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Seth S. Tannenbaum, "Bleacher Seats and Luxury Suites: Democracy and Division at the Twentieth-Century Ballpark" (U Illinois Press, 2026)
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- [00:01]
Seth Panabone
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Paul Knepper
Welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Paul Knepper and today I have Seth Panabone on the author of Bleacher Seats and Luxury, Democracy and division at the 20th century ballpark. Seth is an assistant professor of sports studies at Manhattanville University. Seth, welcome to the show.
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Seth Panabone
Thanks, Paul. I'm really thrilled to be here.
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Paul Knepper
So I want to start off, I guess, with kind of your personal experience with ballparks. What, did you go to ballparks a lot as a kid or a ballpark or numerous ballparks. And how did your interest in ballparks begin?
- [00:42]
Seth Panabone
Yeah, so I grew up a Phillies fan. I grew up in Philadelphia and my dad was a high school baseball coach. A baseball was sort of part of our, of my upbringing, just part of what our family did. We went to Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia sort of sporadically when I was young. Wasn't the easiest place to get to from where we lived. It wasn't impossible. But in 2003, the Phillies were putting the finishing touches on Citizens bank park, which was going to open in 2004. And we wanted to be able to get opening day tickets. And one of the ways you could guarantee opening day tickets was if you bought a partial season ticket plan for the last season at the vet. So in 2003 we got the Sunday season ticket plan which is like 13 home Sundays for the course of the season. And even though I don't live there anymore, my dad and I have had this two seat Sunday season ticket plan now for going on 23 years. So I spent a lot of time at the Vet as a young kid and a lot more time at Citizens Bank Park.
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Paul Knepper
So.
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Seth Panabone
Yeah.
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Paul Knepper
And at what point did you start to look at ballparks, the Vet or other ballparks, through the lens of, you know, sociological and economic lens. And, you know, think of it as a place where, you know, division in terms of the division and exclusion that took place.
- [02:10]
Seth Panabone
Yeah, so that didn't really get started until graduate school and I sort of stumbled on it obviously, as I just said, like I'm super interested in baseball and have spent a lot of time in the ballparks, but. But I didn't really think about it with my academic hat on. You know, I just sort of experienced it as a fan until I was in graduate school. And, and I didn't go to graduate school intending to to study ballparks to write about the fan experience. I went with the intention of writing about conscientious objection during World War I and discovered that Although I could write an article about that. There were only like 2,800American conscientious objectors to World War I, so there wasn't really much more to write about. I took a class on consumer culture history. I took a class on food history. And I started to think about where they intersected. And one of the things where it intersects is hot dogs at the ballpark. So I got super specific and started looking at that and then expanded out to look at sort of the full fan experience from there. And once you start thinking about that academically and reading about the rhetoric about the fan experience, but also understanding the realities of it, as someone who's sat in various places in a ballpark, that division, that exclusion really starts to stand out.
- [03:32]
Paul Knepper
By the way, I love this stuff about the hot dogs in the book. The next morning, as we're getting ready, well, I was getting ready for work. I'm telling her about, you know, how the name hot dog came about, and it's the German origins and all that.
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Seth Panabone
So I love that. That's one of the. It was one of the first pieces of research I did. So that's so cool that it's still resonating.
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Paul Knepper
Yeah, I loved it. So I. You know, you did a great job of kind of tracing the evolution of the ballpark and the ballpark experience through these five different stadiums. And you start off with the Polo Grounds. And I wonder if you could just kind of talk a little bit about the Polo Grounds. What was unique about the Polo Grounds and significant about the Polo Grounds?
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Seth Panabone
Yeah, so among other things, I mean, unique about the Polo Grounds, it was shaped. I think someone described it as a bathtub. Like the playing field was bathtub shaped. It's a big oval, functionally, and mean that that makes it unique. But it was a place where baseball was played in New York at the various iterations of the Polo Grounds. And it moved around and it burnt down and it got rebuilt from the 1880s into the 1960s. It was the original home of the New York Mets for two years. And with the center of, you know, national media in New York and the center of baseball media in New York for a long time, too. It sort of was the touchstone for where people thought about the fan experience. When Babe Ruth comes to the Yankees, the Yankees are playing at the Polo Grounds. It's like the center of the baseball universe for a good while. And it's a place where a lot of the norms of the fan experience are created. It's the place where supposedly, not to spoil Things, but supposedly the hot dog was invented there. It was not actually, but supposedly it was at a baseball game. And a lot of the sort of rhetoric of early 20th century baseball atmosphere, this idea that people from all walks of life are interacting are either directly set at the Polo Grounds, or once you start getting really reading into all of this stuff, you're like, oh, this person is thinking about the Polo Grounds while they're saying that immigrants from this part of the world and that part of the world and that part of the world are all sitting together. Because if you understand the demographics of New York, well, you know, there are immigrants from all those different places in New York, and that may not be the case in every other major league city.
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Paul Knepper
Yeah. And I guess kind of, you know, structurally and location wise, how is it kind of representative of staves of the day?
