Who is Major League Baseball Meant For?
The Fantasy Island Dreams of Baseball Stadium Design
They called it paradise. The place to be. They watched the hazy sun sinking in the sea.
The Eagles, Last Resort
Who was Major League Baseball meant for? Who was the audience that owners were most actively after? What Fantasy Island dreams did they build to seduce them?
Bleacher Seats and Luxury Suites, a new book by Seth S. Tannenbaum (an American historian at Manhattanville University) takes a penetrating look at these questions through the history of baseball stadium design from the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium to Dodger Stadium, and from the Astrodome to Camden Yards.
The short answer is that the MLB’s most cherished target market was always middle and upper-class white people. Mostly men. I checked my status again this morning. Still white. Still a man. Still middle class (though trending down). And yes, very much a baseball fan, though increasingly skeptical of its long-term economic future.
Tannenbaum’s thesis, which is well-supported throughout the book, is that baseball stadiums have been designed to give the egalitarian illusion of a place where a financial tycoon and a labourer both had a hot dog and a beer and cheered the home team, while actually catering to the white middle and upper-class sense of safety and their exclusionary aesthetic of social status: gated boxed seats, multi-tiered stadiums, luxury boxes, private clubs and “premium spaces” and stadiums located in middle-class white neighbourhoods accessible by car.
The book starts with a vivid recounting of a 2015 game in Baltimore that was played in front of an empty Camden Yards. No fans were present, the result of social unrest and protest instigated by the horrifying murder of a black man, Freddie Gray, while in police custody. It is a dramatic reminder that race remains a central, unresolved conflict in the American story. And it sets a bracing tone for Tannenbaum’s unvarnished exploration of race and class in MLB history, a book filled with fascinating stories and compelling historical details about owners, fans, architectural choices, urban planning, local politics, interior design, social norms, food and beverage options and more.
Let’s start with washrooms in Yankee Stadium. I loved this bit that he quotes from a 1920s reviewer named Roi L. Morin:
The toilet arrangements are perhaps the best to be found in any structure of the kind. There are sixteen distributed throughout the stands, including in the bleachers, six of which are for women. Adjoining the men’s toilets are smoking and lounge rooms, and the women’s rest rooms, tastefully furnished with wicker chairs, dressing tables, etc., cretonne hangings and grass mats.
Smoking and lounge rooms. Wicker chairs. What in God’s name is a cretonne hanging?* The whole scene made me think of the 1970s Maple Leaf Gardens where the toilet was a single giant trough and you’d have to shoulder in there alongside a barnyard of drunken hockey fans, unzip, and make your little tributary contribution to the reeking river of piss. Now that was democracy. I have no idea what the women’s washroom looked like but I don’t think it was decorated with cretonne hangings.
At Yankee Stadium, the preferred target market was evident everywhere:
The team invested in an ornamental facade that made the park look nicer to fans in more expensive seats closer to the field and blocked the view from the cheap seats. It helped the Yankees to confer status on their richer fans and showed their relative disregard for their poorer ones.
Dodger Stadium and the White Flight California Dream
Fast forward to 1957. The year Walter O’Malley, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, moved the team that brought Jackie Robinson into the Majors across the continent to LA. It’s a nuanced story, but the core issue was that Brooklyn (historically a middle-class, white neighbourhood) was becoming Black and Puerto Rican and poor. There wasn’t enough parking at Ebbets Field for all the white people who had fled to the suburbs to commute back to Brooklyn for the game, and they no longer felt safe going there anyway. Cue the move to sunny, suburban Los Angeles. Dodger Stadium was accessible primarily by car in its own little Hollywood hill haven, surrounded by a Saturn’s ring of 16,000 parking spaces (it “had more parking spaces than any other place in the nation in 1962”).
Moreover, like the suburbs, Dodger Stadium appeared immune to the turbulent 1960s. As one Dodgers fan who was a teenager in that decade wrote, “The real world never intruded [in 1969] at Dodger Stadium. Everything there was as it always has been. You looked out at the hills and the same purple sunset. The organist played the same show tunes. It was its own kind of opiate. A fantasyland.” Even in times of national upheaval, the America on display at Dodger Stadium was one that would not trouble middle and upper-class white people.
