Angel Stadium: The History, the Dimensions and How the Park Plays

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 13 min read

A guide to Angel Stadium in Anaheim, home of the Angels: the parks the club used before it, how the fences and the open air shape play, the crowds it has drawn, and how to plan a visit.

Angel Stadium sits in Anaheim, California, and it has been the Angels' home for every season since 1966. That is a long tenure by the standards of the modern game. Most clubs that began play around the same time as the Angels have since moved into a newer building, some of them twice. The Angels stayed put, changed the name on the front of the park several times, and kept winning and losing in the same patch of Orange County.

This guide covers what the park is and what it was. It looks at the dimensions and features recorded in the site's reference data, the three other parks the club used before it settled in Anaheim, the way the fences and the weather affect a game, and some general advice for a visit. Nothing here depends on prices or schedules, which change, so those are left to the club and to the official sources.

The short version: Angel Stadium is an open-air grass park with a capacity of 45,517 in the site's data, fences of 347 feet down the left-field line, 350 down the right-field line and 396 to center, with the deeper alley on the left side. It is not a park that plays dramatically for hitters or for pitchers, and that is exactly why it is a good place to see the sport played in its plainest form.

The park at a glance

The site keeps a small reference record for every ballpark. For Angel Stadium it reads as follows, and the rest of this guide leans on these figures.

Two things stand out before you look at any history. The lines are close to each other in length and ordinary rather than short, and center field is not especially deep. And the park is open to the sky, so a game here is played in whatever the Southern California evening provides, which is usually calm and cool by baseball standards. Those two facts explain most of what follows.

You can find the live team page at the Los Angeles Angels team page and the park's own entry at the Angel Stadium page. The topic page for the club, Angels news and coverage, collects current reporting.

Before Anaheim: three parks in five seasons

The club began as the Los Angeles Angels in 1961, one of the two American League teams added that year, and it did not have a stadium of its own. According to the historical record, its first home was the Wrigley Field in Los Angeles, a small park that was a different ballpark from the Chicago one of the same name. The Angels played there for a single season. The best attendance recorded for that 1961 season was 603,510.

From 1962 through 1965 the club played in Dodger Stadium, as a tenant of the National League club that had arrived in Los Angeles a few years earlier. That arrangement produced the club's best early crowd, 1,144,063 in a single season, and it also produced the odd period when the Angels were the junior partner in somebody else's house. The team name is a clue to how awkward this was: in 1965 the club became the California Angels, a name that did not tie it to Los Angeles, and in 1966 it moved to its own park thirty miles or so down the road.

That sequence matters for a reader trying to place the franchise. Many people think of the Angels as Anaheim's team from the start. In fact they played in Los Angeles for their first five seasons, in two different parks, and the move to Orange County was a deliberate break with the neighbor that had hosted them.

The move to Anaheim Stadium in 1966

The record lists Anaheim Stadium as the club's home from 1966 through 1996, which is thirty-one seasons under one name. The park was built for baseball, in a large parking-lot setting beside a freeway, and the club was the anchor tenant.

Attendance in that first long era was modest by later standards. The best season in the historical record for Anaheim Stadium reached 2,807,360, a figure the club would eventually pass many times over. For most of the era the Angels were a team that drew in good years and stayed quiet in bad ones, which is how most clubs behave, but in Southern California it sat alongside a very large neighboring franchise and a lot of other entertainment.

The stadium did not stay a pure baseball park. In the middle decades it was enlarged and enclosed to accommodate football, and a major renovation in the late 1990s returned it to a baseball-only layout. If you read older accounts that describe a closed bowl with a very different outfield, that is the football-era configuration. The present park is the one the late-1990s work shaped, and the fence figures in the table above belong to it.

One park, many names

If you search for results from this ballpark, you need to know that it has had a series of names. The historical record shows them like this.

The club's own name moved at the same time. It was the Anaheim Angels from 1997 through 2004 and became the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in 2005, a rename that produced years of argument about geography. None of this changes the address or the grass. When a record says Edison International Field, it means the same building where the club won its only World Series title, in 2002.

The practical advice is simple. If you are looking up a game, a player's home split, or a photograph, search on the era as well as the name. A box score from 1985 will say Anaheim Stadium. One from 2002 will say Edison International Field. Both are the same park.

