Rating Ballpark Locations Objectively: A Very Crude Attempt
See the updated version of these ratings using Walk Score here.
Last night, the author attended with his wife/PCA an independent Frontier League game between the Schaumburg Boomers and Traverse City Beach Bums at the latter’s home park in Traverse City, Michigan. While so doing, that same author and that same wife stumbled into a discussion of what ballparks — major-league or otherwise — might be said to have the most appealing locations. Wrigley Field, for example, is excellent in this regard: it’s situated in a lively urban neighborhood, surrounded by bars and restaurants*, and is accessible by public transit — more easily than by car, in fact. From the author’s experience, much the same can be said for Fenway Park in Boston and San Francisco’s AT&T Park. Angels Stadium, on the other hand — as with any park surrounded entirely by parking lot — offers little in terms of this sort of ambiance.
*Although, it should be noted, not necessarily bars a reasonable person would find him- or herself patronizing.
It occurred to the author that there might be a means by which to assess objectively the relative merits of a ballpark’s location. The table below — of all 30 major-league ballparks sorted by the population density of their relevant zip codes — represents an entirely preliminary and very crude attempt at doing that. The author’s reasoning is thus: areas with many bars, other sorts of businesses, etc., tend also to be densely populated; areas that are surrounded by parking lots and accessible almost exclusively by car will tend to be less densely populated.
