Skip to footer

Baseball fans: Take a quick tour of all 30 major league ballparks

Authors Josh Pahigian and Kevin O’Connell explore America's major league ballparks in "The Ultimate Baseball Road."

26. Chicago White Sox/US Cellular Field

Charles Rex Arbogast/AP

  • By Ross Atkin Staff Writer

Opened: 1991

Capacity: 40,615

What the authors say: “[I]n US Cellular Field, with all its many and continued improvements, the White Sox have created a compelling place that their fans truly want to visit, and one that they can afford.”

Learned from the book:

• “New Comiskey,” as US Cellular Field is sometimes known, was opened a year before Baltimore’s Oriole Park, which revolutionized ballpark architecture. Although “the Cell” missed this revolution, a seven-phase renovation project has managed to transform it into a more fan-friendly park than the “massive monolith” it started off as. “The nuances are there now,” the authors say.

• US Cellular Field lacks the walkable neighborhood that surrounds Wrigley Field, but the White Sox have been working to establish a zone of fan-friendly businesses nearby.

• Using the team’s training center staff, the White Sox conduct free instructional clinics for kids before each game and allow them to use batting cages and practice pitching mounds.

• The White Sox introduced the exploding scoreboard to baseball many years ago and continue the tradition after White Sox home runs.

• On sweltering days, fans can take a cold outdoor shower on the left-field concourse or use the Rain Room, which is equipped with misting machines. 

• The authors found the White Sox have a strong base of “good old-fashioned working class folks” who are “gritty and tough-minded, but with a Midwestern friendliness and civility.”

26 of 30
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.