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Seth Panabone
Yeah, that's a really good question. So structurally, the Polo Grounds, especially after it is rebuilt out of concrete and steel so it burns down. In 1911, it was a wooden stadium, it had two tiers, it burnt down. They rebuilt it out of concrete and steel with two tiers in 1911. And the grandstands were physically separate from the bleachers. So you couldn't walk. If you had a grandstand ticket, you couldn't walk around to the bleachers and vice versa. So it's physically divided in that sense. It's structured. It's located when it was first moved there, up on the edge of New York City, the edge of population, where there's a lot of land, you need land to buy a ballpark. And this is an era well before municipalities are involved in clearing land for stadiums. So this needs to be something that the Giants owners can privately purchase. So it's mass transit accessible. It's up on the edge of the population. But as the population of New York City expands, what you basically get is a lower middle class and middle class residential neighborhood all around it. So the very people that the team owners are trying to draw these middle class sort of up into the white collar professions folks are living right near the ballpark. So it's very easy for them to get to, but it's also a comfortable environment for them to walk to because they're walking through neighborhoods composed primarily of people who are a lot like them.
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Paul Knepper
Yeah, it's interesting. You know, as I was reading about the Polo Grounds, I'm from New York, I grew up in Queens and Long island, and I was a Yankee fan and. But I, I really enjoyed reading about the Polo Grounds because there's Tremendous, you know, growing up there was tremendous nostalgia for Ebbetts Field and the Dodgers and there really wasn't the equivalent of that for the Giants and, and the Polo Grounds. And I'm not sure exactly why that is. Maybe just because I don't. The Polo Grounds is relatively close to Yaqui Stadium. That, that Ebitsfield kind of was, you know, had Brooklyn to itself in a way. So all of Brooklyn was, was kind of nostalgic for, for Ebbets Field. I don't know, I don't know what the answer is to that, but I, I, I knew a lot more about Ebitfield because of that and, and really enjoyed learning about the Polo Grounds, you know. You know, one kind of theme about, throughout the book is, is this exclusion and division. And you touched on the division a little bit with the grandstand and, and the rest of the stadium. And what was the accessibility like at the Polo Grounds for minorities?
- [08:46]
Seth Panabone
Yeah, so one of the things about the Polo Grounds at all ballparks of this era was that until the 1930s, major league games have day games. So if you are working an hourly job, and most working class jobs in the beginning of the 20th century were five and a half or six days a week, then the only day that you can go to the game is, is Sunday. Except in New York and in Massachusetts and in Pennsylvania, there were Sunday baseball bands into the 1920s and 1930s. So there literally was not a time in which working class people could regularly go to games because they were just being played while they were at work. So that's not, you know, full on exclusion, but that's a pretty significant barrier to entry for that group of people. And going all the way Back to the 1880s, baseball owners have tried to attract women to the ballpark, sometimes in an attempt to parlay gender norms into trying to get male fans to behave better, sometimes in an attempt to get women interested enough in the game to buy tickets. But the ways that women were marketed to were, to put it mildly, demeaning. They were marketed to as though one, they were completely ignorant of the game. And this is an era, like all errors, in which many women know a lot about the game and some even play baseball and, you know, amateur baseball, that they don't know anything, that they're annoying to men, that just their mere presence there is annoying to men, but also that the only reason they're there is to find a male partner like that. There's no framing of woman as an actual baseball fan, which puts them as sort of on this Subordinate level. And the Polo Grounds is not segregated in, in any formal way. And only one ballpark in this era is actually formally segregated. That's Sportsman's park in St. Louis. Griffith Stadium in Washington D.C. has a very sort of fuzzy, hazy policy that we don't need to get into. But black fans are not in any way, shape or form treated as equals. Polo Grounds 1. The Polo Grounds is often sight of segregated Negro league games in which the vast, vast, vast majority of the fans are people of color. But black people who go to Giants games are also subject to racial slurs, treated really terribly. I have some examples of a, of a. He was then a young boy when he grew up to become a journalist and an author who talked about how he was treated as like a 12 year old fan at the Polo Grounds. And the Giants themselves, well, they're just pretty racist. They hire a mascot, a like 12 year old local black kid as a mascot and they rub his head for good luck. And they have players who commit acts of racist violence and just put them right back in the lineup and all the rest. So it's not. There's no formal barriers here to working class people attending, to women attending, to people of color attending, but they are so clearly marked as inferior or given extra hurdles to get there. And that's really where this division comes in. And sort of why exclusion isn't exactly in the title of the book. Because it's not what we might think of as the classic example of, of segregated buses or water fountains. Right. But it serves the same purpose anyway without having to do that.
- [12:23]
Paul Knepper
Yeah, I hear you. It's tricky because there was clearly some intentionality behind it. But there was also, as you note, the blue laws and stuff like that that were kind of circumstantially excluded. Certain groups, certainly minorities, et cetera.
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Seth Panabone
Yeah, it's, you know, it's sometimes it's a sin of a mission, like it could do more and they chose not to, which tells me that they liked the status quo as it was.
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Paul Knepper
Right. Yeah. So in 1923, Yankee Stadium opens, the first stadium to be called a stadium. How did, how did Yankee Stadium differ from the stadiums that came before it?
