How Concrete and Steel Built Baseball

There's been talk in Toronto about the future of its iconic domed stadium (officially known as the Rogers Centre, but everyone calls it SkyDome or just the Dome). It's one of the largest baseball stadiums, and certainly not the best, as it was designed as an all-purpose stadium, that could host football games and other events.

The trend now is to smaller, purpose-built stadiums that echo the design of the earliest modern stadiums like the original Yankee Stadium or Detroit's Tiger Stadium. Deadspin has an article about the history of those stadiums and how they used modern mate

In the new construction, form no longer necessarily followed function, as the ballparks received artistic flourishes as a testament to the craftsmen who made them as well as permanence they were supposed to embody. The exterior walls at Shibe Park had terra cotta balls and bats as decoration. Ebbets Field’s rotunda included a chandelier of baseball-shaped lights. And Yankee Stadium’s unprecedented third deck was capped with copper friezes, in what’s become probably the most iconic representation of sports architecture. Simply put, these new ballparks were aspirational.

“The concrete-and-steel stadiums not only represented a safety measure, but a leap of faith on how popular baseball would become,” says MLB historian John Thorn. “In effect, it was like Field of Dreams. They built in the hopes it would come. They built ballparks of great seating capacity and seeming posterity.”

If you're a baseball fan, you'll find it a fascinating article.