The new cookie-cutter stadiums

The most dominant team in baseball isn't the Yankees or Red Sox. It's HOK Sport.

With the opening of Nationals Park in Washington, more than half of the teams in MLB have parks either designed or extensively renovated by HOK, the Kansas City architectural firm that invented the “retro” ballpark. And that number will swell to 17 next season, as both the new Yankee Stadium and Citi Field are HOK projects that open in New York. The Wrigley Field renovations are HOK, and the planned ballparks in Minnesota and Miami are HOK projects. In five years, it's likely that 12 of the National League's 16 ballparks will have an HOK imprint.

Their early works in Miami (Dolphin Stadium, built for football), Chicago (U.S. Cellular Field) and St. Petersburg (Tropicana Field, which is multipurpose) were fairly boring warm-ups for Baltimore, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Anaheim (renovation), Houston, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, San Diego, St. Louis and Washington. The latter group mostly has the quirky parks with asymmetrical outfield fences, facades that match their cities (mostly brick) and grandstands that are closer to the action than the previous generation of ballparks.

In fact, we've gone from the cookie-cutter multipurpose stadiums that looked the same in every city to ballparks that really all look the same again, but in a better way. There was no saving the virtually identical Riverfront, Three Rivers, Veterans, RFK and old Busch Stadiums – and Shea Stadium is basically the last of its multipurpose ilk.

And all were replaced or will be replaced by HOK ballparks. Besides creating intimacy amid vastness, do you wonder why they're so popular?

From Washington Post architecture writer Philip Kennicott:

“As people circulate through [Nationals Park's] public spaces, where beer can cost $7.50 and the cheapest hot dog is $4.50, the human traffic flow unifies the two central purposes of the building: baseball and the fleecing of baseball audiences. This circulating motion wrings money out of you like wet laundry on the spin cycle.”

Nationals Park is opening to mostly praise, but the ballpark doesn't seem to have a lot of personality, unlike Baltimore, Cleveland, Houston and a few of the HOK masterpieces.

For a look at the ballparks in major-league baseball and key details for all of them, check out this new gallery.

Photo: Fans walk around the outfield concourse before the game between the Washington Nationals and Atlanta Braves on March 30, 2008 at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Drew Hallowell/Getty Images)