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Seth Panabone
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's huge, Right? It's so much bigger. But it also opens in New York after the blue laws are gone. So Sunday baseball is a real legitimate option for working class people. And the 1923 Yankees are a little bit of a draw. You know, Babe Ruth is, is a bit of an attractive ticket sales motivator. Right. So Yankee Stadium has three tiers and separate bleachers. So there's so much more division to separate everybody. Which means that Yankee Stadium can attract black people from Harlem and white people who don't want to sit near black people from Harlem. And there's space where they can be in the same facility but they don't have to interact. And working class people, white and working class people of color can be in the same space. The Yankees can make money from them without upsetting, you know, the wealthier people who want to sit closer to the ballpark. And there is, you know, those three tiers means there's also like a middle class section where if you can't quite afford the suit, you know, the lower grandstand, but you don't want to sit with the working class people. There's a space for you too. And that, I mean, among other things, it helps expand the capacity. Which means they can make more money when the Yankees are in the World Series. They can make more money when Joe Louis is knocking out Max Schmeling. They can make more money when they're doing all of these various different events in Yankee Stadium. But the other thing about those different tiers and divisions is that it allows for different types of behavior, not just different types of people. So there's a large group of sort of middle class, upper middle class baseball fans who don't like gambling. They don't want to be around gambling. They fly, they're morally opposed to gambling. So it's incumbent on the Yankees to not have people gambling near where those people are sitting. But there's also a huge section of baseball fans that loves to gamble, that finds it interesting and exciting and they want to, you know, put a quarter that the next pitch is going to be a curveball or whatever little minor bets they're doing. And all of the divisions in Yankee Stadium allow the Yankees to basically police their anti gambling statutes differently. So they're much harsher in the more expensive seats and they give much more leeway in the cheaper seats. So that larger stadium with the more divisions are allowing the Yankees to attract people who want to behave in different ways, which again is increasing their bottom line because it means there are more people in the ballpark.
- [15:46]
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- [16:14]
Seth Panabone
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- [16:21]
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- [16:30]
Seth Panabone
And breathe.
- [16:31]
Paul Knepper
Oh, sorry.
- [16:32]
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- [16:42]
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- [16:45]
Seth Panabone
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Paul Knepper
And I mean, one thing I noted about too about Yankee Stadium was it seemed like they introduced some of the, you know, modern amenities that we kind of take for granted now, such as, you know, box seats. That seems to be a point of emphasis. And they introduced the stadium club at some point. And again, that's another form of division, of course.
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Seth Panabone
Yeah. So Larry McPhail who becomes their. Larry McPhail is a character, but he becomes their owner, one of their co owners in 1945 and he was responsible for introducing lights in Major League Baseball in Cincinnati in 1936. And he brings that to New York too. But he's really driven to try and improve the fan experience for the wealthiest of Yankees fans. So he is refining their field boxes and as you said, he introduces the stadium club, which is a basically an invite only. You have to be a box seat ticket holder, restaurant and bar underneath the stands where not only is it not accessible to quote unquote, regular fans who might sit somewhere else, it's not even visible to regular fans. It's entirely enclosed in its own area and it's only populated by, by those very same people. So that division is really beginning to grow with Yankee Stadium perhaps before we even get into the sort of classic, you know, if you understand baseball history and ballparks. Oh, this, that came around in the 60s and 70s, but its origins are really in those 1940s developments at Yankee Stadium.
- [18:50]
Paul Knepper
Yeah, I was surprised by that. The stadium co in particular, I didn't know that they had that kind of thing that, that far back. You know, as you mentioned, of course, the, the 1923 Yankees had had quite a draw in Babe Ruth. The 1930s had had a John Lou Gehri and the 40s had a John DiMaggio. In the 50s and 60s had quite a John Mickey Mantle. And yet as you talk about in the book, you know, heading the 50s and really into the 60s, attendance started to drop off despite the great Mantle and, and Whitey Ford and, and all the other, you know, great players that were there. So maybe you could talk a little bit about how, you know, the, the, the nature of the neighborhood and you know, and, and really national trends towards suburbanization affected attendance at the stadium.
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Seth Panabone
Yeah, Paul, really well framing these questions.
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Paul Knepper
I love them.
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Seth Panabone
The. So as you were sort of suggesting, right, this is a response to larger demographic changes, right? Post war, you see massive suburbanization. I say that speaking from a Westchester county suburb of New York City where people come, come back from the war or this is, you know, post Depression baby boom, right? They want more space and they move out to car accessible suburbs because we're building as the country, the, the interstate highway system. And Yankee Stadium is not accessible on what is now Metro north at that point. It is, it is today, but it wasn't then. And you can't easily drive to and park at Yankee Stadium. Not even now when they've done probably billions of dollars of work to try and improve that. Right. It's still an awful experience. Yeah, yeah, right. So. And we've got an increase in night games after World War II. So we've got now more games happening at night in neighborhoods that are due to this demographic change due to white flight, due to redlining, due to economic discrimination in jobs are increasingly populated by working class people of color. So the fans at Major League Baseball and the Yankees like everyone else, has been trying to draw for decades those middle and upper class, white, primarily male fans no longer live near the ballpark, want to drive everywhere and aren't all particularly comfortable in the neighborhoods around the ballpark. Plus games are on tv. So what are you going to do? Are you going to do this thing that makes you uncomfortable and you got to worry about your car and you got to worry about finding a place to park or are you going to listen to Mel Allen and Red Barber talk about the game on your teammate? So the Yankees try and combat that. They, you know, they start doing some parking lot sharing with, with the Giants of the Polo Grounds. They start Selling tickets at various different train stations and suburban stores and all this other stuff. And they're not particularly successful. Eventually they con New York City into purchasing Yankee Stadium and functionally rebuilding it and adding a bunch of parking garages. But they, they really don't for, for a good bit of time return to their peak 1940s, early 1950s attendance. And, and nobody else across baseball does either for a little while because lots of teams are experiencing to some degree what the Yankees are. Are experiencing as well.
- [22:26]
Paul Knepper
And of course one of those teams is, is their crosstown rival of sorts in, in the Brooklyn Dodgers. And in, in 1957, Walter O', Malley, to the chagrin of, of many Dodger fans still, you know, they're, of course, there's not a ton of them still around, but enough that they're still, they're still pissed off about it. Those that are. He picked up and left for LA and for, you know, really all the reasons you just enumerated. What I don't know. I guess I would say maybe you could talk a little bit about that. That moved to LA and, and, and the difference in of course in the, in the Chavez Marie and the location where they ended up compared to, you know, Brooklyn.
