Preamble:
Welcome to this year's countdown to The Real National Hot Dog Day. I hope you've been doing your exercises over the last month to stretch out those bellies because game time is almost here.
In counting down to the big day, one of the fun things I like to do get people hyped (do the kids still say "hyped"? I like to think they do) is to rank things from 30-1. Last year it was my favorite baseball teams, the year before it was Red Sox players. This year it's going to be stadiums (stadia?).
I've been to 29 different parks and I have thoughts on all of them, but there are 30 days until April 8. So what to do for today? I'm going to use this as a catch-all for the seven parks that I haven't seen and rank them from 7-1 in terms of ones that I want to see next.
7. Tropicana Field. Florida sucks. Tampa sucks. And this stadium looks awful. Plus as we found out last year, the Rays are my least favorite team in MLB. If I wasn't such an OCD completest, I'd skip this one. But since I'm not, I'm going to go and sit with my arms crossed the entire time. That'll show 'em. Fun fact: do you know that NHL Lightning used to play their home games in this mausoleum? It's the house that (Brent) Gretzky built!
6. LoanDept Park. Up until 30 seconds ago, I had no idea of the name of the park that the Marlins play in. Now I do and it's as low-rent as the franchise. The two interesting things about the place: the psychedelic statue in center field and the aquariums behind home plate have been ripped out (by former CEO Derek "FUN!" Jeter) and now it's just a boring ass place to watch a game. Great job Jetes, you should be the next commissioner.
5. Guaranteed Rate Field. Or Comiskey II in Chicago. Fun fact, I'm going to this field this year so I'll be able to give a better synopsis of the place. Know this, it opened a year before Camden and the White Sox are trying their damnedest to get out of the place; even threatening to move to Nashville. Do I think that will happen? No. Owner Jerry Reinsdorf tried this bullshit back in the late 80s when he told the world that the Sox were going to play at Tropicana Field (then called the TropicanaDome) only to get the money to build this legacy to boringness.
4. Globe Life Field. It's hot in Texas. Really hot. Especially in July and August, so it finally dawned on the Rangers that the should play in doors after 45 years of playing outside and sweating their mustaches off. I think that this place looks, I don't know, fine? At least there won't be any rainouts or no one will die of heat stroke. Fun fact: the first teams to play in this place weren't the Rangers! When we were in the depths of Covid four years ago, this was one of the spots where MLB held the playoffs. The Ray and Dodgers took the field before the Rangers did. The only other park I can think of where that happened is Wrigley Field, which was built for the Federal League Chicago Whales. When the FL when belly up, the Cubs moved in.
3. Target Field. This looks like a lovely park to spend a Friday or Saturday summer evening. I'm kinda obsessed with the Twin Cities in a weird sort of way, all tucked up in the northern part of the US. It seems quaint. I've never been to Minnesota--I heard the mosquitos are murder--but I'd like to go and where the Twins play is a TARGET destination. Ho, ho! Get ready Minnesotans for that kind of wit when Byron Magrane comes to town(s)!
2. Kauffman Stadium. When I was a kid, this was an absolute house of horrors for the Red Sox (sort of like old Arlington Stadium in Texas, though for other reasons). The Royals were the bizarro Red Sox, they were super athletic, barely hit dingers (Medford, MA native Steve Balboni held the club's season record of 35 for many years) and were fast as hell. Kauffman (nee Royal) Stadium was huge and it was covered in astroturf and guys like Willie Wilson or Lonnie Smith or Frank White would slap the ball around and the next thing you know they're standing on third base waiting for George Brett to drive them in and Red Sox fielders are trying to catch their breath. But then the Royals got rid of the turf, tightened the place up a little and it doesn't have quite the same amount of advantages as it used to. They still have the waterfalls though and the team wants to move to a park in down town KC. So I better get my ass to Missouri if I want to see it.
1. Dodger Stadium. God damn, this is the quintessential ball park. I want to go here so much, my feet hurt. Look at the picture attached to this post, it's so perfect. I mean if that doesn't scream baseball, I don't know what does. I have to go to LA really soon and check out a game here, I don't care how much it's going to cost; this is like a pilgrimage to Mecca (not the place the Bucks used to play at).
