December 28, 2005 [LINK]
New stadium chronology page
Year-by-year baseball stadium chronology, tracing the complete "life cycle" from construction through demolition of all past and present Major League Baseball stadiums. There are probably a few minor omissions in it. It is plainer appearance-wise, but more information rich than the old graphics-intensive Baseball stadium chronology (by decade) page, which has been touched up just a bit.
Cleveland Stadium update
I bought myself the "Take Me Out to the Ballpark" calendar (by the author of the weird round book by that same title) that included some detailed photos I had never seen before. One of them showed the outfield fence in Cleveland Stadium at some time during the 1980s, when the marked power alley dimensions were eight feet greater in right field than in left field. There was no evident reason for this apparent asymmetry, and I'm beginning to suspect that it was nothing more than a matter of where the distance markers were placed. Anyway, I jumped the gun on the planned revisions to the diagrams on that page, which are now completed.
Movies: Mr. 3000, Bang the Drum Slowly
A new visitor to this Web site just alerted me to the fact that the movie Mr. 3000 was not filmed in Ameriquest Field, as the cover of the DVD implies, but rather Miller Park in Milwaukee. My apologies; the Civic Religion page has been duly corrected. That reminds me, I was going to mention a similar oddity in the movie Bang the Drum Slowly, which I reviewed on Sept. 25. Anaheim Stadium is on the cover (see imdb.com), but none of the movie was actually filmed there. There's an additional quirk about the photo of Anaheim Stadium that shows Robert DeNiro crouching with the catcher's mitt: It is a mirror image of the grandstand in left field, with the foul pole on the wrong side. Also, the stadium roof on the left side of DeNiro's head does not align with the roof on the right side; sloppy photo doctoring, in the pre-Photoshop era.