How every ballpark played this season
Runs per game at each MLB venue, both teams combined, from every completed 2026 regular-season game. League average: 8.96.
Source: MLB Stats API (statsapi.mlb.com). 2026 regular season unless marked otherwise. Updated Oct 6, 2026, 4:51 AM ET. Scoring averages, not park factors.
Ask ten fans to name the best ballpark and you will get at least six answers, and most of them will be the park they grew up in. That is fine. A ballpark is partly a building and partly a memory. Still, some parks are simply better places to spend three hours, and after enough road trips the reasons become clear: what you can see from your seat, what the neighborhood feels like on the walk in, how easy it is to get home, and whether the place has a story.
Our list below is a reasoned ranking, not a survey. We weigh views, history, food and atmosphere, and getting there and back. We also note how each park plays, because a ballpark on this site is also a variable in every bet placed on the games inside it.
What makes a ballpark great
Four things decide it for us.
The view comes first. The best parks point the seats at something worth looking at beyond the outfield: a river, a skyline, mountains, a bay. Parks built in the 1970s often faced a parking lot or nothing at all, which is part of why so many were torn down.
History matters more in baseball than in any other sport, because the game changes slowly and old buildings let you stand where the famous plays happened. Food and atmosphere are the third piece, and this is where a park can overperform its architecture. Transit is the last, and the most underrated. A park you can walk to from a train or a bar district turns a game into an evening. A park surrounded by a sea of parking turns it into a traffic jam with baseball in the middle.
Our picks
1. Fenway Park, Boston
Fenway opened on April 20, 1912, which makes it the oldest park in the majors. It is cramped, some seats face the wrong way and a few sit behind posts. None of that matters once you see the Green Monster, the 37-foot, 2-inch left field wall that turns routine fly balls into doubles and line drives into outs. The original wall was a 25-foot wooden fence. It sits inside a real city neighborhood, and the walk in before a night game is part of the ticket.
2. Wrigley Field, Chicago
Wrigley opened in 1914 as Weeghman Park and is the second-oldest park in the game. Bill Veeck planted the ivy on the outfield walls in 1937, and it is still there. The rooftop seats across Waveland and Sheffield avenues, the hand-operated scoreboard from 1937 and the day games give it a feel no new park can copy. It is also the park where you should check the flags before you check the lineups, because the wind off Lake Michigan decides a lot of afternoons.
3. PNC Park, Pittsburgh
If we had to pick one park for a first-time visitor, it might be this one. PNC Park opened on April 9, 2001, and the view from behind home plate across the Allegheny River to downtown Pittsburgh is the best in baseball. The city renamed the nearby Sixth Street Bridge after Roberto Clemente, and on game days it closes to cars so fans can walk across it to the gate. It is small, it is steep, and there is not a bad seat in the lower bowl.
4. Oracle Park, San Francisco
Oracle Park opened in 2000 on the edge of the bay. Home runs that clear the right field wall and land in McCovey Cove are called splash hits, and Barry Bonds hit the first one on May 1, 2000. Kayakers still float in the cove waiting for the next. The park plays big and cold at night, so bring a jacket in July and do not expect a slugfest.
5. Oriole Park at Camden Yards, Baltimore
Camden Yards opened on April 6, 1992, and changed how every team built parks for the next twenty years. It was the first of the retro-classic wave: brick, steel, asymmetrical fences and a downtown site instead of a suburban lot. The B&O Warehouse, more than 1,000 feet long, runs behind right field and gives the park its look. If you have ever walked into a new-looking old-looking ballpark, Camden is the reason.
6. Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles
Dodger Stadium opened on April 10, 1962, and is the third-oldest park in the majors, though it rarely feels old. It is the largest baseball stadium in the world by seats, at about 56,000. The palm trees and the San Gabriel Mountains behind the outfield at sunset are worth the traffic, and the traffic is real. Plan to arrive early and leave late.
7. Petco Park, San Diego
Petco Park opened in 2004 in downtown San Diego, and the builders did something clever with a problem. The Western Metal Supply Co. building, a brick warehouse from 1909, stood in the way. Instead of tearing it down they built it into the park, and its corner now serves as the left field foul pole. The weather is close to perfect most of the season, and the neighborhood around it is packed with places to eat before first pitch.
