June 04, 2004
It's the seats that killed us.
ESPN.com has just finished visiting, and rating, all the ballparks in the Major Leagues. Fenway finished 11th, and my other fave, Pac Bell Park, was second.
Page 2 wanted to visit all the major-league ballparks this summer -- and so we did. We decided upon our own arbitrary scorecard to grade the ballparks and compiled the scores in 20 different categories ranging from the exterior architecture of the stadium to the quality of hot dogs and concessions to the ease of moving from the cheap seats to the prime seats.
Fenway scored very highly in all but one of the 20 categories: Seat Comfort. We ranked last in the Majors in this category. And that's fair, I guess, cause the seats are horrible.
But just for fun, I recalc'ed the results with Seat Comfort removed from everyone's rankings, and Fenway jumps to fourth place. PNC, Pac Bell and Camden Yards are still 1,2, and 3, but Fenway moves to something more like its rightful place.
Maybe this is a note for the owners, that seat quality should be high on the fenway-fixer-upper list.
(Note to ESPN. The arithmetic on your table is wrong. When I added up the rows, I found 6 parks whose "Total" didn't check. There may be explanations and footnotes that I missed by not reading the text for all the parks, but you'd think that the table would add up.)