Take Me Out to the Ballpark

The Seattle Mariners move this week to Safeco Field, their $517 million field of dreams. It boasts a retractable steel-rail canopy, a brick façade, cedar-lined dugouts, Kentucky bluegrass turf–and is the most expensive ballpark in Major League Baseball history. Next spring, the Detroit Tigers, the San Francisco Giants, and the Milwaukee Brewers will move into their new baseball palaces, which were similarly inspired by the retro ballpark designs in Baltimore and Cleveland. But are these new stadiums all that they’re cracked up to be? In 1996, architecture critic John Pastier revealed the aesthetic flaw in these new parks.