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This ballpark was not built to be a copy of Wrigley Field or Ebbets Field. It was built for the same reasons that those ballparks were built the way they were built. I think that’s a very important distinction.

—Jon Miller, former Baltimore Orioles radio play-by-play broadcaster

Art Modell’s moving Cleveland’s NFL franchise to Baltimore was not the first time Monument City was handed a team named the Browns. Back in 1953, with the attendance in the seats resembling what a 100-loss team would be expected to draw, St. Louis quickly became the gateway to the East, as the city’s “other” major league team, the Browns, announced their move to Baltimore; like Modell’s team 40 years down the road, they would change their name, becoming the Orioles. Having already hosted a team named the Orioles in a minor league capacity a decade before, Memorial Stadium in Baltimore became the home to the major league version of the Orioles. The inaugural ’54 season of the Orioles ended with the exact 100-loss record of the Browns the year before; however, attendance was over the one million mark, which was a far cry from the team’s numbers at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis. Unfortunately for Baltimore, the ensuing years of increased success occurred in the same league as the New York Yankees, who dominated the ’50s and early ’60s and were unwilling to share the glory with their new neighbors. In 1966, however, the Orioles emerged from the Yankees’ shadow and won the team’s first World Series title. The team returned to the fall classic three years later to not only face the New York Mets but fate as well, and the Orioles lost to the “Amazings” four games to one. The following year, thanks to players such as pitcher Jim Palmer and slugger Frank Robinson, the Orioles defeated the soon-to-be-known-as “the Big Red Machine” Cincinnati Reds in the 1970 World Series. The Orioles returned to the World Series twice more in the ’70s but lost both times, to the Pittsburgh Pirates and Roberto Clemente in 1971 and Willie Stargell in 1979. Four years later, the team won their third World Series title, as Pete Rose and Joe Morgan, wearing a different shade of “Red” in Philadelphia, fell to Storm Davis, Rick Dempsey, and the “O’s” four games to one. The following few years were not promising ones for a Baltimore return to the World Series, as the ’88 team began their season 1–23; however, despite their cellar-dwelling placement in the division, history did not repeat itself for these “Browns”-blooded Orioles. During the team’s horrendous 54–107 season in 1988, a ballpark was announced for downtown Baltimore, which would tentatively open for the ’92 season. Enter the two most influential individuals in what would soon become the new evolution of baseball stadium construction and development: Orioles president and CEO Larry Lucchino and (at the time) unknown architect Janet Marie Smith, who broke away from the “cookie-cutter” mold with the Orioles’ future home of Camden Yards.

There Goes Here Comes the Neighborhood

Before taking his broadcasting talents to a Giants team he had loved and followed ever since he was a young boy, Jon Miller spent 14 years in the Orioles booth. Having been with the club since well before construction began on the new stadium, Miller describes the events that led to Camden Yards’ literal and metaphorical ground breaking: “What happened with Camden Yards was new. The ballparks that had been built in close proximity to the time frame like Toronto, who had built something totally new. A retractable dome that was huge. The Blue Jays had the 21st century seeming ballpark and something that had never been done before. Then the White Sox built a new ballpark, calling it the ‘new’ Comiskey Park at that time. They broke ground for that park about a month before the Orioles broke ground for Camden Yards. They had the same architectural firm. It was called H.O.K. at the time. A guy from H.O.K. explained to me years later the White Sox had the oldest ballpark in the game, and they wanted their new ballpark opened as quickly as possible. They looked at it as a good revenue producer. They wanted luxury suites and a big stadium club where the lawyers, and stockbrokers, and what not would want to hang out, whereas, with Camden Yards, the Orioles people said, ‘We want to do something that’s going to be great, and we want to do it right. Maybe it will take a little bit longer.’ They hired Janet Marie Smith to be the architect from their standpoint. They said to Janet, ‘People remember Ebbets Field so fondly 40 years after it’s ceased to exist. They love Fenway Park and they love Wrigley Field. We want you to find out, specifically, why those ballparks were built the way they were built.’ If they asked me, as a baseball person, ‘Why are Fenway Park and Ebbets Field so fondly thought of,’ I would have told them. I felt like I already knew, but Janet Marie Smith was sort of a blank canvas in that regard. If they had told her, ‘Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh is the most beloved park in baseball. Find out why,’ she would have just gone with that and assumed that was right. She didn’t take anything for granted. She didn’t assume anything.”