Of course, the city had to evict all the poor Mexican immigrants who lived in Chavez Ravine to build their Diamond Shangri-La, and it took many years and the genius of Fernando Valenzuela to finally bring the Latino fans into the Dodger fold.
The Astrodome: Visions of a Suburban, Interplanetary Futureworld
The Harris County Domed Stadium, aka the Astrodome, is a similar story. Owner Roy Hofheinz brought a new team to oil and NASA-boomtown Houston. The stadium was built in the suburbs and surrounded by an enormous Paved Paradise Put Up a Parking Lot. Only the affluent could easily access this modern temple to baseball, safe from the rays of the sun and the perceived dangers of the inner city.
Chester Smith of the Pittsburgh Press said the Astrodome makes the Taj Mahal look like an abandoned outhouse. Associated Press reporter Joe Reichler declared the dome “looks like it might have been built by Jules Verne in his most fantastic dream.”
Larry McMurtry wrote that it looked ‘like the working end of a gigantic rub-on deodorant’.
The Astrodome interior-design theme had various exotic colour palettes clearly meant to stimulate the aspirational instincts of their target market: “Imperial Orient, The Red Dragon, Pagoda Den, Panjim Emerald, Egyptian Autumn, Old South, Southern Plantation, Old Mexico, The Aztec, Hispania, Spanish Lady, Laverne Aloha, Tahitian Holiday, Golliwogs, and Petroleum Room.”
Petroleum Room? That one sounds a little Sean Diddy Combs and Jeffrey Epstein-creepy, no?
There was air-conditioning. Upholstered seats.
The HSA [Houston Sports Association] claimed that all fans would “be able to sit in a chair as comfortable as any found in the world’s finest theatres and opera houses…the first seats to be vacuumed, instead of wiped or washed.
And there was a role for women in the future of baseball too:
Hoffheinz also used women as sex symbols to attract men, employing female ushers called ‘Spacettes’. A journalist wrote that their ‘job combines glamour with a lot of hard work. Each girl is expected to be a combination hostess, tour guide, traffic cop and diplomat. She must be friendly, polite and well-groomed’.
And don’t forget the first real video board featuring the classic Home Run Spectacular - Astrodome Scoreboard Classic
The Astrodome is a relic now. A gigantic rusted-out-interplanetary used car sitting on the front lawn of Texas. The decaying father figure to a long line of multi-use suburban donut stadiums which flowered briefly in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, etc, and then were abandoned to the concrete dustbin of baseball history.
Camden Yards and The Retro-Chic Aesthetic of Nostalgia
The arrival of Camden Yards and the Retro-Chic age of ballpark design in 1992 is the final chapter in Tannenbaum’s book, coming full circle. Camden Yards was the triumph of baseball’s governing aesthetic of fantasyland nostalgia. As one of the lead planners, Janet Marie Smith said, it needed to be an ‘architectural throwback to baseball’s glory days before World War II’ and ‘look as if Babe Ruth had played there.”
The Orioles correctly inferred that a ballpark built to remind fans of the 1940s and 1950s would have popular appeal. As author Peter Richmond noted, ‘The marketers of Camden Yards…hit upon a truth that…the past is comfortable. You can go there and be safe. Nothing unknown is going to happen in the past.
It obviously worked. At least for those whose past was felt to be a comfortable place to return to. Camden Yards set the Retro-Chic standard for virtually every baseball stadium built after it. On first seeing it on TV, framed by the now iconic warehouse, I remember feeling acute diamond-dream jealousy as a Toronto Blue Jays fan. The Skydome,** so modern with its retractable roof when it debuted in 1989, still had the shape of the 70s suburban, donut stadiums (dressed up by Windows Restaurant and voyeuristic hotel rooms out in centrefield). I felt the tug of the Camden Yards nostalgia. It looked like what baseball was supposed to look like. Fenway-esque. Wrigley-errific.
Camden Yards was more than just a ballpark. It was a festival centrepiece in the redesign of a more tourist-friendly, entertainment-focused downtown Baltimore that was easily accessible to suburbanites. Tannenbaum clearly documents its effect on the local black population and their declining involvement in baseball. Was the past a comfortable place for them to return to? The story of Freddie Gray’s murder in police custody haunts the retro-chic dream of Camden Yards and the glossy fantasy of Baltimore’s inner-city revitalization.
