Spontaneous Construction : Baltimore’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards Is a Fan’s Delight That Looks As If Builders Designed It as They Went Along--and It’s Supposed To

Sprawled outside Janet Marie Smith’s third-floor office window is Baltimore’s $105-million steel-and-brick time warp: a new ballpark dressed up in turn-of-the-century clothes.

“It’s a park that fits in with the tapestry of downtown Baltimore,” says Smith, her Mississippi accent all but gone. She is vice president for planning and development of the Baltimore Orioles, a highfalutin title for the team’s day-to-day manager of Oriole Park at Camden Yards, which since its opening on April 6 has drawn mostly rave reviews from George Bush, architectural critics, fans and the players who work there.

A couple of weeks ago, the Orioles, in first place by half a game in the American League East, began a home stand by playing the Oakland Athletics, the No. 2 team in the West. A capacity crowd was shoe-horned into this new-old park, on the site of the railroad station where Abraham Lincoln stopped while en route to Gettysburg for an epochal address 129 years ago.

“Forty-four thousand people on a Monday night,” Smith said the day after the series opener.

The Orioles and the A’s also drew more than 45,000 on a Tuesday night and almost 46,000 the night after that. When the home stand ended last week, the team had played to sellout crowds for 10 of its first 23 dates at home. Averaging more than 40,000 fans, the Orioles are headed for a 3.5-million year at the gate--this for a franchise that has been over the 2-million mark only six times since the St. Louis Browns moved here 38 years ago.

“The new park was necessary for the long-run future of the franchise,” said Eli Jacobs, who became the Orioles’ principal owner when Edward Bennett Williams’ widow sold the club to him and his partners for about $70 million in 1988.

A native of the Boston area, Jacobs was weaned on the Red Sox and swallowed one of life’s first big disappointments as a 9-year-old when his team lost the seventh game of the 1946 World Series to the St. Louis Cardinals.

Not by accident, there are facets of state-built Camden Yards not unlike Boston’s 80-year-old Fenway Park. The high batting background in center field here bears a likeness to the left-field “Green Monster” at Fenway.

There has been a lot of borrowing from a lot of baseball’s grand old ballparks, and if this be larceny, the Orioles are pleading guilty.

“Some of the things in Baltimore look like they were accidental,” said John Pastier, a consultant on the Camden Yards project. “At times, you get the feeling that it was being designed as they went along. For instance, the upper and lower decks don’t line up with each other. That’s the beauty of this park--the sense of spontaneity that is everywhere.”

Down the left-field line, the home-run distance is 333 feet. In deepest center, the fence is 410 feet from home plate. The right-field line measures only 318 feet, but the wall there is 25 feet high, compared to seven feet in the rest of the park.

Two players--Mickey Tettleton of Detroit and Kevin Reimer of Texas--have hit the ball out of the park in right field, but no one has muscled up to reach the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Warehouse, the eight-story, 1,100-foot building that frames the park from center to right field. That’s a shot of about 475 feet.

There is a narrow street between the outer limits of the stadium and the red-brick warehouse, which was built in 1898 and restored after it was abandoned in 1974. Janet Marie Smith and the rest of the Orioles’ front-office staff work in the warehouse. The ballpark light tower that illuminates right field is located atop the warehouse.

Between the warehouse and the park, stretching the length of the street, is a festival, a bazaar of courtyard stands that includes Boog Powell’s barbecue pit, arguably the best food at Camden Yards. Powell, now 50, was a hulking, 230-pound first baseman who always looked as if he knew good food. He played 13 years for the Orioles, hitting 303 home runs.

“This is how popular the Booger still is in this town,” said Chuck McGeehan, a friend of Powell. “I went by one night, just to say hello, and about 70 people yelled at me to get to the end of the line to get my barbecue.”

During Powell’s career, the Orioles were artistically successful, winning five division titles, four pennants and two World Series. But the Colts of the NFL were the major sports presence in Baltimore then, and the Orioles struggled annually to draw 1 million fans to Memorial Stadium, which was a piecemeal improvisation on a park that had been built for football in 1922.

Memorial Stadium was the place where Ted Williams, at the end of his career, complained about the distraction in the batter’s box because a resident’s light was burning in a home beyond the center-field fence. Earl Weaver, the bantam manager, grew tomatoes in one of the Memorial Stadium bullpens.

Elrod Hendricks was a teammate of Powell and is in his 16th season as the Orioles’ bullpen coach.

“We couldn’t sell out the seventh game of the 1971 World Series,” Hendricks said. “People would listen to the games on the radio in this town, but they wouldn’t come. Things started changing in the late 1970s, and can you believe how bad it was, looking around now? There’s no comparison between Memorial Stadium and this new park. This place is a good place to come.”

