Should We Always Deride the Donut?

When Oriole Park at Camden Yards opened in Baltimore in 1992, it marked a turning point for baseball—and for American cities. Camden was a recreation of the classic pre-war neighborhood ballpark. With its tight urban siting, pedestrianized thoroughfare, and dramatic downtown views, Camden recycled not only elements of the physical landscape—most prominently, the B&O Warehouse out beyond right field—but the history of baseball in cities itself.

Through Camden, Baltimore was saying that baseball would be, once again, of a place. It was a forward-thinking stroke through retrograde design, a cue to a certain monied populace that downtowns were again places of leisure and entertainment and safe to congregate.

Other cities got the message. Since Camden opened, baseball has gauzily basked through nearly 30 years of nostalgic architecture, repurposing history for something that feels contemporarily authentic. Popular and critical opinion has generally expressed a preference for the neo-retro ballpark, inspiring praise of baseball’s timeless place in the city while almost universally deriding the soulless Modernism of the concrete donut stadium. This sentiment is finding new, nuanced expression in architecture critic Paul Goldberger’s latest book, Ballpark: Baseball in the American City, which picks up on classics like Phil Bess’ City Baseball Magic.

It makes sense that baseball would have adopted a revisionist approach toward the places in which it’s played. A large swath of its fandom, and even more of its professional class—the writers and broadcasters who give voice to the game—trade ecstatically in what seem to be the sport’s hard-coded narratives: finding the pastoral in the urban, timelessness over constraints, playing by the “unwritten rules.” This backward lens of viewing the game has coated it in stars-and-stripes amber, a self-reflective and anxious strain that has existed since its beginnings, and has been amplified ever since Camden Yards opened in 1992, grafting onto an ever-evolving sport, a conservative creep.

But in the rush to (re)capture an assumed past, has some of the game’s personality been lost? Did the “ugly era” of concrete donuts produce a more vibrant cultural space for the game’s character and expressiveness, and perhaps produce a more vibrant game?

An oft-used argument against Modernism was that it deadened the places in which it took root. And while this was often the case of the relationship of the concrete donut to its surroundings, flanked as it was by acres of asphalt for parking, a brief read of baseball’s material culture at the time indicates otherwise.

The concrete donut era brought baseball Rollie Fingers’ mustache, clad in the A’s gold-and-green, who would sometimes clash, in every sense of the word, in technicolor contests with the electric orange Orioles, when Jim Palmer wasn’t modeling his Jockeys. It was when, with baseball’s frontiers settled, room was made for the San Diego Chicken and Morgana, the Kissing Bandit and big, vocal personalities like Dock Ellis and Bill “Spaceman” Lee, who spoke truth to power from mounds in the middle of modern baseball bunkers, wearing uniforms that were as yellow as a crayon and so flamboyant as to appear foreign. Much of this territory, at least focused on the 1970s, is covered by Dan Epstein’s Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging ‘70s, and much of the material changes are reflective of larger bohemian ideals seeping into the mainstream.

This growing sense of openness continued into the 1980s: In a diversity that saw an expanding Hispanic population, reaching 15.6% of the game’s makeup by 1992, complementing what was a watermark era of African-American participation, rising from less than 10% of the game’s demographic in 1961 to crest between 16-18% from 1972-1996. In Ozzie Smith’s defensive acrobatics. In Roger McDowell’s kangaroo court.

Responding to changed field conditions—think: larger ballparks plus Astroturf—baseball became a game of speed to a degree it hadn’t been in decades. As SABR’s John McMurray found, there were more stolen bases than home runs in 1976, the year the A’s stole a still-record 341 bags. The trend continued. In 1985, the Cardinals stole 314. In 1987, 3,585 bases were stolen, more than in any other season.

Cumulative ERAs across baseball averaged 3.72 from 1969-1990. Hits averaged 8.75 per game across the same time span. Home runs were hit at a clip of 0.78 per game from 1969-1990. From 2012 through the present season, there has been an average of 1.1 homers per game. These statistical comparisons are meaningless, except for the fact that many of the prognosticating class who have embraced the nostalgic trappings of the faux-retro ballpark are the same chatterers who bemoan the “three true outcomes” of the game played today. The dynamism they are pining for is the game of the concrete donut.

And let’s not forget how those concrete donuts and domes themselves could be employed as 10th men in the outfield. The Twins exemplified this best, employing the Metrodome as a home-run vacuum while deafening opponents. The bland, suburbanized multipurpose donut was in fact a laboratory of dissolving boundaries and experimentation, both within the game and within the game’s culture. It speaks to an era when baseball, building off its earlier color-barrier breaking years and westward push, could be seen as a progressive force.

This isn’t to suggest that baseball was progressive or that its shape-shifting and boundary-pushing happened only because of the concrete donut. But it’s worth noting that the era’s most regressive event, “Disco Demolition Night,” in which an angry crowd of predominantly white spectators rioted with glee in burning the artifacts of a predominantly black music, took place in an old baseball palace, the fading grandeur of Chicago’s Comiskey Park.