8. Coors Field, Denver
Coors Field is on this list for the atmosphere and the mountains, but mostly because nothing plays like it. One row of seats in the upper deck is painted purple to mark one mile above sea level, about 5,280 feet. The thin air lets the ball carry and takes bite out of breaking pitches, so the Rockies started storing baseballs in a humidor in 2002, kept at 70 degrees and 50 percent humidity. It helped, and scoring at Coors still runs higher than almost anywhere else.
9. Yankee Stadium, New York
The current Yankee Stadium opened in 2009 across the street from the original, which stood from 1923 to 2008. It is not a charming park, and it is expensive. It makes the list because of Monument Park and the frieze carried over from the old building, and because a sold-out October night in the Bronx is one of the loudest experiences in American sports. Take the subway; driving to it is a mistake.
10. Kauffman Stadium, Kansas City
Kauffman Stadium opened in 1973, and it is proof that a park from that era could be done right. The Water Spectacular behind the right field wall, at 322 feet across, is the largest privately funded fountain in the world, and the fountains run between innings.
A note on Sacramento
The Athletics are not on our list, and that is not a comment on the team. After leaving Oakland, they began playing at Sutter Health Park in West Sacramento in 2025, a minor league park of about 14,000 seats that they share with the Sacramento River Cats. The deal runs through 2027, with a Las Vegas stadium planned for 2028. It is a pleasant place to watch Triple-A baseball, and an odd one for the majors: small, hot in summer and built for a different level of the game. Totals there are a genuine unknown compared with parks that have decades of data behind them.
What this means for betting
A ballpark is not just scenery for a bettor. It is one of the few inputs to a game that you can know perfectly in advance. You know where the game is played, how deep the fences are, how high the altitude is and what the weather usually looks like in July.
That is why totals move from park to park. The same two lineups might see a total of 8 at Oracle Park and 10.5 at Coors Field, and both can be fair numbers. The scoring table above shows how many runs have actually been scored at every park this season, and our ballpark run environment page explains what those averages can and cannot tell you. The short version: a park’s average includes its home team’s own hitters and pitchers, so a great pitching staff can make a hitter’s park look tame.
Here is a simple way to think about it. Say a game at Coors has a total of 11 and you believe the true number is closer to 11.5. An over at -110 means risking $110 to win $100. If you are right about the park but wrong about the starters, you lose anyway. Park effects are one layer of the bet, not the bet. Start with the two starters on our probable pitchers page, then adjust for the park, then for the weather.
The first inning is where parks and pitchers collide most directly. Some parks suppress early scoring because of cool evening air or a deep outfield, and some make every leadoff hitter dangerous. Our NRFI rates show how often each team and starter keep the first inning scoreless, which is the cleanest way to see that effect. For how full-game totals are set and graded, including what happens when a game is shortened by weather, the over/under guide covers it.
Since 2022 every MLB park has had to store baseballs in a humidor, not just Colorado and Arizona, which made the ball more consistent from city to city. Altitude, wind and dimensions still differ, and so do the baseball betting lines that come out of them. Use our calculators to turn any total price into an implied probability before you decide. And if you bet on a trip to one of these parks, set the budget before you leave the hotel: you must be 21 or older in most US states, and 1-800-GAMBLER is there if it stops being fun.
Planning a ballpark trip
If you want to see several parks in one trip, geography helps. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington and Pittsburgh sit within a day’s drive or train ride of each other, and the schedule often lets you catch three or four in a week. California gives you San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego along one coast, with San Diego the best weather bet. Chicago is its own weekend, with two parks and a third, Milwaukee, an hour and a half away.
Buy tickets for a weekday night if you want a relaxed crowd and cheaper seats, and a Saturday if you want the full noise. Check the probable starters a few days out. Watching an ace pitch in a great park is a different game from watching a bullpen day, and if you are betting as well as watching, it is the single most useful thing to know before you go. Our homepage has today’s slate, and the MLB records page is worth a read on the flight, since several of those marks were set in the parks above.
