Oriole Park at Camden Yards

For a long, long time, the use of multi-use sports facilities meant that in American cities lucky enough to have a couple of sports franchises, baseball teams mostly played in football stadiums. This meant that as a fan of the Indians, you could go down to Cleveland Municipal Stadium and be one of 2,000 fans in attendance at a stadium that held 80,000-plus.

Not the most intimate scenario.

But lucky for us, baseball parks experienced a bit of a renaissance in the early 90’s.

Oriole Park at Camden Yard is the first – and widely regarded as the best – such example.

Harkening back to the classic “Jewel Box” parks of baseball’s golden age, such as Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field, these retro classic parks have brought the classic game back to a new generation of fans.

Camden Yards includes all of the amenities of newer parks – but employs the aesthetics of the classic jewel boxes – bricks, stone, green painted seats and steel.

This is baseball the way it was meant to be.