Ballpark Review: PNC Park

For each of the next four days, I’ll be posting a new edition that covers my experience seeing a game at one of the final four active Major League ballparks I haven’t been to before this week. My wife and I have already seen three of them in the last three days, and will see the fourth and final one, Wrigley Field, tonight. This will complete my effort to see a game in each active Major League ballpark, and it will have taken me only 48 years to do it, which must be some kind of record.

First on the itinerary was PNC Park, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates. We arrived in town Friday after a few days in the DC/Northern Virginia area, with a stop at the Antietam National Battlefield along the way. I’d heard wonderful things about this ballpark and went into it with really high expectations. And, I have to say, it didn’t merely meet them, but far, far, FAR exceeded them.

Before getting into the experience at the ballpark itself, I want to pause and highlight the sequence of events on our trip. Though I can’t claim to have considered this in advance, in retrospect it was fitting that we started in Washington given my interest in writing about the Negro Leagues. Washington is where the Homestead Grays played many of their home games in their later years at Griffith Stadium, which is where Bowie Kuhn saw them play as a teenage scoreboard operator. Their talent impacted him so much that years later, in one of the few clearly admirable aspects of his time as commissioner of baseball, he advocated for the election of Negro Leagues players to the Hall of Fame.