- [23:15]
Seth Panabone
Yeah. So where Abbotsfield was located was originally incredibly easy to access on mass transit. It had streetcars. They are the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers. Their fans were dodging trolleys to get to the ballpark. Right. You could get there on streetcar. It was really, really simple. But in the Post World War II era, some of those streetcars begin to get shut down. So it gets harder to get there. And more and more of their fans are now moving out to Long island, moving to Westchester, moving to North Jersey. And there are something like 250 parking spots around Ebbets Field. And that's.
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Paul Knepper
Oh boy.
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Seth Panabone
Let me do some back of the napkin math here. I'm going to say that's about 1/70 of what Dodger Stadium ends up having, give or take. Apologies if my math is not good. And that means that and Dodger State, I mean, excuse me, Ebbets Field is suffering from a lack of maintenance. And you know, if you ask some of those old Brooklyn Dodger fans, I say, well, Walter o' Malley didn't want to maintain it because he always wanted to move. Yes. But the Dodgers really suffered during the Depression and they literally didn't have money to do the upkeep on Ebit Field. And I. That did begin to sort of wear on the stadium itself. And Omali wants to build a domed Stadium, where the, the Barclays center is in downtown Brooklyn now, where, where the, the New York, the Brooklyn Nets play. And Robert Moses won't give him that land. He was willing to, he, he wanted New York City to use eminent domain to like, put it all into one parcel. And then he was willing to buy it. Not at market rate, but he was willing to buy it. And he was going to privately build his own dome. But Robert Moses refuses to do that. He wants the Dodgers to move out to Queens, where the Mets eventually end up. And Moses basically says, meh. And after a lot of back and forth, he says, meh. It's really a lot of back and forth. But he says, meh, LA comes in. LA wants to be seen as a big league city. And the way to do that is to get a Major League Baseball team. And they say, look, we'll give you 300 acres of land surrounded by parking lots in, in LA and you can move there. And it's not nearly as simple as LA made it sound. One, I don't think, I don't think o' Malley knew that people still lived there. I don't think o' Malley knew that the people who had already been evicted had been promised housing there. Once he gets out there, he has to get through a. There's a referendum vote on it, and he has to like, call every single Hollywood baseball fan to do a telethon to get him through it. There's a lawsuit that he loses at every level until the California Supreme Court sties in his favor and then they have to evict the last remaining residents. And that's a huge controversy. And it means that the Dodgers really can't connect with LA's really large Mexican American population until Fernando Valenzuela comes around in 1980 and 1981. But the site in Los Angeles, to get to what I think was your original question, is 300 acres. So they build a stadium into the hillside, which is actually really kind of interesting from an engineering feat. It means that they don't have poles blocking the view, because each level, the stadium sort of sitting on the hillside surrounded by about 16,000 parking spaces. And because it's built into the hillside, each of the tiers, the five tiers of Diner Stadium, have their own specific parking lot where you can walk straight in from your section of the hillside into your section of the stadium. So you're not interacting with the people in the different tiers in your private car, driving to the ballpark in your parking lot, where you're only around people like you. And in the stadium, where when it opens in 1962, you can't actually move between the different tiers. You're just on your level for the whole time. So it's very car accessible. I mean, it's a nightmare to drive to, too, but it's very car accessible. It's connected more or less to some major highways. It's not far from downtown. So people who are driving from wherever they live to downtown for work and very easily stop at Dodger Stadium on the way home. It is built around the car. It is not built around mass transit. There's functionally no way to get there on mass transit. It's a totally different experience than O' Malley and other baseball owners were operating in the 1940s and 1950s.
- [28:03]
Paul Knepper
And how did that. How did Dodger State of Impact know the game of baseball and other parks in the future?
- [28:10]
Seth Panabone
Yeah, so Dodger Stadium is phenomenally successful. The Dodgers set Major League Baseball attendance records year after year after year. And with its five tiers, with its, like, they take that stadium club from. From Yankee Stadium and they expand on the idea and they add more. More amenities and. And more exclusivity. And other teams want to max this. It's got a different style, architectural style. It's modern mist, it's. It's unadorned, it's clean, it's neat, and it's surrounded by parking spots and every other stadium that comes after that, even the ones that don't quite look like it because Dodger Stadium remains, you know, Kaufman Stadium looks kind of like Dodger Stadium. Shea, for a little while, looks kind of, you know, it's that open outfield kind of thing. But even the ones, you know, the concrete donuts like I grew up going to in Veteran Stadium, and the domes like the Astrodome, surrounded by parking lots, all about car access, trying to present this neat and clean and futuristic vision that distances baseball from what was seen to be like a too gritty, too urban, too dirty 1940s and 1950s stadium experience.
- [29:29]
Paul Knepper
And, you know, I want to go back to something you touched on with the five tiers. And, you know, it's, you know, kind of the theme throughout the book is that the. The ballpark is portrayed or thought of as this kind of egalitarian experience where all people from different socioeconomic and racial groups and whatever are all mixed together and joyfully enjoying the wonderful American pastime. But in reality, it's. It's. There's this division, and I actually wrote that. A quote from the book that I really like about. Yeah, about Dodger Stadium, you said instead of. Instead of one big neighborhood was like a series of gated communities. And I mean, it really, really hammers home that. That. That to me, that's kind of the. The really hones in on that theme throughout the book and particularly what you said, you know, with. With down to the parking, how you were excluded. You're. You were, you know, segregated to separate tiers by parking. I mean, how. How intentional. How intentional was that? You know, in other words, we want to keep these people separated.
