How we rate

Two scores sit next to each other on every food item: ours and everybody else's. They are allowed to disagree. When they do, that gap is the most useful thing on the page.

The scale

Half a baseball to five, in half steps. Half a baseball means we bought it, we tried it, and we regret it. There is no zero, because an empty row of baseballs is what an unrated item looks like, and a score that reads as "no score" is not a score.

What the Bleacher Bound score means

It means somebody from Bleacher Bound stood in the line, paid for the thing, and ate it. That is the entire bar, and it is the reason the number is worth anything. We are not going to tell you we cleared the plate. On a good day we are trying eight items in nine innings, and finishing any one of them is not the point. Tasting it is.

We have been to 19 of the 30 ballparks. At the other 11 there is no Bleacher Bound score, and we are not going to invent one.

Every "best stadium food in MLB" list you have ever read was assembled by somebody who did not eat most of it. That is why those lists still send people to stands that closed two seasons ago. We would rather have gaps than have that.

What the community score means

It is the average of everyone who has rated that item, and the number of people it took is printed next to it, on every score, always. A score with no count beside it is not information, it is a vibe.

Nothing gets a score at all until 5 people have rated it. Under that we show you the count instead, and you will see something like "2 of 5". This is not us hiding the number. It is us refusing to print an average of two opinions in the same typeface as an average of four hundred, because it would look exactly as confident and be worth nothing like as much.

Who can rate, and what happens to it

Anyone, on anything they have actually eaten. That is the only rule.

It takes an email address, once. That is the whole reason we ask: without an account, one person with a spare afternoon could rate the same hot dog five hundred times and quietly decide what everybody else sees. One account, one vote, on each item. You can change your vote any time, and changing it replaces your old one rather than stacking on top of it.

Your ratings are saved to your account, so they follow you from park to park and you can go back and change your mind. We never show your email to anyone, and we never email you unless you asked us to. Ratings are public only as part of an average. Nobody, including us, publishes who rated what.

The ballpark rankings work differently

We do not score ballparks out of five. We rank them, 1 to 30, because nobody can honestly tell you whether Fenway is "a 9" but anybody who has been to both can tell you whether Fenway goes above Wrigley. You still score parks out of five baseballs, and the site turns everybody's scores into a community ranking that sits next to ours. A park needs 3 ratings before its community score appears.

The rankings page explains the rest, including why the order of the table is not simply the highest average.

When we get it wrong

Tell us. Menus change every season, stands close, and things get renamed. There is a correction link at the bottom of every guide page, and we would rather hear it from you than leave it wrong.