What the dimensions tell you

Read the fence numbers in order, left to right: 347, 390, 396, 370, 350. The two foul lines are within three feet of each other, and a typical outfield has the corners as the shortest points, which holds here. What makes the Angel Stadium shape interesting is that the two power alleys are not equal. Left-center is 390 feet, and right-center is 370 feet. That is a 20-foot difference, and in a park where the lines are nearly the same it means a ball hit to the alleys travels different distances to clear the wall. Fence distances are as listed on the site, and clubs adjust walls over time, so read the shape as a rough guide.

Because the left-center gap is deeper, a right-handed pull hitter has a slightly longer ball to hit to his power side than a left-handed hitter does to his. A left-handed batter who pulls toward right-center faces the shorter alley, 370 feet, though the foul poles are nearly the same distance in both directions, 347 and 350. In practice park effects are small and noisy, and a single number rarely tells the whole story, but the shape of the fence is a real feature of the park, and it favors the left-handed pull hitter by a small margin.

Center field at 396 feet is on the shorter side of the usual range. A deep center is more helpful to pitchers and to fast outfielders who can cover ground, and a short one is slightly more generous to a hitter. At 396 it sits in the middle of the pack, a little shorter than the deepest parks in the sport.

An open-air park at 151 feet

The reference data lists the elevation as 151 feet, which is close to sea level. That matters because air density affects how far a ball flies. Thinner air, found at high elevation, lets a batted ball carry farther, and the most extreme example in the sport is Coors Field in Denver, which sits roughly a mile above sea level. Anaheim is not in that conversation. The ball here travels the way it does in most coastal parks.

The park is open, so the weather is part of the game. Southern California evenings tend to be mild, and the ocean breeze can cool a game in the later innings, but a hot afternoon can put real heat on the field and the stands. Humidity is generally low compared with the East Coast and the Gulf. A damp, heavy evening air that would hold a fly ball down is less common here than in many cities, though it does occur.

The surface is natural grass. Grass plays differently from artificial turf: ground balls slow down a little more and take more true hops, and the field is generally kinder to an infielder's legs. The infield in Anaheim is a standard one, and nothing about it needs special mention except that groundskeepers can adjust the grass height, the firmness and the wetness of the dirt to the home team's style.

How the sun and the layout shape a game

The reference data gives the park an orientation of 43.6 degrees, measured as the compass direction from home plate to center field. That means a batter faces northeast. The Official Baseball Rules recommend that the line from home plate through the pitcher's plate to second base run east-northeast, which keeps the setting sun out of a batter's eyes. Angel Stadium is turned a little more toward the north than that recommendation, but the principle holds: in an evening game the late sun sits behind the batter and off to a fielder's side rather than directly in anyone's face.

This is why night and late-afternoon games are comfortable for hitting in this park. The sun is low in the west during the early evening, and a hitter looking toward center field is looking away from it. Fielders are not so fortunate in the early innings of a late-afternoon start, when a fly ball near the sun line can be harder to track, but the orientation spares them the worst. As with the fences, the effect is real but small.

Orientation is one of those features that do not show up on a scoreboard but explain a lot. Newer parks pay more attention to it than older ones. A park built before the sun angles were thought through sometimes forces a delay in the first inning of an afternoon game because the glare makes the batter's job nearly impossible. Anaheim's layout avoids most of that.

The crowds the park has drawn

Attendance is the one thing in the historical data that tells you about the fans rather than the players, and Angel Stadium has some large numbers in it. The best season for each stretch, as recorded in the database, looks like this.

The highest single-season figure in the club's history is 3,406,790, recorded in 2006. That total came a few years after the 2002 championship and during a stretch in which the club kept winning its division, and it is a useful reminder that attendance follows success with a lag. The club won the American League West in 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2014, and those years sit inside the stretch of the park's biggest crowds.

The best season of the latest stretch, 3,095,935, is lower than the peak. A simple reading is that the crowds followed the results, but attendance also depends on the economy, on ticket policy and on factors outside the park, so the numbers are best treated as a guide rather than a verdict. For a fair comparison, check a source that lists every club's attendance for the same season.

What has happened on this field

The park's biggest moment came in 2002, when the Angels beat the San Francisco Giants in a seven-game World Series, 4 games to 3, for the club's only title. They had reached the Series by beating the Yankees 3 games to 1 in the division series and Minnesota 4 games to 1 in the championship series. That is the single most important run in the park's life.

