The best of Coors and Camden Yards. Who else in Major League Baseball is building ballparks. As sports fans, we've been to dozens of other facilities, from Fenway Park and Jacobs Field in Cleveland to Maple Leaf Garden and the Brickyard in Indianapolis. The problem with buildings of all sorts is that very often, the owners know more about what they don't want than what they do. Unable to speak the lingo, they leave it up to the architects to read their minds.
Architects can be spectacular or spectacularly bad, and ballparks are no exception.
HOK Sport, Kansas City, Mo., architect for the Reds' new ballpark, gave the world Camden Yards in Baltimore and new Comiskey Park in Chicago. The former wowed everyone, helping to kick off the busiest stadium-building era in baseball history. Here's the best of what we saw on our six-city tour and what we think the Reds need to take into account. In some cases, the Reds and HOK have already penciled in some of these features, but it's the accountants who have the ink. A wide concourse all the way around the ballpark, so fans can walk around and see the game from anywhere.