Why Your Stadium Sucks: Citizens Bank Park

This is a weekly feature in which I (and maybe you, too, readers) detail the various reasons for hating your ballpark. This week: The Philadelphia Phillies' Citizens Bank Park. Edgy: Citizens Bank Park opened in 2004, by which point our stadium builders had clearly run out of ideas. With the lone exception of a blinking neon Liberty Bell in right, there is nothing to distinguish the place from something that might've gone up in, say, Charlotte. There is plenty of contrived personality, though. Set down in a cluster of parking lots in industrial South Philly, CBP nevertheless pretends to be an old-style ballpark squeezed into a tiny downtown lot. The outfield walls zig and zag simply because, once upon a time, outfield walls used to zig and zag — never mind that they did so because the site required it, as at Fenway. Today, the asymmetrical outfields serve no purpose other than to signal a quirkiness that the ballparks don't actually possess. They're the pre-ripped jeans of stadium d...