Bay Area baseball fans love to go out to the ballpark, whether that be at AT&T Park or the Oakland Coliseum. The experience fans have at those ballparks though can be a bit different, and thanks to social media, people can now give their feedback in real time.
Now people's love of their ballparks has been taken a step further as The New York Times' Nick Silver recently released a semi-scientific study of all Major League Baseball's ballparks across the country and ranked them according to fan experiences taken from Yelp.com. The study came up with some answers you might not have expected, and unfortunately for Bay Area fans the Coliseum and AT&T Park are on totally opposite ends of the spectrum.
According to the study Silver used the 1-5 voting system that Yelp uses in it's reviews and averaged them out for all 30 parks around the league. Fans voted Pittsburgh's PNC Park as the best ballpark in America, followed by historic Fenway Park, then the Giants' AT&T Park third. The Twins' Target Field and Orioles' Camden Yards round out the top five, and the first AL West team on the list in Seattle at number eight. The A's are way, way down the line at number 29 overall, sitting only above the Blue Jay's Rogers Center as the worst field in all of baseball. And just to throw some salt in the wound two stadiums that don't even exist anymore, old Yankee Stadium and the Mets' old Shea Stadium both rank higher than the Coliseum does, not cool.
Here's the entire list, equipped with ratings (out of 5) and standard deviations for each park. And remember folks, the higher the standard deviation, the more variation in responses there are from the voters, and the Coliseum has one of the highest. People either love it or hate it when they watch a game in Oakland, while over in San Francisco the deviation is much lower, meaning most people like going there.