29. 
We are 29 days away from The Real National Hot Dog Day and we're counting down the stadiums I've been to in order from worst to best.
This was the first park I've ever been to, outside of Fenway Park. The way that I got there was kinda dumb, kinda Amesbury but it worked out. When I was in eighth grade our Spanish class took a four day field trip to Montreal during spring break. Why Spanish speaking kids would go to a French speaking city is beyond me, maybe they wanted to expose (no pun) us to people who spoke something other than a butchered version of the King's English.
Anyway, we were supposed to go to a planetarium that night, but I think that the weather was lousy so the surprised us with tickets to the baseball game instead. And I was ecstatic when I heard the news. National League! Expos versus Phillies! A new, modern stadium! Holy shit this was going to be so good.
It was and it wasn't. I mean it was cool as hell going to the game with 40 other kids. There were only like five chaperones, so it was like we were at the game by ourselves; we ran around the stadium, bought souvenirs, ate like assholes ... it was awesome.
But the park itself? Ugh. I wasn't impressed. And I was 14-years-old at the time, I was pretty much impressed by everything that wasn't mundane. The place was dirty, cheap looking, not well lit. The turf looked old, the place was cavernous without a lot of people there. It just seemed, I don't know, sad.
Olympic Stadium was built to hold the 1976 Olympics and then was retrofitted for Expos games. Even when I went back in 1988, you could tell that this wasn't a baseball stadium. It no longer had the track running along the field like it once did, but it just was depressing. It was just run down and didn't feel like a major league team should call this place its home.
We were told that the roof was able to open and close, but it broke some years prior to when we got to see our game there, so it had to stay closed. I think that the fixed it some years later, but the system they used to bring in the natural daylight didn't work all that great.
In 1991-ish, a huge chunk of cement fell off the roof during a time when no one was in the stadium and crashed on one of the concourses. Had there been a game at this time, more than one person would have gotten crushed. The Expos had to go on a 30-day road trip so that architectural engineers could make certain that that wouldn't happen again.
Even though the stadium was a drag, for a long time this was my most interesting fact about myself: I saw an Expos game in far-away Montreal. That doesn't say much for me, but I thought that it was cool as hell.
The Expos ended up leaving Montreal in 2004 and relocated to DC the following season. As for the Amesbury Middle School Montreal trip, it ended up going pretty great. We had a lot of fun, I was introduced to a new rock group: Guns N' Roses that everyone seemed to listen to. I went to my first sports bar, which was cool, even though no one drank. We saw anti-English rallies, which made us want to shout things in English (we were assholes!) and kinda terrified us too.
I guess sending a bunch of barely Spanish speaking kids to Montreal was a success. Consider our horizons broadened.
As for the game, the Expos beat the Phillies 2-1 in extra innings. I'm pretty sure it was Tim Raines (or maybe Graig Nettles) who hit the game winning home run right into the rightfield section we were sitting in. Only we weren't there. Some of the kids were getting bored and wanted to leave, so we took off in the eighth.
Knowing my eighth grade self, I was absolutely furious. But que sera sera.
Actually it turns out Nettles hit a dinger in the eighth (where we were sitting) to tie the game and the Expos scratched out a run in the tenth. Here is the boxscore: https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1988/B04160MON1988.htm Two Hall of Famers: Michael Jack Schmidt for the Phillies and Tim Raines for Montreal.
28. 
27.
We are 28 days away from The Real National Hot Dog Day and we're counting down the stadiums I've been to in order from worst to best.
Today's stadium is RFK in Washington, DC, home (for a short time) to the Washington Nationals. When last we left the Expos (yesterday), they were wards of the League and were playing in a shitty stadium in Montreal and a stadium in Puerto Rico. The team was sold and moved to Washington, where the national game was given its third chance to take root in the nation's capital.
