Bob Hulsey wrote:
This new wave of cookie-cutter HOK ballparks saddens me because they all seem the same to me. When you click on a game on tv, can you tell where you are? There's a brick facade behind the plate and two rolling ad backdrops. All the seatbacks are forest green. I thought Camden Yards was a fine ballpark but MLB didn't need 30 of them.
Bob, you've written something that I've thought about a lot over the past couple of years. What's weird is that a lot of the new-wave places that have been around for a while decided to start putting up brick facades behind home plate in the last couple of years. I don't remember Camden Yards having a brick facade behind the plate when it was first built or when I visited in 2001 (though I could be wrong). Now it does. Same with the Ballpark in Arlington. There are at least one or two other places that originally didn't have a brick wall up that now do, but their names escape me at the moment.

There is a cookie-cutter feeling to some of these places on TV. The new parks since 1992 have tried to be different, and yet all come up looking the same on TV. But I've been to a few of them and even the places like Turner Field that are middling when compared to Camden or PNC Park are still nicer than a place like the Vet, which was a total dump. Jacobs Field (now Progressive Whatever) in Cleveland has no standout quality to me, yet I liked it a lot when I visited, even if a lot of its elements were ripped off from Camden.

And I'm sure the people in Cleveland don't mind their park looking like Camden if it's a nice stadium. It's better than the old cookie-cutter syndrome of bowl seating and artificial turf (which excludes the Astrodome for a variety of reasons). The people in Cincinnati probably prefer their Camden/PNC ripoff to a circular bowl with no exterior view, bowl seating and turf. Cincy is another place that has no standout qualities to me other than the Ohio River view, and yet I enjoyed the park a lot.