaurant owner could put up a plaque advertising the fact that you could come to his restaurant, have a great meal, a few drinks and then piss in the same urinal that Babe Ruth and Ted Williams and Mickey Mantle used.

I still think it’s a great idea and if they tear down Kauffman Stadium, I’m going to look into buying a toilet.

OK, I’ve still got things I haven’t mentioned like uniform bullpen mounds (apparently some teams screw around with them and make the visitor’s bullpen mound different than the field mound) warning tracks and outfield wall padding, but we’ve gone on long enough (and I say that like it’s partially your fault) so we’ll wind things up with one of the bigger ballpark requirements:

The ballpark needs to fit the ballplayers

One of the many cool things about baseball is lack of uniformity in outfield dimensions which means the Boston Red Sox left fielder doesn’t have to have great range because he doesn’t have that much ground to cover, but a Kansas City Royals left fielder should be able to fly because he’s playing in such a huge outfield.

So smart teams build their roster around their park and if a team has been drafting players that can run and cover ground in a big ballpark and you build them a park with a short porch in right field, your park and your team might not fit each other.

Which sounds like common sense and maybe doesn’t need to be repeated here, but in 1995 they moved the Kauffman Stadium outfield walls in 10 feet because they figured fans like home runs, but it turned out fans weren’t all that crazy about home runs when the other team hit them, so in 2004 they moved the walls back to their original dimensions which once again made Kauffman Stadium a huge ballpark.

Also in 2004:

The Royals signed outfielder/first baseman Matt Stairs who was not known for his range and in 19 Big League seasons he stole 30 bases which averages out to 1.5789473684 bases a year so maybe the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing and if we build a new stadium we ought to spend at least some time thinking about what kind of team we’ll put in it and maybe talk to some ballplayers who might have some helpful suggestions about what kind of ballpark we should build.

OK, that’s it.

If you’re here in KC try to stay warm because it’s currently 27 degrees and my phone says it “feels like” 18, but what it actually “feels like” is a good day to stay inside and have an Irish Coffee which you can either drink or pour down your pants in an effort to warm up and I might make two and do both.