Baseball was but one—albeit a large—domino to help recast American cities as great good places in the public mind. Beginning in the late 1980s and through the early 2000s, the media backdrop of cities as where the young find fun, sex and themselves—insert “Friends” and “Seinfeld” references here—predominated. The musician and cultural critic Ian Svenonius, writing in his 2006 book, The Psychic Soviet, even coined the phrase “Seinfeld Syndrome” to describe the way in which the show would catalyze the repurposing of city space for entertainment and developer’s needs.

Camden Yards debuted at this time, which is also when the town planning theory “New Urbanism” began to hold sway in architectural and planning circles. New Urbanism, according to the charter issued by its namesake organization, the Congress for the New Urbanism (disclosure: this writer worked for CNU as the director of communications from 2011-2013), stands for “the reconfiguration of sprawling suburbs into communities of real neighborhoods.” It advocates for walkability, connected streets, and human-scaled architecture that puts people first. It is difficult to argue with its core set of urban planning principles.

Yet as an architectural discipline made manifest, there have been issues of equity, design, and its sense of a simulacrum of authenticity, as in the exclusive Florida communities of Seaside, of “Truman Show” fame, and the Disney-developed Celebration. New Urbanism undergirds, at least in theory, many of the neo-traditionalist ballparks that have been built since Camden. That disconnect between intent and application, the tension between fake and real, can be felt in ballparks like Cleveland’s Progressive Field and St. Louis’ Busch Stadium. If you squint, they all look the same, a somewhat ironic turn given the supposed sameness of the damned donut park.

By definition, architecture attempts to prescribe the definitions of place. It is difficult to divorce the values and social structures embedded in architectural ideas from the architecture that then takes shape. The impulse to break free from rigid, or spent, definitions of place is what drove the initial Bauhaus and Modernist movements—to move beyond the dead ideals of old Europe and its wars.

In the United States, a return to pre-war urbanism is, for many who came of age in suburbia, significant of nothing but an adult playground; to many others, it signals a return to a time when they were not welcome. Those architectural forms are emblems of exclusion. To re-appropriate a traditionalist form is just one point Chris Rock eloquently makes while comically and mournfully noting that many Black New Yorkers today, removed from the days of Shea, ask, “What the f— is a Met?”

Engaging in nostalgic practices for the concrete donut, of course, is to engage in the same sort of practices that eventually gave rise to the neo-retro park, of which many—Pittsburgh’s PNC Park, San Francisco’s Oracle Park and certainly, Camden, for starters—remain magisterial. And of the extant midcentury ballparks, the Emil Praeger-designed Dodger Stadium, always considered a tier or two above the stadiums of the time, is endlessly lauded—and nightly packed. Across the freeway in Anaheim, over 37,000 show up nightly to see the always-maybe-next-year-in-Los-Angeles Angels.

Casting blame or praise solely on design typologies limits and lessens the agency of those responsible for shaping—and challenging—the ways in which our collective spaces are used. Baseball is a living game. Like its styles of play, notions about where and how it should be played will shift. This is important to pay attention to because in the cyclical nature of popular culture, the concrete donut era of Modernism and its cousin, Brutalism, is having a moment.

We’re at a point in history where many Modernist buildings are approaching their 50th and 60th birthdays, gracefully aging into the time when, where it’s warranted, historic preservation status applies. Mad Men still casts a cool of midcentury modern over the culture. The same sort of motivated individuals who felt that traditional cityscapes of lore were under threat by Modernism in the 1960s are the same sort of folk who may view the vulnerability of Modernist landmarks defensively. In short, Modernism is being charged with the energy that it was initially fought against, and the idea of the concrete donut—if it can be incorporated into the urban fabric more seamlessly—may come into vogue once more.

More so for baseball though, it’s the idea, or rather, ideas, that the concrete donut signifies. Whatever one’s architectural analysis of the concrete donut era, it was a time where the game and its materiality were confronted by flexible forms of identity, of design, of personality. Whether consciously or not, the neo-retro trend has coincided with a conservative crisis of conscience in baseball. In an attempt to build something aspirational representing the spirit of the game’s past, something that’s supposed to feel foundational, a feeling of fixity has set in. The game, or at least the culture trapping it, feels fixed. 

But it only feels like that. Baseball isn’t fixed. Its foundation is and should remain flexible, which is perhaps the biggest lesson the concrete donut era provides.

Perhaps the A’s, hoping something BIG happens with their hoped-for waterfront home, should temper desires for moving or bust. Tampa Bay, pulling out all sorts of Hail Marys to move out of the last remaining fully-enclosed dome, Tropicana Field,  is playing fantasy footsie with Montreal, where the starkly modern Olympic Stadium sits empty—except when it’s packed to the gills during now-annual Blue Jays exhibition games.

Maybe the Rays really will go to Montreal. Maybe, with a new narrative around the era of the donut and a recognition of how delicious and rich that time in baseball actually was, the Rays can simply move into Olympic Stadium. And if they did, we would know one thing for certain: It would sound great.