Smith’s unassuming approach eventually gave birth to the genius her mind had been harboring and took her from a “blank canvas” to a pioneer. Miller continues, “She went to the architectural firms that designed all those ballparks 90 years before, and she found out why they were built the way they were built. She came back and said, ‘They were built according to the architectural attitudes in that city and in that neighborhood at that time.’ For her, the old 19th-century B&O Warehouse, where the ballpark was going to be, was a key to getting that feel. If they could duplicate the brickwork and some of the architectural features like the archways design, then the two would look like they had been side by side for 100 years. The Orioles liked that idea. It also kept the idea of Eutaw St., which bordered the warehouse. You had the ballpark, then you had Eutaw St., and then the warehouse. There was a lot of sentiment to tear down the old warehouse. It was just a big brick monstrosity, and that would open up the ballpark to the downtown inner harbor. You’d have these views of the skyline and inner harbor, and it would just be a showcase for the city. Smith said they could do that as well, but if they wanted these odd dimensions and the kinds of things to replicate the feeling they have at Fenway, Wrigley, and the old Ebbets Field, the warehouse was the key to all of that, so they kept it. That truly gave an authenticity to everything else. The outside of the ballpark had the brickwork just like the brickwork on the old warehouse. They truly did blend together like they had been built at the same time, even though one was built more than 100 years before the other.”

Once the footprint was cast, and before Camden Yards went out “on the market,” it was time for baseball’s version of a “focus group.” Miller notes, “People were excited about seeing this new ballpark. The players the same thing. I remember we flew in from spring training. We got in after a day game down in Miami, and everybody immediately walked through the clubhouse and out into the dugout to see the field. Everybody was so excited, and they turned the lights on so we could all see it, and the first thing that struck you—I’ll never forget the first real look at the actual ballpark—it was finished and there was that warehouse looming over everything. It was so dramatic. The size of it made the ballpark its own little world.” It should come as no surprise that the buzz about Camden Yards made its way to the Big Apple. Miller adds, “Before opening day, the New York Times architectural critic had come down and wrote a review of the ballpark and was just effusive with praise. Something totally unique. He thought it was the most important new baseball-stadium building since probably the ’20s, maybe even Yankee Stadium itself. He predicted that this would revolutionize baseball-stadium building from that point onward. That this would be sort of the idea that every new stadium would follow.”

Camden Yards inspired not only the ballparks to be built after it but also the ones that had been built just before it. Miller notes, “Subsequent ballparks took things from Camden Yards, but, also, they said, ‘Maybe we can improve on this or improve on that.’ The new ballpark in Chicago—which had great attendance the whole first year—after Camden Yards opened, people said, ‘We did it the wrong way. The Sox park is nothing compared to that.’ That hurt the White Sox and it hurt Toronto. I remember people in Toronto specifically saying to me, ‘We really screwed up. We should have built like a Camden Yards park,’ even though what they had done was state of the art. Suddenly, the fans themselves were not satisfied. That became a big thing up there that they had not done the right thing. Chicago did a major renovation to their ballpark eight or nine years ago when they cut off the top few rows of seats in their upper deck and then put sort of an ‘old timey’ looking rooftop with supporting poles that had more the look of the ‘old’ Comiskey Park. That ultimately was brought about because of Camden Yards.”

Enough! Just Play Ball Already, Would Ya?