- [30:31]
Seth Panabone
Yeah, it's. It's sort of a both and thing. What. What Walter O', Malley, who by this point is into his 50s, if not 60s, is really excited about is not having to walk up and down stairs and no one having to walk up and down stairs. And that's what those tiers of the parking lot allows them to do. You can just walk straight into whatever level you're on. But he also knows from his experiences at Ebbets Field that fans in the upper deck would, you know, things might fall on the fans in the more expensive seats down below accidentally in big, heavy air quotes. So he doesn't want that interaction. He wants to be able to get, you know, the Hollywood movie stars to come and sit down there without being mobbed by everybody. So it's. It's both a feature of the unique geography of Chavez Ruvidin and this goal to allow him to draw in as many different groups as possible into the same space, which makes it feel like it is that, you know, small d democratic space where people are coming from different areas, because physically, in the ballpark, there really are different groups of people, but they're not actually interacting. So it does both of those things. I mean, everything. Everything really boils down to what can they do to make more money from the people they want to draw? And their understanding of how to do that and their understanding of how to do that, these owners is, well, we gotta make it feel like it's inclusive but not actually have that interaction because that interaction makes people uncomfortable. They like the. The idea of it being inclusive, but the actual reality of inclusion is not something that fans seem to enjoy.
- [32:17]
Paul Knepper
Right. The next ballpark you featured was, was the Astrodome, and which, you know, I remember when I was a kid, it was considered all this wonder of the world and. And all that. I mean, of course, a lot of that is just marketing, but how. How did this. How did this idea of this massive dome come about?
- [32:35]
Seth Panabone
Yeah, so, I mean, the Axodome legit was A wonder of the world in 1965. It's not just marketing. It's never before completed. The largest thing like it. The engineers. I've had the privilege of reading the papers of one of the primary engineers, and it was like, we're pretty sure this is how it's going to happen. We've done all the research and studies, but we won't know until we do it. And then it worked.
- [33:02]
Paul Knepper
Right?
- [33:03]
Seth Panabone
And that's kind of mind blowing. I mean, the thing is still there. It's necessary in Houston because Houston is not a pleasant place to be outside in the middle of the day in January or, I mean, in July or August. It's necessary because oftentimes it rains a lot in really short periods of time in Houston, they get hurricanes. But it's also necessary because Houston is not a traditional baseball town, so you're not going to attract new fans who are, if they're going to be miserable. So you got to make it comfortable for them. And it becomes possible. It's a lot of ideas that Walter o' Malley had been kicking around about his Dodger Dome in Brooklyn that are borrowed by this guy whose name is Roy Hoffheinz, who's the former mayor of Houston, who becomes involved in the ownership group of something called the Houston Sports association, which is the ownership group that. That gets the National League to agree to expand to Houston and owns the Astros. And it also becomes possible because when the hsa, the Houston Sports association, is talking to the National League about getting A team in 1961, 1960, 1961, the National League says, hey, you can't be segregated. Houston can't be segregated. Your ballpark can't be segregated, because, you know, we're talking 13, 14 years after Jackie Robinson, and public accommodations in Houston at that point in time are segregated. The movie theaters, the restaurants, the hotels, and the minor league ballpark in Houston, where the Houston bus play is segregated. And Hoffman says, okay, that does. You know, I agree with that. But he has to sort of navigate it carefully because he doesn't want to be at the forefront of integration because he doesn't think that his target audience of fans would appreciate him being at the forefront. And integration certainly goes to Houston's civil rights leaders and black business leaders and says, look, here's the deal. The ballpark's not going to be segregated, but we need you to vote in the bond elections that are going to fund it. And Houston's civil rights leaders say, yeah, this is great. It's going to help propel our push for civil rights in other arenas because of the state. You know, if, if the, the eighth wonder of the world is, as it was called, is. Is. Is not segregated. And if the team comes and like, we, we can't have Hank Aaron and Willie Mays staying in a black hotel in a major league town and not being able to stay in the fancy hotel with their white teammates, they recognize that this is another force that might move the city of Houston to desegregate. So they support it pretty wholeheartedly. They are involved in campaigning in these bond elections. And there's this wonderful passage from one of the activists who talks about how they got this message out. So they would send out pairs of people with bullhorns basically into various neighborhoods of Houston. And this is a black activist and a white or basically an employee of the Astros at this point, right? A black guy and a white guy. And when they were in white neighborhoods, the black guy was driving and the white guy was on the bullhorn. But when they were in black neighborhoods, the white guy was driving and the black guy was on the bullhorn. And it like sent this message of, oh, we're not just going to be the service employees. We're not just going to be, you know, the driver. Right? We're actually going to be involved in this. And it was very successful. And, you know, post election analysis in these bond elections seemed to indicate that black community support was the difference. And it did. You know that as soon as the Houston Sports association bought the minor league BUFFS before the 1961 season, they integrated that stadium when the Astros. Well, then the Colt.45s moved into a temporary ballpark that was not segregated. And when the Astronaut opened, that was not segregated. And by 1962, the main hotels and restaurants and movie theaters, et cetera, in Houston were not segregated. That doesn't mean that black fans were treated as equals at the Astrodome. It's clear that Hopfines did not think about black fans in the same way he thought about white fans. He. He primarily thought of people of color as employees in the most exclusive sections of the ballparks and, and not as fans there. So, yes, it's open to everybody, but it's clear from what Hoffine said and how he behaved that he wasn't fully thinking about access for everybody.