The wrecking ball has not touched the city-owned Memorial Stadium yet. Having lost the Colts to Indianapolis--the team’s marching band remains, playing at such Baltimore events as the Preakness horse race--Baltimore hopes for an NFL expansion team, which could play at Memorial Stadium until another stadium is built near Camden Yards.

At baseball-only Oriole Park, the spectators are on top of the action, enjoying the game as they do at Wrigley Field in Chicago or in Fenway Park. There are signs all over the box-seat area warning fans about foul balls, and they can come whistling into the stands at menacing speeds. But a real baseball fan will trade danger for proximity, any day.

“Team management had the right instincts about Camden Yards,” said John Pastier, who was architecture critic at The Times from 1969 until 1975. He and Janet Marie Smith were neighbors in Silver Lake, Smith attending about 35 Dodger games a season during the five years she lived in Los Angeles.

Pastier says he has been to about 200 stadiums and stadium sites in the major and minor leagues. He is an unabashed traditionalist.

“Camden Yards has broken the cookie-cutter way of designing ball parks,” he said. “It is the best park built since County Stadium in Milwaukee (which opened in 1953). It might be the best new park built since Yankee Stadium (opened in 1923). New parks in Cleveland and Denver are going to follow some of the things that have been done in Baltimore.”

Yankee Stadium has been called “The House That Ruth Built.” Center field at Camden Yards is where Babe Ruth’s father ran a saloon from 1906 to 1912, about three blocks from the birthplace of his home run-hitting son.

Probably the only serious thing wrong with Camden Yards is that it wasn’t named Babe Ruth Stadium.

There have been other complaints, and at a recent game the lights went out, delaying play for 20 minutes.

“I still haven’t been given a satisfactory explanation for that,” Eli Jacobs said.

Some season ticket-holders--and the number has grown in a year from 15,000 to about 22,000--have said that their locations were better at Memorial Stadium, where the capacity was about 6,000 more than the new park.

“There’s a physician that sits in my section,” said a Camden Yards usher in the area behind home plate. “Some of the interns at his hospital have better seats. He doesn’t like it too much.”

And some fans are disappointed with the terrace boxes, which sell for $12, a dollar less than the boxes downstairs.

“The terrace boxes are really an endless row of seats with sight lines obscured by the overhang of the club deck,” one said.

Larry Lucchino, the president of the Orioles, answers the complaints by saying: “It’s like buying a new car. Once you get it off the floor, there’s always the chance that there’s going to be some knocks and rattles.”

Adds Janet Marie Smith: “My job won’t be done until all the kinks are out. We’ve responded to some of the feedback we get. It was because of a fan’s suggestion that we re-arranged the two bullpens, making them visible for the fans.”

Jacobs is satisfied.

“The park has exceeded our expectations,” he said. “And we had high expectations.”

One fan complained that after a game it takes longer to get from his seat to his car than from his car to home. The parking lot at Camden Yards holds only 5,000 cars, but there is space for about 28,000 other cars within three-fourths of a mile of the park, and Smith estimates that 20% of the fans use public transportation.

Pastier is glad that the architectural firm--Helmuth, Obata & Kassabaum of Kansas City, which also designed Royals Stadium--favored stairways over ramps.

“Stairs are really old-fashioned,” Pastier said. “Look at all the ramps at the new Comiskey Park. They just overwhelm the outside of that stadium.”

The grass is real at Camden Yards, and the early scouting reports on the park is that not many routinely hit ground balls will get through the infield, outfielders should be prepared to charge everything rolling in their direction and fly balls appear to be carrying deceptively well.

The night Mark McGwire of Oakland hit a three-run first-inning homer, launching the Athletics’ three-game sweep, his teammate, Jose Canseco, said: “I thought it was going to be a sacrifice fly, but it just kept going. This park has a very different aura about it. It’s very cozy. And with the fans on top of you, it’s fiery, like it is in Yankee Stadium.”

Brady Anderson, the Orioles’ left fielder, was hitting close to .300 early, off to the best start of his career.

“The lights here are very good,” he said. “They’re as good as anyplace. But in the daytime, there’s an awful glare. In the daytime, it’s as bad as anyplace to see.”

A sixth-place team that lost 95 games last year, the Orioles won 13 of their first 17 home games before Oakland came to town. The Orioles have been out-hitting their opponents by more than 50 percentage points at home.

Because Camden Yards is a new park for the Orioles as well as their opponents, their manager, Johnny Oates, says his club’s edge in Baltimore has been “home crowd, not home field.”

Bill Ripken, the second baseman, completed the manager’s thought: “It’s better having 45,000 people rooting for you than it is having 50,000 rooting against us in Toronto.”

Next year, the All-Star Game will be played at Camden Yards, enabling the National Leaguers to experience the treasures of Oriole Park.

“No dome here,” said Roger Angell, who writes about baseball for the New Yorker. “No beetling cyclotron over our heads. This is a pavilion, a park right in the city. This is a fan’s park, I think. They’ve done it at last.”