How is it that Baseball parks are all different sizes?

Basketball, Football, Hockey the playing field or court etc. are exactly the same size across the board. In Baseball the only thing uniform about the field are the bases and the pitching mound. Throughout MLB the outfield varies in size, what is the deal with that?

Public Comments

1. homefield advantage
2. Makes each stadium unique and gives a home advantage. Makes it bett er when you go into someone elses park and win
3. to be honest there is no good answer to this question. i played baseball all the way through highschool and watched baseball my whole life. i have never found a good answer to this question.
4. For downtown stadiums, it's a question of adapting the building to the neighborhood. One example: Oriole Park at Camden Yards was built to fit in with the existing Warehouse that forms a backdrop for right field...what an impressive target. As long as the mound and bases are in the right position, the shape of the outfield doesn't really matter. George Carlin and other philosophers have pointed out that the foul lines in baseball are limitless, extending to infinity.
5. We'll yes the outfield is different in every ballpark, but thats what makes them unique...but most outfield walls follow this standard, from home plate, in left field and right field the wall should be somewhere around 300 ft and in center field it should be somewhere around 400 ft.. but I like the fact that every ballpark is different.
6. If it ain't broke, why fix it? The first baseball fields were limited by whatever was around, whether buildings or fences or streets or whatever else. For one example, look at Fenway Park; its leftfield distance is limited by that street just past the fence. Over the years, people never really found any reason to standardize field sizes, so why do it? It makes each field unique, which makes things interesting, mixes it up a little. One extreme example is in Denver, Colorado, where they have a centerfield fence 415 feet from home plate, which is deeper than most places. In high-elevation Denver, the ball travels farther, so they built the fences farther out to compensate for that. Today, they humidify the baseballs before the game, and that seems to be working to retard the balls' flight a bit. In short, there really hasn't been a need to standardize things. As long as they meet the post-1958 minimum of 325 feet down the foul lines, and 400 feet to straightaway center, they're OK (Official Baseball Rules, Rule 1.04 NOTE [a]). It's what makes baseball unique. I guess it's what makes golf unique as well; every course is different. Every auto racing track is different. In bowling, oil patterns are different from tournament to tournament. No reason to standardize, that's all.
7. Why not? What concern is it of baseball's whatever the lesser sports do? Those many, dull "play on large rectangle, move the object to the short ends" frivolities lack creativity as it is. A true baseball fan will not try to map their unworthy notions onto the great game. Symmetry is overrated.
8. Sports rules normally only dictate the field of play in regards to scoring. Basketball and Football are both "linear" games -- the point is to get from one end to the other. Baseball is a "circular" game; the point is to return "home". Therefore, the only dimesions stated in the rules are those of the basepaths. Historically, early baseball was played in large empty fields with no fences. The fences came into being when baseball took off as an urban game. Back in the '20s and '30s you didn't just buy a huge lot and put up a stadium with quirky dimensions that you chose...the outfield dimensions were determined by the size and shape of the available space. Older parks like Fenway have "short" fields because that is all the land that was available at the time. Baseball did go for more symmetrical stadiums in the '60s and '70s. Although stadiums like Dodger Stadium and Kaufman Stadium in K.C. are "classics" there were also a bunch of awful, boring "multipurpose" stadiums in Atlanta, Philly, Pittsburgh and Cincy...When it was time for those monsters to be replaced, the teams opted for more "old school" stadiums and funky outfield dimensions were just part of that image.
9. The playing field (base path distance, pitching mound to home plate distance are spelled out in the rule book. The minimum distance from home plate to the outfield is there as well, but the heigth of the wall (the "Green Wall" at Fenway) allows for a shorter field. If you have a fast team you would build a bigger park with lots of room to run and if you had a strong long ball team you would want a smaller park.
10. it makes stadiums unique,like Fenway and the old Polo Grounds and stuff.