Blog post

January 1, 2013 [LINK / comment]

Happy New Year!
State of the diagrams, 2013

For baseball fans, the new year will bring some interesting changes. The Washington Nationals are no longer a doormat for the rest of the National League East; they are, instead, favored to repeat as division champions. That means the heat will be on them from the get-go, so they shouldn't assume anything. Another big change is league realignment, as the Houston Astros migrate to the American League Western Division, though the likely effects are hard to guess in advance. The N.Y. Yankees and Boston Red Sox are straining to field championship caliber teams, while the big-spending L.A. Dodgers try to somehow wrest control of the NL West from the S.F. Giants. Finally, for the first time since the 1980s, NO new baseball stadiums are expected to open any time soon.

But before we get too caught up with contemplating what the 2013 season holds in store, I thought it would be a good opportunity to take stock of where this Web site stands with respect to the prime feature: all those baseball stadium diagrams. I think it's fair to say that some of them are very good, while others are OK but clearly in need of improvement, and some (such as Forbes Field) are horribly deficient, and have been for a long time.

Every year the president of the United States is required by the Constitution to submit to Congress a report on the national situation. For the past century or so, presidents have met this obligation by making a formal speech to a joint session of Congress. I thought it was high time I did something like that to summarize where my work in refining baseball stadium diagrams currently stands, and where it is headed in the future.

With that in mind, I now present my own assessment of the "state of the diagrams," ranking from "A" (superb), "B" (pretty good), "C" (marginally acceptable), and "D" (just plain lousy). This reflects only the diagrams themselves, and has nothing to do with the aesthetic appeal of the real-world stadiums. Some stadiums such as Nationals Park were updated fairly recently, but lack some of the latest features such as an upper-deck (transparent roof) version, and/or the entry portals therein. You can tell if a diagram is outdated if the size of the dirt infield is smaller than it should be (pre-2009, more or less), or if the profile view is crude, with the lower deck lacking the almost-universal attenuated (curved) grandstand slope ("pitch") that gives rise to the expression "bowl."

This list only includes major league stadiums, not minor league ones or those in foreign countries. Generally speaking, the ones that have been updated in the last year or two are state of the art, or close to it.

[ * (asterisk) = name change; * * = multiple name changes.]

If all goes according to plan, I will have virtually all the diagrams up to top-notch standards by Opening Day, which is April 1 this year -- just 90 days away. (The Baseball blog page will automatically keep track of the Opening Day countdown.) In the mean time, I'll try to keep up with e-mail inquiries about diagram upgrades, or you can simply post a comment on any blog post, if there are particular ballparks that you'd rather see finished sooner rather than later. Thanks once again for your interest, ballpark fans!

[Some grades in this table were subsequently changed after the initial posting.]