RFK was an old, beat up stadium that was never meant to house the Nats for very long. It began its life as one of the multipurpose stadia that dotted the landscape in the 1960s and 70s. Basically the idea was why have two stadiums in the city for baseball and football, when you can spend less money and have two for the price of one?
People in New York (Shea), Pittsburgh (Three Rivers), Philadelphia (Veterans), Cincinnati (Riverfront), Miami (The Orange Bowl), Denver (Mile High), Los Angeles (The Coliseum), Houston (Astrodome) and Washington--and there were other--all agreed. A bunch of these multipurpose stadia didn't have grass, they had astroturf, which was basically green painted concrete. Not RFK though, it was a Cheech and Chong special: pure grass. (Good timely reference? Sure, the kids love the dopey hippie antics of Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong.)
While these venues weren't great for the athletes that played there, the folks who ran the city loved them because every one loves a two-for-one deal. After awhile owners started to get pissy because if you didn't own both teams that played in the stadium, there was a good chance that you were a tenant to the guy who did own the stadium. Rich people hate answering to other people so much, so in the 80s and 90s they began vacating these dual purpose places for palaces of their own.
Don't worry folks! Those rich people never had to pay for their stadiums and parks, they got us to do it for them. How? Ginned up "research" papers saying that new stadiums bring huge financial windfalls to the areas (they don't). If that didn't work they'd fall back on good old extortion -- "Build my stadium or we're moving to Louisville or Tampa or some other God foresaken burgh filled with rubes who'd kill to build a stadium for me."
Anyway, the second iteration of the Senators called RFK their home and when they left for Texas after 12 seasons in DC, the Washington Football Team had the place all to themselves. And RFK was a legendary football field as the WFT was really good in the 80s and 90s (three Super Bowl Champs!) and their fans (the Hawgs) became something of a media sensation too.
But as the millennium changed the WFT moved to Maryland into a new (tax payer supported) stadium and RFK was pretty much only home to the MLS DC United. So the Nats were able to move in and play there.
Was it a good stadium? No. It was run down, beat up and seen better days. There was a charm to it, like there is in all those old stadiums, where you know some cool stuff (at least football wise) happened on the same grass that you were looking at.
My wife Aly and I went with her friend Amy and sat in seats in the second tier of stands. It was a warm April day and it was just a lovely day. We didn't have any kids to worry about, we just watched a game between two teams we didn't care about (Nats and DBacks), drank some beers and enjoyed ourselves.
Incidentally this was the second or third week that the Nats were new to town and we got seats no problem. I'm not sure what that means/meant but I remember at the time being worried that we wouldn't get seats.
The folks at RFK tried really hard to make their stadium presentable and they did fine. It wasn't as depressing as Olympic Stadium or tomorrow's place, but it was an old shithole. And there's only so much paint and elbow grease you can use to spiffy a place like that up.
Here is the boxscore of the game we saw: https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/2005/B04170WAS2005.htm No Hall of Famers. Woof of a game.
27.
We are 27 days away from The Real National Hot Dog Day and we're counting down the stadiums I've been to in order from worst to best.
This is not a brag or anything, but it's needed to make a larger point: I don't mind going out and doing things by myself. For a lot of people, that's difficult and they don't like it. Not me. I've gone to concerts, comedy shows, movies, dinners and baseball games alone. I would prefer company, but if people can't go, they can't go. It's fine.
Most of the things I go to, it's hard to talk to someone while you're doing/watching the thing. Baseball games (and dinners) are different. Live sporting events are designed to be communal and sometimes when you're by yourself, they can kinda drag a bit. It's a good time to meet people and talk to them, which is what I do.
All of that being said, the one time that I went to the Oakland Coliseum was one of the most depressing times I've ever spent at any ballpark. I was on a business trip in 2008 and the A's were bad. They were playing the Orioles who were also really bad. I took the BART to the Coliseum (it's gone through so many names, that I'm not sure what it was called) and got out of the train.
I walked to the park in this completely chain link fenced-enclosed walkway over the parking lot that seemed like a little bit of overkill. It was ominous, like I was going into a battle. Or a war zone. I bought my ticket from the ticket window and the person there seemed bored and completely uninterested--to be fair, she could have been having a bad day.
