Dubroff’s Diner

Diner Question: If you could watch a ballgame in any park, which would it be?

It’s time for another edition of Dubroff’s Diner. Wednesday, I ranked the 30 major league ballparks. I’ve been fortunate to see all 30 plus 24 that are no longer in use.

All of those 24 were memorable. I fell in love with baseball in Baltimore when I moved here in 1980 and went to Memorial Stadium, a place where I spent countless happy days and nights until the Orioles moved downtown after the 1991 season.

I warmly remember its cousin, County Stadium in Milwaukee, which, like Memorial Stadium, was built in a neighborhood and had a similar brick design.

Tiger Stadium was nostalgic but not nearly what Fenway Park and Wrigley Field were.

There were some that aren’t missed. Exhibition Stadium in Toronto was a trumped-up city park, where if you sat behind first base for a night game, you’d have the sun set in your eyes.

Denver’s Mile High Stadium hosted the Rockies for the franchise’s first two years in 1993 and 1994. In ’93, fans were so hungry for baseball that a major league record 4.4 million came there even though the stadium was much more suited to John Elway than Andres Galarraga.

But there were a generation of parks that I wished I could have seen: Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field, Cincinnati’s Crosley Field and Philadelphia’s Connie Mack Stadium all hosted major league ball in my young lifetime. If I could go further back, I would have loved to have seen the Polo Grounds, where the Mets played in 1962 and 1963.

If I had one park in which I dearly wished I could have watched a game, it was Ebbets Field. I was born very close to the Dodgers’ home, but they moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles when I was an infant.

Sometimes, we forget how fast time moves. For many of us, we took attending games at Memorial Stadium for granted, but fans under 35 may not remember going there, or were simply too young.

This week’s diner question: If you could watch a game in a major league park, present or past, that you have not been to, which would it be?

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