After the biggest commotion to set up a ballpark perhaps since Fenway Park or Wrigley Field 80 years before, Camden Yards opened its gates to the fans and other media outlets on April 6, 1992, and the Orioles christened their new home with a 2–0 win over Charles Nagy and the Cleveland Indians. If there was any doubt about whether the new ballpark would attract enough attendance to live up to its hype, it was quelled before April 7. Miller notes, “The people of Baltimore got very excited—first off—because they thought they had a good team. They won that opening day game, and the Today show from New York came down and originated its show from the ballpark for a couple of days. They were on the field, showing the ballpark to a national audience, and Baltimore people got very excited about that. They were excited about the ball club. They were excited the New York Times said their ballpark was a groundbreaker. A beacon of the future. Because of that, the ticket office was flooded with people wanting tickets. They were finding out the next game that had tickets available was the next month. It was just an incredible phenomenon, and they started selling out all these games in advance. Ultimately, it was just the place to be seen in Baltimore.” Relatively close to Baltimore, the nation’s capital was catching wind of the park as well. Miller continues, “It was much easier for people from Washington to come to the ballpark. I remember the old writer Mo Siegel from Washington made the drive himself for a column for the paper. He drove from the White House to Camden Yards. He said it took him 45 minutes. It was like a 40-mile drive, so it looked like it was a fairly easy task. The Orioles research showed that maybe 20 to 25 percent of their total attendance came from the Washington, D.C. area, so this became a real attraction all by itself.”

Regardless of the Today show, Mo Siegel, and a New York Times architectural critic’s praise of the young Camden Yards, it was all for naught if the boys in orange and white couldn’t find a way to play inside it. At the time, that “if” didn’t seem so unreasonable. Prior to Camden Yards, the trend in stadium construction over the previous few decades had been “cookie-cutter,” multipurpose edifices. Three Rivers Stadium, Atlanta Fulton County Stadium, Veterans Stadium, and Riverfront Stadium were all ballparks in which a batter would literally have to check the logo in the on-deck circle to know where he was playing. The dimensions of the fields all seemed the same, the bowl of the bleachers all rose up like an above-ground coliseum, and whatever scenery there was beyond the stadium gates was better seen after the game. While Toronto’s Rogers Centre and Chicago’s “new” Comiskey Park were not considered “cookie-cutter” facilities, their outfield design was still quite standard. Fenway Park and Wrigley Field, the two settings from which Janet Marie Smith sought inspiration for Camden Yards, had their own idiosyncratic dimensions and angles in the outfield because their proverbial “cookie-cutter” tins were pushed in by the inner-city neighborhoods of both Boston and Chicago. Flash-forward to opening day, 1992, at Camden Yards and a “cookie-cutter” tin pushed in by Eutaw St. and the B&O Warehouse; the unanswered question on everybody’s mind was: Hitter’s haven or pitcher’s paradise? Jon Miller describes Camden Yards’ uniquely designed field: “We all thought right field—where they had a higher wall—would be sort of a reverse image of Fenway Park, but what happened was the winds would come in from left across to right. Apparently, that wind would hit the warehouse and be deflected back in towards the batter, so when you hit a ball to right field, it was actually getting knocked down by the winds. Not many balls were clearing that wall, much less scraping off it. At Fenway, the effect was always to left field. High fly balls that were going to be an easy catch in most ballparks would scrape off that wall and guys would get doubles on them. At Camden Yards, that was not happening. At first, we thought, because of that, it might end up becoming a pitcher’s park, but it became evident, especially when the weather heated up, that it was going to be a very good home run ballpark. I think, to this day, it’s still one of the best hitter’s ballparks in the league.”