- [37:47]
Paul Knepper
Right?
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- [39:17]
Paul Knepper
have to say I really enjoyed that part of the book because so much of the book is about, you know, how the ballparks and the ballpark experience reflects society. But this is one of those examples where the, the ballpark, the ballpark experience actually influenced and changed society. And I really, I really like that. The other thing was great. One of my favorite anecdotes was about instead of, instead of digging up dirt for, you know, when they broke around, they, they fired off their guns. I live in Houston now, so I, I, I'm sorry. Houston. I live in Austin. I live in Austin, but I'm very familiar with Houston and Texas at large and that certainly resonated.
- [39:55]
Seth Panabone
Yeah, that was such a fascinating thing that they didn't break ground with shovels at the Astrodome. Groundbreaking. They broke ground with revolvers loaded with wax bullets. And I didn't even know wax bullets were a thing before, you know, before
- [40:08]
Paul Knepper
I, I, yeah, the only thing that surprised me about that was that it did not use real bullets. I mean, that, that's the only surprising part, really.
- [40:17]
Seth Panabone
I mean, maybe they thought somebody would shoot themselves in the foot. I really don't know.
- [40:21]
Paul Knepper
Yeah. So I want to move on to kind of the the last stating you feature in the, in the book, which is Camden Yards. I know that's the full, not the full name, but that's the, the popular name. And this was cool for me because this I remember, you know, I was, I was born in 77, so I guess I was 15 when Camden Yards open. And it was a huge deal. You know, we, we. There was this period of the, the, you know, the cookie cutter stadiums, the multi use stadiums that were just boring. They were just boring. They were both boring and inefficient. Right. They were boring architecturally. And then, and, and then they weren't, you know, the seats weren't necessarily facing towards home plate and because they weren't built just for baseball. And I mean the, the best example I knew was, I mean, I wish Shea Stadium was, was one of those. And so all of a sudden we, we have Camden Yards and, and maybe talk a little bit about what, what was unique about Camden Yards and how that kind of, you know, set ballparks in a whole, whole new trend.
- [41:29]
Seth Panabone
Yeah, it's funny that you, you said that you described those, those cookie cutter stadiums as, as inefficient and unadorned. And that was their appeal when they opened. And then by the 1980s, people were like, wow, this is terrible. This is the thing that we used to be really drawn to. The fact that it is multipurpose, the fact that it doesn't have all these architectural flourishes was just absolutely unappetizing. So what's different about Camden Yards is that it is unlike anything since, I want to say, Kaufman Stadium in 1973. It's designed exclusively for baseball. And the Orioles have a vice president and then an owner, and then they hire this woman, Janet Marie Smith, who all desperately want to create a nostalgic, modern baseball stadium. They are inspired by what's going on in urban architecture. If you've been to Baltimore, literally right next door at Inner harbor in Harbor Place, where this festival marketplace idea is happening, where old buildings, you know, turn of the 20th century buildings are being repurposed for modern uses. And those modern uses are selling stuff. So the Orioles can't repurpose an actual old stadium. Right. They don't want to stay in Memorial Stadium. It's got pillars that are, you know, four or five people wide. They're huge pillars. It's just, it's not located in a place where people can park at. It's not located in a place that's accessible. This is before the NASS moved to D.C. for people from the D.C. area. So Camden Yards is unique in that it is both mass transit accessible in new ways because it is right off of the, the train, the mark train from, from Washington D.C. it's right off of a new light rail line that opens, that connects Baltimore's northern suburbs to the ballpark. You can see it from i95 if you drive just after you, if you come in from the north, just after you come out of the tunnel. Right. It's right off there on the right. It's really easily accessible in that way. And it also incorporates the city. All of those multi use stadiums, those cookie cutter stadiums that you were talking about, they don't pay any attention to the street cred. They just sort of plot down even if it's right in the middle of the street. And Canyon Yards is just, you know, hemmed in intentionally by the Baltimore street grid. It feels like it fits. They leave the warehouse there after much back and forth and it's gorgeous. There's nothing quite like is smaller than those multi use era stadiums and those cookie cutter stadiums consciously. And it actually, its seating capacity only gets smaller over the years. It has fewer cheaper seats than anything before it. The feature section at Canyon Yards is much, much smaller than it was at Memorial Stadium. It's much smaller than it is at Dodger Stadium even. It's intended to evoke nostalgia about the 1940s and 1950s, which is deeply ironic because the previous wave of ballparks was intended to move as far away from that as possible. But that nostalgia is going to be primarily of interest to people who felt fully welcomed in stadiums of the 1930s and 40s and 50s. And as the book talks about, as we've talked about in this conversation, the people who are fully welcomed are middle and upper class white men. So the nostalgia is really most appealing to them. And it's sort of doubling down on that historical pattern of it's not quite exclusion, but it's definitely not full participation and full acceptance.
- [45:20]
Paul Knepper
Yeah. And of course that became, really became the model for stadiums for decades to come. It's funny because there's this just kind of facade to the whole thing. Right. Just the idea of the egalitarian experience that's actually exclusionary and like kind of it feels like false nostalgia. You know, it's this idea that there's a quote in the book and I forget the woman's name that you mentioned, but about how she wants people to feel like they've been there before, even though of course they haven't. And it's. Yeah, I don't you know, it's, it's, again, it's marketing. It's just trying to get dollars. Right. But it's, it was very interesting to think of it and look at it on those levels.
