MLB Ballparks: ROGERS CENTRE
When the Toronto Blue Jays moved from Exhibition Stadium to SkyDome in the summer of 1989, it was a breath of fresh air. Gone were the freezing nights on Lake Ontario in a park built for Canadian football. Now, controlled climate, screaming neon, and concrete greeted those coming in.
An absolute marvel of a stadium that became outdated four years after opening.
Imagine growing up in the 1980s, and the crush of your dreams had the perfect hair-sprayed head with sweaters full of shoulder pads. You still see her today occasionally, the hair still brown with help, and those jeans are too tight. That is Rogers Centre.
Although the CFL Argonauts left for the new Exhibition Stadium, the artificial surface remains laid in squares visible on television. The place is huge and sucks sound well. Those strips of colorful neon, straight out of Miami Vice, are there like a food court holding on to a pretzel place and cheap Chinese.
A combination of things doomed the place almost from the start. When the Baltimore Orioles unveiled Camden Yards, the era of the full-service cookie-cutter ballpark was over. Baseball-only yards were in. Sharing with the NFL was thankfully over.
When Houston and Phoenix opened retractable roof stadiums with grass instead of plastic, the novelty of Toronto’s dome was gone. Milwaukee, Seattle, and Miami play on real green stuff — when the new Texas Rangers stadium opens, same deal.
Unlike the recently closed Turner Field and Arizona’s Chase Field, Rogers Centre is dated. The fans do their best, but the place is a monument to everything about the 1980s we disliked.