Ballpark Rankings Update - O.co Coliseum

While I was in the San Francisco area I was able to get to an Oakland Athletics game. They play in what is now called the O.co Coliseum. O.co is the new name for Overstock.com. It's a terrible name but the sponsorship makes sense, since the whole Moneyball theory the A's operate on is based on trying to get quality players at a cheap price. Anyway, O.co is an old place -- older than the Vet. It opened in 1966 for the NFL Raiders and the A's moved in from Kansas City in 1968. So old that the men's room had troughs instead of urinals. I've taken a vow to never use a trough.

Being one of those multi-purpose places, the sightlines aren't so great in some areas. And even where I sat (seven rows behind the visitors' dugout; thanks for not buying up the good seats, A's fans), it seemed far away because there's a lot of room between the stands and the foul lines. That helps pitchers a lot, because foul pops that go into the seats in many places are easily caught here.

I stood up between innings of the game (in which the former Philadelphia A's beat Detroit, the day after the Tigers clinched the AL Central title) and circled around to take this video. YouTube is having issues again, or something, because the sound

To All The Parks I've Loved Before...

Apologies to Willie and Julio for the title...

I thought I'd dig up something from the archives of the Outsports discussion board. A thread was started in 2002 about favorite major league ballparks. At the time, I had only been to six. I ranked them thusly: Oriole Park at Camden Yards, Dodger Stadium, Yankee Stadium, Veterans Stadium (I made a note that the Vet ranked ahead of the others because of good memories as much as anything else), Qualcomm Stadium and Candlestick Park.

From 2003 through 2008 (during those happy years when I still had spending money) I managed to get to a lot more parks, and updated the list each time. So I thought I'd share my current rankings here on the blog. Ballparks listed in italics have been vacated by the teams that once called them home. Some have been torn down and replaced, others still stand.