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April 20, 2004

If It's Tuesday...

...It Must Be Philadelphia

by Neil deMause

Having just returned from my first game at Citizens Bank Park, a perfectly entertaining contest peppered with five home runs (including two by Placido Polanco plus a Pat Burrell shot that rattled the left-field foul pole) and ending in a 6-3 win for the minions of Bowa, I can say without hesitation that the one most memorable thing about the Phillies' new $458 million stadium is...

...hang on, give me a minute. I'll come up with something.

OK, for starters: It's not Veterans Stadium, the Phils' old home of the type routinely derided as a "concrete donut," which always seemed a libel on donuts, if not on concrete. Sitting across the street from the Vet's rubble, the new structure--some locals have suggested nicknaming it "The Vault", which seems like a reach--is first and foremost recognizably a baseball stadium, as witnessed by the several fans who were heard gasping on their way into the park: "Oooh! Grass!"

Other than living vegetable matter, CB Park offers the usual modern-stadium accoutrements: plenty of gratuitous brick facing, including on the batters' eye; exposed steel (pinkish-red I-beams here, including several serving as chunky light-tower supports); and self-consciously quirky dimensions (the outfield grandstands are lopped off at acute angles, in imitation of old-time parks like Ebbets Field--an imitation that would be more impressive if CB Park had Bedford Avenue out beyond the outfield wall, and not acres of parking). The 43,500 seats are dark blue and equipped with 43,500 cupholders, the luxury suites and club level are vast but not overly intrusive, and the ad signage has been kept to a dull roar. We sat in the next-to-last row, right next to the "Millwood Militia" (thick-necked white youth in camo garb), and felt neither in need of a telescope nor in danger of mistaking our surroundings for, say, Shibe Park.

This is cookie-cutter retro, and in a way, the non-descriptness is nice: Unlike, say, Safeco Field, CB Park doesn't call attention to itself, so you can sit back and watch the game, not the spectacle. (Though it's worth noting that the biggest cheer of the day came not when Billy Wagner fanned Luis Lopez for the final out, but a few pitches earlier when he hit 100 mph on the scoreboard radar gun.)

Still, it's not a place you'd associate with "charm" or "character" or "grandeur" or any of the things that launch pilgrimages to Fenway or Wrigley or Yankee Stadium--or even Camden Yards, for those who dig the warehouse and the view of the Bromo-Seltzer tower and don't mind a bit of vertigo in the bargain. If you've been to Safeco, or Jacobs Field, or the Ballpark at Arlington, you've seen Citizens Bank Park. Sure, none of those places have a giant, swinging, light-up Liberty Bell, but I hear that place down in Houston has a choo-choo train, and out California way they have a giant glowing Coke bottle and...what city were we talking about again?