While the reverse image of Fenway in Camden’s right field is great for hitters, it can also be a good assignment for the not-so-fleet-footed fielders. Miller continues, “Right field is a shallow field. You could put a guy who doesn’t necessarily cover a lot of ground and get away with it in right field because there’s not a whole lot of ground to cover. The center field is still pretty big. The deepest part of the ballpark is not in straightaway center. It’s a little bit off to the side. Guys can go up and make catches above the plane of the wall other than in right field. It’s not until you get out to right center, where the scoreboard ends, that the wall is just a normal, 8-foot height.” Considering that the “cookie-cutter” molds also included high outfield walls separating the players from the fans, the eight-foot, fan-inviting wall of Camden Yards was new territory for Orioles outfielders, and, for that matter, the fans. Miller adds, “Brady Anderson was the left fielder, and he actually practiced making catches where he brought the ball back into the park. Brady would practice vaulting himself up on the padded wall—digging his cleats into the padding—and he was good at it. The third game that first year, he goes all the way back to the wall on this fly ball, and a fan reached out of the stands, caught it, and kept him from catching it. Brady was so upset and he came down from his leap and took his glove off and threw it on the ground. He was swearing, so we, on the air, used that video to admonish the fans, ‘Don’t do that. Brady’s good at that. Let him go in and make that catch. Don’t let the other team get a home run if Brady can catch it.’ It never happened again the whole time I was there.”

One truly unique feature of Camden Yards, which never really had a chance in Wrigley or Fenway due to space constraints, is the home and visiting bullpen area of the ballpark. Miller notes, “They wanted both bullpens to be in complete sight for everybody in the ballpark. This had never been done before. The Orioles bullpen was raised up a little bit behind the center field wall so as not to be hidden. The visiting bullpen was raised up still further. It was like a terraced effect. You could see both bullpens from just about anywhere in the ballpark. They were very forward thinking in that regard.” Though many would argue that as groundbreaking as Camden Yards was when it opened, it still was not perfect. Miller describes the team’s exercise in customer service: “There were some complaints by people who were sitting down the lines—especially in the lower deck—that the seats were facing the outfield and people would have to turn in their seats and crane their necks to look back to the infield and home plate. A company had come up with a different idea for the seats where they could actually be turned inward so that you could just sit and—straight on—look at the pitcher’s mound and home plate. They replaced all those seats where that had been a problem with seats that had a little twist in them. They still fit perfectly in the rows.” With the seats adjusted to their desired comfort level, the fans had the perfect view for one of the most-anticipated moments in baseball history, which would occur in 1995 at a still-young Camden Yards.

September 6, 1995: The Iron Man Trots Camden Like the Iron Horse

Before retiring from the game because of the illness that would not only end his life but eventually be named after him, Lou Gehrig played in 2,130 straight games, a streak that by today’s scheduling standard spans 13 seasons. Beginning in 1981, a new face with a familiar name in baseball began his own road to Gehrig’s record in an Orioles uniform. Cal Ripken Jr. won the American League Rookie of the Year award in 1982 and during the team’s world championship campaign the following year won the league’s Most Valuable Player award as well. Ripken won another MVP during the ’91 season. Eventually, as the years piled on and Ripken stayed healthy, Gehrig’s 2,130-game mark began to show on the horizon. Finally it came down to 1995, when history, foreseeably, would be made late in that baseball season. Having the advantage of being able to plan around a record, the Orioles had their own way of recognizing Ripken’s feat. Miller explains, “When Cal Ripken was approaching Lou Gehrig, there was the question about ‘How will we mark this historic moment?’ because basically, before the season even starts, assuming there were no rainouts that changed the schedule, we already know what night he’s going to break the record. It’s not like the big home run to break ‘the Babe’s’ home run record for Henry Aaron. We don’t know when that’s going to happen. With Cal, we know exactly when, and we can make sure the schedule makers give us a home game for that event. I think it was Charles Steinberg who came up with the idea. Charles was a local Baltimore guy who became a dentist, but he always kept this nighttime job with the Orioles. They put him in charge of Oriole productions when they got their first big Jumbotron colored screen at the old Memorial Stadium. Charles was also a huge music fan, and so he was always taking actual songs and tying them into baseball themes. Charles came up with this idea that the record only becomes official in baseball once the game becomes official. It’s not that Cal takes the field at the beginning of the game and there’s the record. According to baseball rule, it becomes an official game and everything counts after four and a half innings—if the Orioles are ahead—or five innings if the Orioles are behind or tied. A couple of home stands before, they put numbers up on the warehouse wall as banners. Either at the top of the fifth inning or whenever the game became official, they would put that rule up on the board so all the fans could read it. Meanwhile, they had this rousing, emotional music built to a crescendo, and right at the ultimate crescendo, the banner fell for the new number. Cal hated it because he was always all business on the field. That’s the way he was raised with the game. He didn’t want to be spotlighted or brought out like that. Now they’re putting his picture on the screen and the fans would cheer. I didn’t understand. I just thought, ‘They’re overdoing this,’ until we got real close, and then I saw the genius of it. This is how it’s going to be commemorated. This is when it actually happened. This is the home run moment. This is Pete Rose getting the base hit that put him ahead of Ty Cobb. This is how it’s going to be enacted, and Steinberg got the fans used to it. We all saw what was going on. Now it’s two nights away and now it’s the night that he ties the record. There’s the banner coming down and that was the moment.” Now that the party was planned, all that remained was the guest of honor, a guest who—unbeknownst to anybody at the time—almost didn’t even RSVP.

