Remaking The Field of Dreams

By WALTER SHAPIRO CHICAGO

Midway through the fourth inning last Thursday, the home team was behind 16-0, and the restless opening-day crowd began to leave their seats. Rather than rushing to beat the traffic home, they set out on sightseeing tours along the broad concourses ringing the field. It was an epic day, the unveiling of the new Comiskey Park, and Chicago White Sox fans were ready to gawk. The splendor of the grass, the picture-perfect sight lines from the lower deck and the allure of the sun-speckled bleachers all trumpeted that this was a park made for baseball. Before the game, aging knuckleballer Charlie Hough, trying to hang on with the White Sox, captured the festive mood when he said, "I love the outfield seats. I'd enjoy sitting out there, I'm sure. I hope I don't have to."

Just across 35th Street stands the forlorn hulk of the original 1910 Comiskey Park, with a gaping hole cut through the right-field stands. A mournful opening-day banner reads, SPEEDWAY WRECKING: THE HARDEST 'HITTER' OF ALL TIME. With these ghostly memories still in sight, how hard it is for the nostalgic baseball fan to come to peace with progress. Yet the truth must be acknowledged: the new Comiskey Park represents a hopeful beacon for the future of baseball. It is a talisman that the wonder of the game will survive this era of luxury sky boxes, insanely lucrative television contracts and pouty $4 million sluggers. "What's happening in baseball architecture is what you see here today," says architect Richard deFlon, who designed the new Comiskey for the HOK Sport group. "This is the first of the new single-purpose stadiums. Baltimore's next, then Cleveland. There is a return to the intimacy and the character of the old ball parks."

Ball park. Just the words jog the memory and uplift the spirit in a way that is antithetical to seemingly analogous terms like stadium, coliseum and that ghastly civic-booster construction "sports complex." The key word is park, because nothing better conveys a small child's glee at the first glimpse of the field on an outing to the ball park. The three survivors of baseball's glory days -- Fenway in Boston, Wrigley in Chicago and Detroit's Tiger Stadium -- are islands of green in a densely urban setting. Lawrence Lucchino, president of the Baltimore Orioles, explains his team's quest for a modern-day field of dreams: "Everyone harked back to their youth and looked for what was special about the ball parks we loved."

This desire to recapture the tradition and character of bygone ball parks is a radical departure for the lords of baseball, who just a few years ago seemed entranced with the air-conditioned, carpeted sterility of the shopping-mall culture. Think back to the National League play-offs last October that pitted two teams bursting with young talent, the Cincinnati Reds and the Pittsburgh Pirates. It would have been an epic series, save for one problem: both teams played in nearly identical 1970 concrete slabs, monuments to the bottom-line obsessions that created multipurpose stadiums equally antiseptic for baseball, football or rock concerts. In 1989 the Skydome in Toronto found a way to exaggerate this folly to Herculean proportions. Boasting a hotel overlooking center field, a Hard Rock Cafe and the aura of high-tech razzmatazz, the Skydome became a monument to itself, with baseball reduced to a minor sideline.

What is stirring about the ball-park revival that began at Comiskey is that it shows art and commerce can sometimes mix. "We all love the game of baseball," says Terry Savarise, the White Sox official who directed the project. "But let's not kid ourselves: baseball is a business." Indeed it is, and Comiskey has 93 luxury sky boxes renting for up to $90,000 a year to prove it. The steeply pitched upper deck, elevated over three levels of luxury seating, invites a remake of Vertigo. Comiskey's other flaw is a love for blandness, rejecting the odd angles or idiosyncrasies that add character to a ball park.

If, architecturally, Comiskey can be scored as a double off the wall, the new ball park rising in Camden Yards in downtown Baltimore is a going-going- gone home run. Make no mistake, fans and players alike will miss the homey pleasures of Baltimore's Memorial Stadium, now in its final year. Set in the middle of an old-fashioned front-porch neighborhood and never an architectural icon, Memorial Stadium is like Baltimore itself, a place that purports to be nothing more and nothing less than it is.

Standing in the upper deck of the half-completed Camden Yards ball park, one can appreciate why baseball bard Roger Angell proclaimed, "This is a fan's park . . . They've done it at last." Although Camden Yards is designed by the same firm that created Comiskey, here the upper deck is a graceful incline, not a mountain climb with Sherpa guides. Downtown Baltimore is always in view, from the Bromo-Seltzer clock tower behind left field to the massive, restored brick warehouse in right field that will become a 460-ft.-from-home-pl ate target. (Already the Orioles are searching for lefthanded sluggers with "warehouse power.") The homage to old ball parks can be seen in such < retro touches as the exposed steel support beams, the irregular configuration of the outfield angles and arches that open wide to embrace the city.

Watching a game in Detroit is a graduate course in capturing the magic of the old-time ball parks. Unlike the ivy-clad perfection of Wrigley Field or the self-congratulatory ugliness of Fenway Park, 79-year-old Tiger Stadium represents the last remaining link with baseball before it became too self- conscious. No park provides more of the sensual joys of the game itself. On a clear night, fans can hear the crack of the bat, the infield chatter and even the ball hitting the catcher's mitt in the Tiger bullpen down the third- base line. The cantilevered closed-in upper deck gives you the impression of sitting in a cherry picker over the umpire's shoulder; the lower-deck bleachers are so close to the field that you can nurture the illusion that you are not a spectator but the Tigers' right fielder.

Yet Tiger Stadium is an endangered species. Pizza baron Tom Monaghan, the team's owner, wants to open the 1995 season in a new stadium. William Haase, the Tiger vice president for operations, argues, "Everything is wonderful about old ball parks. But that doesn't mean they are meant to last forever or that they can be economically feasible." Preservationists are battling to prevent this rendezvous with the wrecking ball. The Tiger Stadium Fan Club, with 12,000 members, has developed its own plan for retrofitting the ball park and is promoting state legislation to bar the use of public funds for a new lair for the Tigers. As Bob Buchta, one of the founders of the fan club, says, "There is a special connection between old ball parks, childhood and the game of baseball. We feel that the Tigers are making an artistic mistake and a financial mistake."

For the moment, at least, Tiger Stadium endures. Next season they too will be aiming for the warehouse in Camden Yards. Other teams -- the Cleveland Indians, the Milwaukee Brewers and the Texas Rangers -- may soon make their own contributions to the ball-park revival of the 1990s. On the field before the opening game at Comiskey, Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent said proudly, "This is the best that baseball can do in terms of architecture." For the true fan, the enduring hope is that he ain't seen nothin' yet.