- [46:08]
Seth Panabone
Yeah.
- [46:09]
Paul Knepper
Yeah.
- [46:09]
Seth Panabone
So that's a Janet Marie Smith quote, and she's a fascinating person. And, you know, I think the quote is, you know, want people to feel like they've been here before, even it's the first time. And for that target audience, she delivers and Camden Yards delivers. We drove down from Philadelphia with my friend, my friend's brother, my friend's dad for a night game at Camden yards in like 1992, because the only time we could get tickets, you know, it's like a two hour drive from where we lived in Fort Avi. It's not terrible, but like, we drove past Veteran Stadium on the way. We drove past the Wilmington Blue Rock Stadium on the way. We drove past all these other opportunities where we could have gone to see baseball because we wanted to go to Camden Yards. And Janet Marie Smith, who, before they had no experience working in baseball, she's an urban planner. She spearheads this project. She make it look, she makes it look exactly like what she and the Orioles executives had in mind. She then gets hired to develop Turner Field in Atlanta to convert the former Olympic Stadium into, into Turner Field. She then gets hired to do all the redevelopment at Fenway park, where they add the, the seats above the monster and they take over what used to be a car dealership and add it to the concourse. And if you've been at Fenway park, all those additions are seamless. It's really incredible.
- [47:30]
Paul Knepper
Yeah.
- [47:31]
Seth Panabone
She gets hired again by the Orioles to do some updates for Camden yards for its 20th anniversary. And since then, she's been working at Dodger Stadium for, for the Dodgers and redeveloping it, making the pavilion, the bleacher seats, sort of the main entrance to the ballpark, and actually breaking down some of the separations that are sort of inherent in the structure of the ballpark. Although the ticket prices of the Dodger Stadium mean that, you know, people in Dodger Stadium are mostly middle and upper class folks these days anyway.
- [48:01]
Paul Knepper
Yeah, yeah, I, I had the same experience actually with, with Camden Yards. I. We were at 93. You know, we were baseball fans. My dad, we'd go to a couple of Yankee games this summer. We didn't travel anywhere else to go to games, but in 93, my dad was like, we're going to go see Camden Yards. And we drove down with. When the Yankees played down there, we drove down. And so, yes, she delivered in that it became an attraction. And. And it. And it lived up to, you know, a lot of things live up to the hype. A lot of things don't. And it did. I remember as a kid and my dad agreed, like, wow, this is a beautiful stadium. It was beautiful. It had a lot of the. A lot of the old charm that I liked and was accustomed to from Yankee Stadium with all the modern amenities. And, yeah, she absolutely delivered.
- [48:49]
Seth Panabone
I remember we sat two rows from the top of the stadium, and it felt like we were sitting in the middle sections of Veterans Stadium. That's how close we felt to. To the atmosphere. And what else? I mean, for me, as a historian, what's interesting about Janet Marie Smith is she's still around, and I talked with her, and I communicated with her. And I'm not used to writing about living people. I, you know, I'm a historian. I write about dead people. I read their documents. So that was a very different experience for me. And I hope I've been both. Both truthful and accurate about her, but also not upset her, because she's a very, very nice woman who was very helpful to me in this project. She donated some of her papers to the Baseball hall of Fame, so I was able to use them there. She, from my limited interaction with her, seems like a really cool person.
- [49:39]
Paul Knepper
No, I think you did a wonderful job of capturing kind of the energy and enthusiasm and vision that she brought to the project. She certainly came across as a very impressive figure, I would say. Where do you see ballparks going in the future? Both from a design perspective, but also from considering the economic and social issues that we've discussed.
- [50:07]
Seth Panabone
Yeah, I don't feel super optimistic about them becoming more egalitarian. I don't feel super optimistic about them becoming better investments for municipalities. I think the model that people are trying to follow is what the Braves have done deep outside of Atlanta, where the baseball is sort of like, secondary to the real estate, where the team makes more money off of, you know, all the real estate in. In the Battery area around the ballpark. A ballpark that is basically only car accessible. Again, a ballpark that quite literally moved from downtown Atlanta because for various different reasons, predominantly suburban, predominantly white, Braves fans didn't feel comfortable parking their cars near where black people lived. And some of them were barely even coded in explaining that. And they continue to be terrible investments for municipalities. But teams are. I mean, cities are scared about losing their teams.
- [51:14]
Paul Knepper
Yeah.
- [51:16]
Seth Panabone
And I think to an extent. It'll be different in different cities, I think. But, you know, we see the A's getting Vegas to pony up money at the same time they cut education budget. Who knows where the Royals are going to go? They're going to actually go to Kansas. The White Sox have been threatening to move from, from their part of Chicago for, well, geez, for almost 35 years now, at least. And they're sort of rumbling about that. Again, it's going to take a pretty dramatic rethink of how baseball finds its fans for, for any of this to change. And also, and I, I just don't know that that's going to come because baseball is finding all these other revenue sources now with, with gambling and all the rest, that no one is really thinking outside the box in terms of, like, wait a second, are we just going to be a venue for gambling or are we going to be building the next generation of fans? And are we going to build. Building a generation of fans that is more inclusive than what we've had before? Right. Are we going to be reaching out to these communities? And, you know, not to be totally pessimistic, but maybe the women's baseball league does spur a new way of thinking about female baseball fans as just baseball fans and not thinking about female baseball fans as different from male baseball fans. I. That's certainly possible. We've seen the growth of other women's sports and its contribution to both athletes and fans thinking differently about female fans of those sports. So perhaps we will see that that's something to pay attention to for sure.