On September 6, 1995, with the numbers spread across the B&O Warehouse windows reading “2,130,” baseball’s “Iron Man,” on the inside, was showing his rust. Miller recalls, “The night that he actually broke the record—we didn’t know it until afterward—Cal was sick. He was running a fever because he was getting no sleep. For several weeks leading up to the breaking of the record, Cal would come out of the clubhouse back into the ballpark, and he’d start signing autographs. People started lining up for this. Not just Camden Yards but all the cities we were in because his wife said, ‘Cal, I hope you can enjoy this experience, and I hope that you can celebrate it and not just look at it as an annoyance and something you have to get through.’ It was a beautiful sentiment, so he embraced it. Everybody wanted a piece of him because he was going for this record. He didn’t charge any money for it. He just stood there and he would sign hundreds—maybe even a thousand—autographs every night. To me, it was unprecedented, but it was Cal’s personal, private thing with the fans. Cal was running a fever by that last night because he hadn’t gotten any sleep. He was trying to live a normal life. He was getting up with his kids and taking them to school. He was getting maybe an hour or two of sleep during the night—because of all the excitement and things going on—and got some kind of a bug, so he was really tired and he was run down. He told the Orioles, ‘There will be no celebration during the game. I know Charles has figured out this thing of when it becomes official, but I will not tolerate any kind of stoppage of the game for any kind of ceremonies. After the game, you can do whatever you want, and I’ll definitely be a part of it,’ because Cal had that respect for the game. Nobody is bigger than the game. That had been instilled in him by his dad growing up in the game.”

One particular attendee at Ripken’s big game was the commander in chief himself, President Bill Clinton, who took his seat beside Jon Miller in the broadcast booth. Miller describes his presidential encounter behind the microphone: “I remember President Clinton came on the air with me in the fourth inning, and Cal came up while the president was on and went to three balls and no strikes. The pitch came in and boom! He hit it. He hit it a long way, and I knew it was going to be a home run the moment he hit it. I started getting real excited with my call, but the president had his own microphone, and he shouted me down. He’s like, ‘Go! Go! Yesss! Ha Ha!’ and he started clapping and laughing. I remember hearing the highlight afterward and I was just sort of a disembodied voice. I sounded like I was in the back of the booth somewhere, and I was a little irritated by it because I thought this is an historic game and that’s a home run that the guy hit himself and I’m basically not even on the call. Then I thought, ‘No. That was perfect because the president of the United States is leading the cheering for Cal’s big moment in his historic game.’ I also thought, ‘What am I going to do? Call the White House and say, ‘Tell the president that I will never work with him again. He’s got no booth etiquette?’ That’s probably not going to happen, so I just better allow myself to realize it made the call. In effect, the president of the United States led the cheering and made the call on Cal’s home run.”

