Ranking the best in-game experiences for each MLB team

Colorado Rockies: The Sandlot

Coors Field is one of my favorite parks and is one of the few retro ballparks that doesn’t feel like a ripoff of Camden Yards even though it looks very similar to the Orioles home on the outside and inside. As I just mentioned while breaking down Progressive Field, the whole point of a retro ballpark is to blend it into its surrounding area. From that perspective, Coors Field is just about perfect.

Walking around the LoDo neighborhood where Coors Field is located, you can almost imagine that the ballpark has been there as long as Wrigley Field has been in Chicago. It blends in perfectly with the low-slung red brick buildings that date back to the original construction of Denver. Coors Field does not look like it was retroactively added to a turn-of-the-century neighborhood. It just looks like it belongs.

From a ballpark design standpoint, Coors Field builds on many of the things that make Camden Yards great, especially the addition of an open concourse. My only gripe with Coors Field is that it should be rotated 360 degrees to offer a view of the city instead of a barely-there view of the Front Range of the Rockies. I get what they were going for, but the mountains are just too a little far away to be seen clearly from the stadium. With a maximum seating capacity of just under 50,500 before some sections were reconfigured into concession areas, Coors Field is also just a little too big for its market.

The highlight at the ballpark is the active brewery in right field that is now owned and operated by Coors. The macrobrewer experiments with smaller batches of craft beer at the stadium. Blue Moon was reportedly first brewed at Coors Field before taking off to mass appeal. There are certainly better choices for beer in the many microbreweries that are scattered around LoDo, but there is a novelty in watching brewers at work in a baseball stadium.