On the Field and In the Stands

Baseball season has finally opened!  Your “building correspondent” reminisces about various ballparks and why it’s so great when a player makes it “home”.  Play ball!

I sang the National Anthem once before a San Francisco Giants baseball game. 

Mercifully it was not a solo; I was one of 30 or so folks from my town who huddled together on the foggy windy field at Candlestick Park and belted out that most unsingable of anthems. But more than the singing, and the crowd, and the wind, I remember the bowels of the stadium.

It had to have been over 15 years ago, because that’s when the Giants left Candlestick Park and built their fantastic “new” ballpark, AT&T Park.  The 49ers, the San Francisco football team that shared Candlestick with the Giants, hung in there for a few more years after the Giants built their nicer, smaller, sunnier downtown park.  But they too finally moved to a $2 billion stadium in sunny Santa Clara last year.  Both teams abandoned the old brutalist Candlestick Park, with its horrible Soviet-like concrete slab architecture, soggy fields from the neighboring bay, and freezing foggy weather.  A game was called once because of the fog.  (Candlestick is now being torn down, and they’re going to build a mall and condos there.  How the mighty are fallen.)

We had to arrive early and meet the national anthem coordinator at some obscure gate in the vast parking lot and then be escorted down corridors even dingier than the ones in the public sections.  We waited behind a rusted chain link fence through the pregame show and batting practice.  And then our moment in the – not sun!  We ran on the field, sang, left. 

This baseball memory got me thinking about stadium architecture.  When we go to a game, or just watch it on TV, we see the front of the house, the stands, the field.  We don’t see what’s behind the scenes, the locker room, the training room. But we anthem singers were part of the “downstairs” crew, we were backstage, to use the theater metaphor.  We huddled and waited, and then, like the team, we came out of the dreary bowels of the building, and into the bright lights of the field, the tens of thousands of cheering fans, the pubic announcer – “Please Welcome….!”

Sports arenas are a curious combination of the very public stage and all that’s behind the scenes to make the spectacle happen.  Out front - the manicured field, the big screens and noise, like a theater staged for action and entertainment.  And then there’s the hidden back stage, locker rooms and training rooms and security and delivery.  The public usually sees only the front of the house.  We singers got a small glimpse of the bowels.

Stadiums and ballparks actually descended from theaters (Greek) and amphitheaters (Roman), both massive public structures for performance and entertainment.  The Greeks knew how to build a mean theater, great acoustics even today.  When they built the original Olympus stadium in 8^th century BC, it could seat 45,000 people, plus the athletes, who were competing in a race of many “stadia,” a Greek measure for 1/100^th of a mile, hence the name. 

The Romans added even more drama and excitement to public spectacle.  The “Circus Maximus” in Rome (“circus” –actually an oval track for chariots and horses) seated 200,000.  They added a fourth wall to the Greek U-design, making it easier to charge admission, and with a private entrance from the emperor’s palace.  Roman “arenas” also had a special viewing spots for the emperor, who acted sort of like the judges in American Idol, casting the deciding vote on whether the final act would be the slaughter of an animal or Christian martyr.  (“Arena” means “sand” in Latin.  A sand hobbyist collector today is an “arenophile.”  They needed a lot of sand to mop up all that blood.  So it was literally a “sand lot.”)

OK, like parent, like child.  If ancient theater and amphitheater begat today’s modern stadiums and ballparks, that’s why we still like to gather in the tens of thousands to witness speed, skill, and violence.  And is it a vestige of Roman imperialism that requires we sing the national anthem before ball games?  (And why not before basketball or football games?) And so many American flags.  It sometimes feels like a political convention.   At least today’s athletes do not have to say to their owners (as the martys reputedly had to, to the emperor) “We who are about to die, salute you.”  (Well, some team owners have about as much humanity as Roman emperors.  And football players actually do die in the cause of entertaining their owners.)

Ken Burns did a fantastic 9-part series on the history of baseball (some of it is on You Tube), nine decades, presented as the nine “innings” of its near century as “America’s pastime.”  I learned from him that we call it a ball “park” because the first games were played, not in Cooperstown NY as legend would have it, but in an even more iconic American city, Hoboken, New Jersey, in an open public park, known (could it get any better?) as “The Elysian Fields.”  Paradise in Jersey!  From “parks” they went to “fields” and “grounds” like Ebbets, and Wrigley and Polo. 

But the rural game became increasingly urban and there was money to be made in big stadiums and domes.  A building boom created today’s billion dollar behemoths, funded by a very American marriage of politics and corporate greed.  In Europe many new rugby and football stadiums were built as well, not just because of the popularity of the game, but because so many tragic deaths from stampedes and raucous drunken crowds led to laws requiring stadiums to be “all seaters”  - every one must have a seat.  That was less of a problem in US sporting venues; lazy Americans would never stand through a whole game.  Our biggest (literally) challenge when building new stadiums has been to make the seats bigger for our bigger butts.

Stadium design includes more and more amenities, especially food and drink. At the Giants’ Park you can eat garlic fries and Ghirardelli chocolate and every ethnic food you can think of.  They know that women go to games too and made enough bathrooms.  They have a kids play area and last year they added an organic garden just beyond left field.  So hip, so Californian.

“The House that Ruth Built” is a nickname for Yankee Stadium, sort of the Vatican for the religion of American baseball.  “House” can mean line and lineage, the house of David, the house of Babe Ruth.  But a house is also a building, a structure, a home.  The goal of baseball is getting home, unlike those linear games of soccer and football.  Most important spot in the whole massive structure?  Home plate. 

Come on home, baseball fans, baseball players.  Home is where the heart is.

Copyright © 2016 Deborah Streeter