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."

5. Colorado Rockies/Coors Field

Ed Andrieski/AP

  • By Ross Atkin Staff Writer

Opened: 1995

Capacity: 50,445

What the authors say: “The Rocky Mountains, which rise beyond Coors Field’s left and center-field walls, provide as spectacular a backdrop for a ballgame as travelers will find in this great land of ours.”

Learned from the book:

• A view of the Rocky Mountains, say the authors, is alone worth make a trip to the ballpark.

• Before the team learned how to compensate for its high altitude by storing baseballs in a humidor, the frequency of home runs earned Coors Field a reputation as Coors Canaveral.

• Even by cutting down on balls that leave the yard, Coors is still a hitter’s park because of a spacious outfield and because thin air lessens the bite on curveballs.

• Got to love the name of the stadium’s section of cheapest bleacher seats: The Rockpile.

• Among the items fans are specifically barred from bringing into the stadium: watermelons. It’s okay, however, to enter with a motorcycle helmet.

• The center field fountain and rock garden nicely echo the great outdoors beyond the stadium walls.

• To designate a mile above sea level, the park has a row of purple seats in the upper deck.

5 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.