Why I Love Baseball: Ballparks

Why I Love Baseball is a nine week series that will be posted on Tuesdays. This week, the focus is on Ballparks.

When I was younger and my mother was just completing her education, I spent my days at the house of a woman that my mom had met through her classes. She had a kid my age and we would often play with the neighborhood kids.

We played a variety of games, from sports like street hockey to games like "kick the can," which I distinctly remember was the first time I had ever heard of the game outside of a documentary I had watched about the depression.

One of the things I remember about my days spent at this house was the baseball games we played in the front yard. It was a quirky place to play. There was a giant tree in the middle of the yard where fly balls went to die, but it didn't always result in an out. If you were lucky, the ball bounced off branches in an unpredictable manner and you'd reach base safely.

We did come up with ground rules for the tree though—if the ball was caught before hitting the ground, regardless of how it hit the tree, you were out. If the ball got stuck in the tree it was a ground rule double. Finally, if the ball somehow got a lucky bounce and cleared the short little picket fence surrounding the yard, it was a home run.

A large portion of my childhood was filled with playing baseball in various places and adapting a field to the odd things that would occur during the course of a game. It's said that one of the reasons people love baseball is because it's grown men playing a children's game.

As boys age and turn into ballplayers, the fields change from backyards to gigantic cathedrals dedicated to this great game. Although those changes occur, the players are still little boys at heart and once you think about it, those monoliths start resembling your backyard.

It's funny to think that fate would have it that I ended up being a Rays fan. The tree I described earlier, when you think about it, starts to sound really similar to Tropicana Field and its catwalks.

The quirks, intentional or not, are a throwback to days of youth when we played the game anywhere we could. Just like if you play enough games in your backyard, if you watch your favorite team play enough games at home, you start to know how every odd angle in the wall and how every ball hit will play as it meets the grass, turf, wall, or corner.

It begins to feel like a second home and you grow sentimental about how the game is inside of the park. You'll be hard pressed to find a Red Sox fan that doesn't love the Green Monster, a Padres fan that doesn't love the Western Metal Supply Company Building, or even a Twins fan that doesn't love the home field advantage the Metrodome's white roof brings.

Quirks aren't the only thing I love about ballparks. The atmosphere of a stadium is something that can't be duplicated anywhere else. The game going on in front of you, the hecklers laying into a player, the vendors shouting, the crowd chattering; there are so many great things about being at a game.

I know a lot of people that love going to games that aren't baseball fans. That's the power of a ballpark atmosphere—it draws people in.

While the ballpark atmosphere exists at every baseball field, each has its own personality with its own unique features. There is the famous home run apple at Citi Field. In Denver, the ball never wants to stay in the park due to the thin air, so they installed a humidor to drive down home run numbers. At Wrigley, ivy covers the walls. Minute Maid Park in Houston has a hill and a flag pole in center field.

Yet these odd installations aren't just found in Major League stadiums, some Minor League ballparks exhibit great personality such as the hit bull, win steak in Durham.

While modern parks have great parts to their design, some of my favorite elements ever incorporated into a ballpark are in stadiums long gone. I always loved how the upper deck overhung the lower deck in ballparks like Tiger Stadium and the Polo Grounds. In general, I just really love the Polo Grounds due to its odd dimensions including 483ft to deep center field.

While quirks like those were commonplace, they've been replaced by modern day ballpark oddities like the walls at Citi Field, which are quickly gaining a reputation for being some of the most difficult to judge where the ball is going to next. One isn't better than the other, it's just different. A progression in ballpark design.

I could go on forever about why ballparks are great, but that would require me to write several novels. If you're interested in finding out more about individual ballparks, I highly suggest going to one of the various websites dedicated to ballpark reviews.

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Sixty Feet, Six Inches is an Indianapolis based sports blog covering a wide range of sports. If you like what you read here, check out our home page for more. Sixty Feet, Six Inches