And there was also concern expressed from the average middle class fan:
Some Orioles fans felt excluded by the increased price for tickets. One complained that the “the wealthy who can pay $13 for a box seat or $18 for a club seat over a full season – have a large selection of great seats. The average fans, who cannot afford such luxuries, are left to compete for a limited number of affordable decent seats.” Elizabeth Thorpe, a self-described “middle class Baltimorean,” explained, “I’ve felt no voice in the stadium process. I’ve known all along this new stadium was not built for the people of Baltimore, but for the tourist industry.” She predicted, “The average Baltimorean will be watching the games at home, one of the few places we feel welcome in our own city.” As fan Drew Farenwald put it, “The citizens, particularly the baseball fans of Baltimore, have been sold a lie.” He noted that all the good seats have “been sold to corporations and ticket agencies.” “The real fan,” Farenwald argued, got stuck with the awful seats “Because this brand-new facility is set up as a money machine with the fan as the fuel for that machine.”
The Skydome Premium-Space Generator and Seat-Removal Machine
My wife and I recently had a spontaneous desire to see the Jays play the Twins on a Saturday afternoon. The only tickets available were over 200 bucks. Not premium seats. For an April game. Against Minnesota. We stayed home and watched the game on TV. The Jays lost that game and were never really in it. If I had paid over $400 to see it in person, I would’ve been too angry to write this article.
The Jays didn’t choose to invest in a retro-chic park. They renovated Skydome to the tune of 400 million dollars instead. Improved the sight lines. Made it feel less like a suburban donut stadium. They added standing room social viewing experiences with the so-called Outfield District Ticket and its branded spaces: The West Jet Flight Deck. Corona Rooftop Patio. TD Park Social. This year, they opened the Rogers Terrace, Skydome’s “newest reimagined premium space”. Behind home plate. Private members-only entrance. Featuring “immersive elevated culinary experiences at every turn”: A sizzling live-fire pizza oven; hand-rolled sushi bar; an open-concept bar “pouring craft cocktails and cold refreshments that ignite the senses”. The cost isn’t listed. If you have to ask then you can’t afford it. It already has a waitlist.
During the renovations, thousands of seats were removed. In 1989 Skydome’s capacity was over 50K. Now it is just over 39K. They spent 400 million to reduce access. What is the effect of that scarcity on ticket prices? Who can’t attend the game as a result?
What is the long view on this exponential drive to the theatre of aspirational exclusivity? What is the price point at which each demographic can no longer use their discretionary entertainment budget on baseball? What other extraction methods are in place or in the works for fans who are priced out of the in-person experience? Fragmented streaming services? The interactive FanDuel-ization of the television broadcast?
Tannenbaum includes an interesting detail about ticket pricing when Dodger Stadium was first built.
The best seats in the park cost only $3.50 and $2.50, and most seats were even cheaper when a gallon of milk cost about $1.00. O’Malley explained that he offered inexpensive tickets “to take care of the little man because he is the one that keeps us going.”
For all Walter O’Malley’s drive to suburban exclusivity, his ticket prices were a tiny fraction of the cost today. Look at that gallon of milk comparison anchor. What’s that ratio in 2026? A jug of milk is about $7 in Toronto. Put that up against $200 for a mid-range lower bowl seat between first base and right field for an April game against the Twins. 29:1. A similar mid-range quality of ticket in 1957 Dodger Stadium was $2.50. A gallon of milk $1.00. I’m not great at math, and I know this isn’t a fully scientific comparison but where is that going?
I have no idea. The CBA negotiations are on the horizon. It’s time to wake up from Camden Yards Retro-chic opium dream of an imagined Garden of Eden baseball past and the alluring luxury box dreams of the present. We aren’t players. We aren’t owners. We are the fuel for the money machine. Shouldn’t we be asking simple questions to both players and owners before the CBA negotiations? Who is the MLB for? Who is it meant to serve? And what concrete considerations do you have for the people on whose passionate attention the whole fragile architecture of the baseball dream rests?
*Cretonne is a “heavy, durable, and unglazed plain or canvas-weave fabric made from cotton or linen, typically featuring colourful printed designs.”
** Skydome is the original name for Rogers Centre. Skydome is more poetic and I therefore use it as a nostalgic marker of a comfortable past; a fantasyland opiate to shield me from crude corporate branding that repeatedly punches ‘baseball is only a business’ right into your face.
People who expendable income.