The Ballpark Rankings

All 30 of them, ranked twice. Once by us, once by everybody else. The two lists are allowed to disagree, and where they disagree hardest is the most useful thing on this page.

We have been to 19 of the 30, and those are marked Rated. The other 11 are marked Projected: ranked on the layout, the sightlines, the transit, the food, the prices, and a great many conversations with people who go to them every summer. Every other list you will find ranks all thirty and never tells you which is which.

We rank. You score. Here is why that is not a mismatch.

Nobody can honestly tell you whether Fenway Park is "a 9." But anybody who has been to both can tell you whether Fenway goes above or below Wrigley. Ranking is a comparison, and a comparison is the thing a person can actually do reliably, so that is what we publish. One list, in the order we would send you.

You get the finer instrument. Score a park out of five baseballs and the site turns everybody's scores into a community ranking that sits next to ours. The Gap column is the payoff: it is where a bunch of strangers who have been to a park think we have it badly wrong. That column is the reason this page is worth reading, and we are not going to hide it.

Hit Rate on any ballpark you have been to. One tap, one number, and it moves the column the whole page is arguing about.

What Rated and Projected mean

Rated means we were there. We bought the ticket, sat in the seat, ate the food, and walked the neighborhood after. Projected means the ranking is built from research rather than from a turnstile: the layout, the sightlines, the transit, the neighborhood, the food program, what it costs, and years of talking to the people who go there every summer and to the ballpark chasers who have done all thirty.

Both are real opinions and we stand behind both. They are built from different material, so we tell you which is which. When we get to a park, the ranking moves if it needs to move, and we will say that too.

How the community rank is calculated

The score you see is the plain average of every rating cast, and the vote count sits right next to it, always, on every row. If four people have rated a park, it says four. You should weight it accordingly, and you can only do that if we tell you.

The order is not the plain average, and here is why. A park with six votes averaging 4.9 is not better than a park with four hundred votes averaging 4.6. It is just less measured. Sort on the raw average and a park almost nobody has rated lands at number one, and it would deserve every bit of the mockery it got.

So for ordering, every park starts out holding 10 imaginary votes at exactly the league-average score, and real votes have to outweigh those before it can move. Six real ratings barely budge it. Four hundred swamp it and the park settles at its true average. Same method the IMDb Top 250 uses, for the same reason. Nothing up our sleeve: the vote count is on every row, so you can always see how much evidence is behind a placement.

A community score does not appear at all until a park has at least 3 ratings. Below that we do not have a number worth showing you, so we do not show you one.