Also, a few extra rows of seats were added in most of the outfield sections, moving the outfield wall about 12 feet closer to home. This addition created a notch in both corners. Extra rows of seats were added between the dugouts and the foul poles, and the front edge of the lower deck now makes a gradual curve along the foul lines, and no longer rises in height as it did before. Prior to the 2001 season, the new Comiskey Park underwent an $8 million renovation. (Thanks, Connie!) Fortunately, some of his biggest gripes have been addessed by renovations in recent years. (Remember Jim Croce's Bad, Bad, LeRoy Brown?) His nicely illustrated book City Baseball Magic was in large part a polemical tract against the dauntingly big new Comiskey Park. It was a human-scale design that was intended to better fit into (and thus revive) Chicago's rough south side. His design harkened back to the classical era stadiums, with a fully roofed upper deck that extended over much of the lower deck. It's a shame the White Sox didn't build the alternative ballpark proposed by Philip Bess. One good aspect is that there are real bench-seat bleachers in the outfield, available at a modest price.
They should have squeezed in ten or so more rows in back of the first deck rather than building such a big second deck. For some inexplicable reason, there is hardly any overhang between the decks, leaving almost everyone exposed to the often-harsh Chicago elements.
Unlike most other stadiums, the entry portals are at the bottom of the upper deck. As in Toronto's Rogers Centre (ex-Skydome), however, the upper-deck seats were set high above the field to accommodate two levels of skyboxes (and one tiny "mezzanine" deck), and the steep "rake" (angle) that this necessitated to view the field below is scary for acrophobic fans. For example, the walls between the dugouts and the foul poles originally followed a straight line, gradually increasing in height due to the slight curvature of the seating rows. There were several design similarities with Kauffman Stadium, the widely-lauded next-to-last stadium in that category.
#U.S. CELLULAR FIELD AND PRO PLAYER STADIUM PLUS#
That design, plus the flashy pinwheel-and-fireworks-spewing scoreboard in center field, were fitting tributes to its predecessor. The outfield dimensions were quite similar to those of the original Comiskey Park, which it replaced: 347 feet to each corner, 375 feet to the power alleys, and 400 feet to center field. As with nearly all other modern 20th century stadiums, of which this was the last example, the field layout was perfectly symmetrical. The "new" Comiskey Park (as it was called until early 2003) was originally hailed by many people, but it soon came to be derided as the model of everything a new stadium should not be. ALL STAR GAME: 2003 WORLD SERIES: 2005 (1 W, 0 L)īEEN THERE, DONE THAT: Aug.
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