Orchestrated by Charles Steinberg, the fans of Baltimore, and the iron man himself, Cal Ripken Jr., took his seat in baseball immortality. In a way only a hall of fame broadcaster could relive a hall of fame moment, Jon Miller relates, “The night of, the Orioles were ahead after four and a half innings. The music played and they put the rule up on the screen, and, at the moment of crescendo, the banner fell. It’s official. It’s an official game, and he actually has the record now. The fans would not stop cheering. Cal kept coming out of the dugout, waving to them and touching his heart. It was really kind of an impromptu celebration between the fans and Cal. The fans themselves stopped the game to celebrate with Cal. Nothing that was planned or put in motion by the club or anybody else. It just happened at that moment. Rafael Palmeiro and Bobby Bonilla were in the dugout and they kept telling Cal, ‘You have to go out and make a lap around the field or we’re never going to get this game started again.’ Cal kept telling them, ‘I can’t do it. I’m exhausted. I would not make it around the field,’ which is the ultimate irony, right? On the night he breaks the Iron Horse’s record, he’s exhausted and he can hardly move. They had said this to Cal a couple of times, and Cal kept waving them off, and then they just pushed him out of the dugout. ‘You’ve got to go. We’re never going to get the game restarted. You’ve got to go. You’re the Iron Man. You can do it,’ and that’s what he did. I still kind of get emotional just remembering it. It was very beautiful. He just trotted around the field. When Cal got to the bullpen, Elrod Hendricks was the bullpen coach and a former catcher who had known Cal since he was a little kid when his dad was a minor league manager. They had a moment where Elrod reached over to shake his hand and congratulate him. Cal stopped his little trot at that point. It was very poignant, I thought. That’s the way it all came down. The ceremony in the middle of the game that Cal refused to let happen, it happened anyway.”

Camden Yards after the Iron Man

Not long after Ripken’s cementing himself in the halls of Cooperstown, Jon Miller assumed broadcasting duties with the San Francisco Giants, where he has called four World Series with the team (2002, 2010, 2012, 2014), which won three of them. Speaking about the team’s 15-year absence from the postseason, which began years before the Iron Man hung up his cleats, Miller notes, “The sad part of Camden Yards, the team went downhill and people were not happy with ownership. All of a sudden, attendance went way down, and it was really sad because the Orioles were a leader in the game in terms of how it’s done. How to build a ballpark and then how to fill a ballpark. To see the ballpark half empty or even two-thirds empty night after night was just really kind of a downer.” Of course, just as streaks are meant to be broken, so are droughts. In 2012, thanks to the slugging power of Adam Jones and Chris Davis and 51 saves from team closer Jim Johnson, the Orioles returned to the postseason and defeated the Texas Rangers in the one-game wild card play-off. Although the O’s lost to the Yankees in the deciding game of the Division Series, the Orioles came back in 2014 to capture their first American League East title since ’97, and after sweeping the Detroit Tigers in the Division Series, were in turn swept by the Kansas City Royals in the ALCS. Having led the majors in home runs as a team for the past two seasons, the Orioles seem to have readapted to their confines and, with a winner on the field, the fans seem to have rediscovered their place as well. Miller signs off, once again, on Camden Yards, saying, “It’s been exciting, to me, to see the ball club kind of rise up, especially this year (2014) or even two years ago when they got good and then stayed good until the very end. The crowds started coming back. I don’t think it’s still anything like what it was, but I think it’s still one of the best parks in baseball and the fans still enjoy going there. With Buck Showalter and Dan Duquette, they’ve done some great things. Hopefully, they’ll be able to keep that up for a while.” With a starting rotation that includes Wei-Yin Chen, Bud Norris, and Chris Tillman, as well as a bullpen with set-up man Darren O’Day and closer Zach Britton, the Orioles have some arms to go with their bats, making another 15-year postseason absence as unlikely as a young rookie starting out today breaking Cal Ripken Jr.’s 2,632-game streak sometime during the 2032 season, with a (then) “over-the-hill” Camden Yards being used as a prototype for the newest Major League ballpark, to be built in downtown Nashville. Stay tuned.