Just had an observation about the 3 main ages of ballparks in baseball history. These ages being the Classic Jewel Box era (1910's-1960's), Multipurpose/Cookie Cutter Stadium era (1960's-1990's),, and the present Retro Classic era (1990's-present). Mainly, how close the stadiums that started the 2nd and 3rd ages are to each other.
RFK Stadium opened in 1961 in DC. While football teams playing in baseball stadiums was already a thing, in spite of the radically different shapes of the fields, up to this point it always consisted of football teams playing in stadiums designed for baseball. The Bears played at Wrigley for 5 decades, and the Patriots at Fenway for 5 seasons, both ending around the beginning of the SB era. Even ones more recent than that, such as Cleveland Stadium and Baltimore Memorial Stadium, were more of baseball than football stadiums. But RFK Stadium was the first stadium with the round/circular design to explicitly try being designed to accommodate both sports to an equal degree. With football catching up to baseball in popularity that decade and teams wanting bigger stadiums, that set off the trend of all those concrete donut stadiums being built. By the early 1970's this was the trend among cities with both sports. Since this is also when domes began, the 3 earliest domes (Astrodome, Superdome, Kingdome) all had this design, though New Orleans never ended up with an MLB team.
Funny how 3 decades later, a stadium in Baltimore, just a 90 minute drive north of DC, made the trend started by RFK Stadium obsolete overnight. As many of you know, Oriole Park at Camden Yards, with it's Retro Classic design (part of which involved being a baseball only park), was an instant hit and left most teams wanting their own version of it. The 2nd age was over and the 3rd had started.
Found this observation interesting for how 2 trend setting ballparks were so close to each other.
