Farewell Forbes Field

Recently it has been my good fortune to spend a total of 14 days in Pittsburgh, a city I had never visited before -- and which turned out to be much greener and interesting than I had imagined it to be.

Here's the most forlorn thing I saw in my exploration -- a piece of what was once the outfield fence at Forbes Field, the former home of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Regarded as the first modern ballpark, Forbes Field would have been 100 years old today.

If Forbes Field were still there, it would likely be counted as one of those historic baseball gems -- of which only Fenway Park in Boston and Wrigley Field in Chicago remain. What seems especially poignant about the absence of Forbes Field is that if it were still there, it would be wedged into a truly remarkable location -- the edges of two university campuses (U. of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon) and a beautiful park (Schenley). Alas, when it took over the stadium site, the U. of Pittsburgh replace Forbes Field with particularly mediocre examples of brutalist 1970s concrete campus buildings.

The Pirates decamped in the early 1970s for Three Rivers Stadium, itself a forgettable brutalist monsterpiece. Recently they moved to PNC Park, among the newer examples of the current rage for cute major league facilities. As a design concept, this idea was fresh and remarkable when it began with Camden Yards in Baltimore. Now it's a bit too tried-and-true -- a bit too calculated, as two recent trips to PNC Park revealed, to dazzle and distract and induce spending on food and frippery, as opposed to savor the national pasttime itself.

Plus, in truth, PNC Park is a bit ugly. From home plate looking outward, PNC offers a lovely prospect of downtown Pittsburgh in the background with the Sixth Street Bridge in the foreground. But from the outfield looking in, there's something cheap and wearying about the place. I think it's the press box, which looms at the top of the stadium and looks as if it was an afterthought dropped atop the structure without any attention to its visual effect.

One of these days -- if the penchant of major league baseball for short-term gain at the expense of longterm success doesn't catch up with it -- some team will try something truly bold. Can you imagine a team playing in a stadium that looks anything like the Olympic Stadium in Beijing, which the swiss architecture firm of Herzog and deMeuron designed to resemble a giant bird's nest? (Hello Orioles? Blue Jays? Cardinals?)

Baseball teams like to use public money to build tiny stadiums so they can make big bucks charging obscene ticket prices -- which generates nice cash flow but seems calculated to turn today's youngsters into something other than baseball fans. I personally would love to introduce my two little kids to Fenway Park, but the cost of such an outing puts that out of the question.

The razzle-dazzle of today's new ballparks is calculated to make a family jaunt to such places an enticing prospect despite the expense, on the theory that the best leisure time is that which most closely resembles a trip to the also absurdly expensive Disney World. But baseball, in order to be savored properly, requires study -- of things like the elaborate strategy and the subtleties of the fierce battle of wits and skill between the pitcher and the batter. Thus it seems particularly fitting to put a ballpark in the shadow of two great universities. If only it were still there.