- [53:05]
Paul Knepper
Yeah, that's a good point. With the women's league. I think we certainly see a significant shift in women's basketball in recent years. I wonder too, like, I don't. Are we ever going to hit a breaking point with the prices? I mean, is there, are we going to get a point where it's. I, I mean, it's crazy. It's really crazy.
- [53:26]
Seth Panabone
Yeah.
- [53:27]
Paul Knepper
You know, and, and that's not just baseball. That's all the, that's all the sports we would. I took my, I, I took my. I'm a big Knicks fan. And so the Knicks played in, in San Antonio on, on New Year's Eve. And I took my wife and my son and we paid $110 a ticket and sat 10 rows from the top. So, I mean, we're all the way up there. So $330 on tickets, $30 for parking, probably another close to 100 on food. So we probably dropped $450 that night. And I would have been able to see the game a lot better on my big screen, high definition television at home. And it was fun. My son had never been to a game. It was a fun experience. But I said to my wife after, I was like, that was fun. I was like, how about next time we watch home and give some money to a homeless shelter instead, you know? Yeah. It's like, what are we, what are we doing here? And, and we're in, you know, we're, you know, my wife, we, we do pretty well financially. You know, we, we could afford to go to more games, but I'm like, this is just kind of silly. Really.
- [54:30]
Seth Panabone
Yeah, I mean, I, I, I, I think what, what the teams have figured out is how to extract revenue from you even when you stay home. Right. To buy league pass to, to, to do whatever it is. Right. They're still extracting that revenue from you.
- [54:44]
Paul Knepper
Yeah.
- [54:45]
Seth Panabone
So it, Right. We're sort of thinking, oh, well, if I don't go to the game, then they're going to, the demand's going to go down and they're going to have to lower their prices. Right. That's sort of the economic modeling that we thought of. But no, they're still extracting revenue from you even when you're not going. So their motivation isn't quite that simple. But I will say, if you wanted to go to a Sacramento Kings game, it would not cost you that much. Right. You want to go see the Tampa Bay Rays play, you want to go see the Marlins play, they might just let you in for free so that there are fewer empty seats.
- [55:15]
Paul Knepper
Right,
- [55:17]
Seth Panabone
right. The demand that, the demand for like a Knicks spurs game. Yes, that's, that's, you know, that's a really popular draw. So. But like for fans to see the good games for cheap is never going to happen.
- [55:36]
Paul Knepper
Yeah.
- [55:36]
Seth Panabone
But you know, you want to go see two terrible teams play, they'll, you know, you can afford to do that, especially with the secondary market. Yeah, I, I don't see it universally coming back down, but I, I, I do see like there are options to do it and I think, you know, minor league sports are a great way to do it.
- [55:56]
Paul Knepper
Yeah.
- [55:56]
Seth Panabone
For, for affordable too.
- [55:58]
Paul Knepper
Absolutely. Yeah. They do a nice job. I've gone there. The Texas Rangers, Round Rock Express is pretty close to me and they, you know, it's, they have to make it a very fun fan experience and so they go out of the way to do so, particularly for kids and yeah, it's a great way to see a game. Yeah. All right. Seth, I'm gonna get out, get you out here with one final question I'd like to ask all my guests. But first, let me say again, the name of Seth's book is Bleacher Seats and Luxury Suites, Democracy and division at the 20th century ballpark. And it's a great read. As, as I, as I told you before we came on, it kind of forced me to look at ballparks and in a whole different way. And really, you know, sometimes you kind of put down the book and you stop and you just think a little bit about it, you know, just contemplate everything you read and absorb it and come up with questions that you can ideally ask that person on a podcast one day.
- [56:59]
Seth Panabone
But thanks, Paul, I really appreciate that.
- [57:01]
Paul Knepper
Sure. So my final question for you, Seth, is what's your all time favorite sports book?
- [57:07]
Seth Panabone
Oh boy. Wow. All time favorite sports book. So I really liked Friday Night Lights when I was a kid, you know, 15, 16, 17, I had the privilege of meeting Buzz Bissinger is of Philadelphia and kid went to my school. But I think as I've gotten older and more into sports studies and thinking critically about sports, more of the problems, both, both with that team, with that town, and with Bizenger's approach to it have become clearer to me. So I think it's super interesting. It's wonderful to teach that book, but it's. I can't really say that it's like a favorite in, in that same way anymore. I read and taught. I mean, it is similarly problematic but also super interesting. Rick Telander's Heaven is a Playground. I read and taught that for the first time last year and oh my goodness, that's what, oh my goodness. So much fun to teach that to students who are 20 years old now, who for them, this is like pre history. And to think about that with them, it's just so well written. And again, like, you know, the approach is really that different from business. Guys sort of parachutes in and had these relationships with the, with the people who are like, they don't really, you know, yes, they understand he's there to write a book, but like, are they really understanding what this consequence is going to be? But it's, it's just so, so super interesting in that way.
- [58:44]
Paul Knepper
I love that, I love that you said that. I've done, I don't know how many of these podcasts I always ask that question and nobody's asked me my favorite, which is probably that book and nobody's ever said that before. So you made my day by saying is a playground. Yeah. Just a wonderful book. All right. Well, Seth, thank you so much for coming on, and I wish you the best of luck with the book.
- [59:08]
Seth Panabone
Thanks, Paul. I really appreciate it.
- [59:10]
Paul Knepper
Foreign.
- [59:22]
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