The Baseball Stadium That “Forever Changed” Professional Sports

Among writers, meanwhile, Camden Yards was nothing short of a marvel. Peter Richmond, in his biography of the park, Ballpark: Camden Yards and the Building of an American Dream, called the stadium a “national showpiece.” In a celebration of the park published before it even opened, Goldberger wrote that Camden was “capable of wiping out in a single gesture 50 years of wretched stadium design, and of restoring the joyous possibility that a ball park might actually enhance the experience of watching the game of baseball.” George Will, who was once considered a candidate for MLB commissioner, declared in 2014 that Camden’s construction ranked among “the three most important things that have happened in baseball since the Second World War,” right up beside “Jackie Robinson taking the field in Brooklyn in 1947” and “free agency arriving in 1975.” Edward Gunts, a former architecture critic for the Sun, wrote that Camden Yards was sure to be “a seminal building” that would go on to “influence the way major-league sports facilities are designed from now on.” (Such predictions, of course, would prove prescient: In the years since the park’s opening, 21 baseball stadiums—most designed in Camden Yards’ distinct architectural likeness—have been built in or near city centers all across the country.)

Nobody, however, celebrated Camden Yards quite as conspicuously as Major League Baseball, which rather loudly incorporated the stadium into the mythic tale that it tells the world about itself. Bud Selig, the acting MLB commissioner at the time, remarked that “Camden Yards … changed everything. It really did. I’m not sure people grasp the significance of it.” The Orioles, meanwhile, began referring to Camden Yards using a trademarked honorific: “The Ballpark That Forever Changed Baseball.”

Three decades after the stadium opened, the Orioles still reference their home park in this way. Upon further investigation, however, their interpretation of exactly how Camden Yards “forever changed baseball” proves somewhat incomplete. Camden changed not only baseball but, arguably, all of professional sports. And not in ways altogether for the better.