Other postseason series have passed through. The club won a division series from the Yankees in 2005 and from the Red Sox in 2009, and it lost to Boston in 2004, 2007 and 2008. The Anaheim crowds also saw the 1979, 1982 and 1986 division winners fall in the league championship series, the last of them a seven-game loss to Boston in which the club had been one strike from the pennant, a story that gets its own treatment in the club's history.

The park has also been the stage for the franchise's best individual careers. Mike Trout leads the club in home runs with 404 in the historical record and in runs, with 1,196. Garret Anderson leads in hits, with 2,368, and in runs batted in, with 1,292. Tim Salmon, the 1993 Rookie of the Year, hit 299. Shohei Ohtani won the Most Valuable Player Award in 2021 and 2023 while playing for the club. The club's Hall of Fame list includes Nolan Ryan, Rod Carew, Vladimir Guerrero and Reggie Jackson.

If you want to learn more about the people, read the best players in Angels history. For the story of each October, the guide to the best Angels seasons and every postseason run covers it. For the full arc, from Wrigley Field in Los Angeles to now, see the history of the Angels.

Where the park sits among its neighbors

An American League West club has several divisional parks to compare. The Athletics, Astros, Mariners and Rangers have all moved or renamed their homes in the years since the Angels settled in Anaheim, and a comparison shows how little the Angels' own home has changed.

The Rangers play in a roofed building in Arlington, Texas, and its fences differ from Anaheim's in ways worth knowing; the Globe Life Field guide sets out the details. The Houston and Seattle clubs also have retractable-roof parks, which is a different kind of baseball from the open-air game in Anaheim, as the Houston Astros history and the Seattle Mariners history describe. The Athletics history covers a club that has moved more often than almost any in the sport.

The Angels, by contrast, are an example of continuity. The park has had one set of grandstands in the same place since 1966, however many times the sign on the front changed.

Planning a visit

A few pieces of general advice apply to any game here, and none of them depends on a price or a procedure that can change.

• Check the official sources first. Schedules, ticket policies, gate times and bag rules are set by the club, and they change. The schedule page lists games and the club's own site governs entry.
• Dress for the evening. Even after a hot day, a night game can cool quickly, so a light layer is sensible. Sun protection matters for day games in the open stands.
• Arrive early for a first visit. Batting practice is when you can see the fences and the shape of the park, and the early innings of an evening game give you the best light.
• Think about where you sit. Seats down the lines put you closer to the corners, where the 347- and 350-foot fences are, and seats behind home plate give the cleanest view of pitch movement. Outfield seats give a different perspective on the gaps.
• Plan travel in advance. Parking and transit arrangements are the club's to describe, and the details change from season to season.

If you are bringing children, the stadium is a comfortable first park: open, relatively mild and easy to follow. For an adult who cares about how the game is played, a seat with a clear view of the infield rewards attention to positioning and pitch sequencing.

Common questions

When did the Angels start playing at this park? The historical record lists Anaheim Stadium as the club's home from 1966, so the 1966 season was the first. The club had used two parks in Los Angeles before that.

Is Angel Stadium a hitter's park or a pitcher's park? Neither in an obvious way. The fences are not unusually short or deep, with 347 and 350 feet down the lines and 396 to center, the elevation is low and the weather is mild. Park factors, which compare runs scored at home and on the road, vary from year to year, so check a current source rather than rely on a single figure.

Why is it called Angel Stadium when the team name changed? Naming rights and club names changed independently. The park was Anaheim Stadium until 1996, Edison International Field from 1997 to 2003 and has carried a form of Angel Stadium since 2004. The club itself has had four names since 1961.

How big is the park? The site's reference data lists a capacity of 45,517. That figure is a design number, and actual attendance depends on the game and on seating arrangements.

What is the longest part of the fence? Center field at 396 feet, followed by left-center at 390 feet. The foul lines, at 347 and 350 feet, are the shortest parts of the wall.

Where to go next

For a look at the club behind the park, start with the Angels team page and the ballpark page, then read the full history of the Angels. To compare with the other parks in the division, the Globe Life Field guide is the natural next stop. For the larger story of how a championship is decided, the history of the World Series puts the 2002 title in context.