And then I went into the park. I have always been a big Oakland A's supporter, they're my second favorite AL team. I've always romanticized Oakland as this hip, cool place to live. The little brother of nearby San Francisco. The city with the can-do attitude. I wanted to love the Coliseum.
But friends, I did not love the Coliseum. I found my seat and for the entirety of the game, my entire section, not row, was completely empty. I wasn't in the upper bowl either, I was in the second bowl and there was no one remotely close to me.
So I got a beer and a dog and watched the A's play seven or eight uninspired innings again the Orioles who did the same thing. After about two innings, I began getting restless and started texting my friends. But it was a 7:00 pm start and most of my friends (except Stephen Brown! Good old Brownie!) were asleep. I stretched my legs, walked around the park a bit. Sat in some other seats.
Then I decided to go home. As I walked back on the walkway to the BART and under the enclosed chainlink fence I heard something. It was a white guy (this is an important detail) walking in the middle of the street, next to the BART tracks, screaming at the top of his lungs, "HEY (racial epithet) COME GET ME! COME GET ME!"
I jumped on the BART and got the hell out of there, though I often wonder what happened to that guy.
Drunk bigots aside, the Oakland Alameda County Coliseum was once one of the most beautiful stadia in the game. Yes, it was a multipurpose bowl like we talked about yesterday but there were some breath taking views of the surrounding areas. Until Al Davis moved the Raiders back from Los Angeles and demanded that they build more seats.
The city of Oakland agreed, built them in center field, destroyed the view, made the place look like shit and the Raiders eventually high tailed it for Las Vegas. This is a city where the Athletics want to go too. Owner Jack Fisher is a real asshole and has salted the grounds in Oakland and is doing a terrible, terrible job of selling the A's to the Vegas community, who wants nothing to do with them.
But I guess that's where they're going and it's a shame because Oakland can support the A's. They just took a stand in not supporting a fuckhead like Fisher and now they're getting the shaft.
Professional sports kinda sucks, you guys.
New thing I'm doing here: if I've seen only one game at the park I'm writing about, I'll link the retrosheet summary here: https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/2008/B05050OAK2008.htm
Huh. Looks like Frank Thomas played for the A's. Wild. Aside from the Big Hurt, no one from this game is going to Cooperstown without a ticket.
26. 
We are 26 days away from The Real National Hot Dog Day and we're counting down the stadiums I've been to in order from worst to best.
In the last three entries, the one thing that ties all of these low-rated ballparks is that they're dumpy. Low rent. Not taken care of. Places that were once grand palaces to sport, now reduced to afterthoughts.
Shea Stadium is no different. I've seen pictures of this place when it first opened up and it looked really bright and vibrant full of electric blues and shocking oranges mixing with the green grass of the playing field. It managed to encapsulate the technicolor vibe of that late 60s era.
With their young team on the precipice of a World Series, the Mets played as shiny as that brand new stadium. But like everything else, what once was new is now old. The stadium fell into disrepair. The blues faded. The oranges wilted. Even the green grass wasn't as bright.
Shea Stadium needed more than a paint job, it needed a complete resurrection. But Shea Stadium was never YANKEE STADIUM, the House that Ruth Built where a million World Series were won. Shea had the famous 1969 series, the less famous 1973 tilt against the A's, the infamous 1986 bullshit and the cross town series of 2000 that wasn't that exciting.
Also, the Jets played there and they were pretty garbage most of the time.
When I walked into Shea, I wasn't really blown away. It was like walking into your very elderly aunt's house, where you recognize that this place was once pretty nice but now it's old, musty and probably needs to be fumigated.
The Mets did so and now play at CitiField. The lesson today is sometimes just because something is old, doesn't mean it's worth saving.
I only went to Shea once and here is the box score: https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/2007/B08240NYN2007.htm
The Mets had a pretty good lineup! The Dodgers, not so much. No Hall of Famers, but Carlos Beltran has a shot.
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