A New Park, the Oriole Way

Home-plate entrance to Oriole Park at Camden Yards, Jul-2006.

A look in from the right-field pavilion along Eutaw Street.

The park looks out over the city as well as the old B & O Railroad warehouse.

• Location: Russell and Camden streets, Baltimore, Md.
• Opened: 1992
• Home team: Baltimore Orioles, American League (1992-present)
• Capacity: 48,876

Rating: 5 baseballs

The park was designed to evoke old-time baseball, using design elements from classic yards such as Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, while at the same time providing all the amenities fans expected in the 1990s.

Camden Yards has a brick exterior, wide airy concourses on the lower and upper levels, a field sunken from street level, irregular dimensions, and seating rows on which the aisle seats sport special grillwork. The out-of-town scoreboard is built into the right-field wall and is in play, much as at many old-time parks. But the most dominant feature of the park is the B & O warehouse across Eutaw Street from the right-field bleachers (that block of Eutaw Street is a concourse within the park now). It was from the warehouse that the numbers hung during the 1995 season, counting up the consecutive games Cal Ripken had played until he snapped Lou Gehrig’s record.

There have been some nice parks built in recent seasons, but Camden Yards was the pioneer and the prototype for the beautiful new facilities in San Francisco and Pittsburgh. The O’s wouldn’t have it any other way.

For 2008, the Orioles have introduced new scoreboards. The main board in center field appears to have been installed by the same company that designed the gigantic matrix board at Nationals Park, just down the road in Washington. The out-of-town scoreboards have also been upgraded.