The Cookie-Cutter Stadiums of the 1970s
Why Riverfront, Three Rivers, Veterans and Busch Memorial Stadium looked so alike, how artificial turf and symmetrical fences shaped the baseball played there, and what replaced them in the 2000s.
Between 1966 and 1971, four National League cities opened a new stadium that looked a lot like the others: a big concrete bowl, a symmetrical outfield, an artificial-turf floor and a football team sharing the dates. Cincinnati's Riverfront Stadium, Pittsburgh's Three Rivers Stadium, Philadelphia's Veterans Stadium and St. Louis's Busch Memorial Stadium (often called Busch Stadium II) were so similar in concept that critics labeled the whole generation "cookie-cutter" stadiums. Today all four are gone. Each was demolished within about a year or two of its last baseball game, replaced by a ballpark designed to look nothing like it.
They deserve more than a punch line, though. The home clubs won eight World Series titles while playing in these buildings, including the Cincinnati teams of the mid-1970s and the Pittsburgh teams of 1971 and 1979, and they shaped how baseball was played in the National League for a generation. This article explains why they were built, what made them alike, how they changed play on the field, and why cities stopped building them. The attendance and championship figures come from the historical record through the 2025 season.
The design logic starts with the Houston Astrodome, which opened in 1965 and introduced artificial grass to the major leagues the following year. Our guide to the Astrodome tells that story. What the four cities borrowed was not the roof but the idea that a modern stadium should be a single multipurpose facility.
What "cookie-cutter" meant
The label was never an official category, so the traits below are a description, not a definition. The four stadiums shared most, though not all, of these features.
| Feature | What it meant in practice |
|---|---|
| Multipurpose design | One building for baseball and football, with seating that had to compromise between the two |
| Round or oval bowl | A mostly circular shape, with stands that wrapped around the field |
| Symmetrical fences | Foul lines of roughly 330 feet and a center-field fence between about 400 and 408 feet |
| Artificial turf | A synthetic surface with dirt only around the bases and the mound (Busch Memorial opened with grass and switched to turf a few years later) |
| Concrete and steel | Large concrete decks, with little character beyond the structure itself |
| Downtown or complex siting | On a riverfront, a former industrial site or a sports complex, with large parking areas |
The symmetry deserves a note. Older ballparks such as Crosley Field and Forbes Field had been squeezed into city blocks, which gave them odd outfield shapes, and the result was that no two parks played the same. The new stadiums were built on open ground, so the architects could draw a clean circle. Our article on why ballpark dimensions are all different covers what the older irregular parks did to the game and why the new ones made the field more uniform.
Why cities built them
The motives were practical. In the 1960s, cities competed to look modern, and many saw a large new stadium as a symbol of civic ambition. A single building that could host a baseball club and a professional football team also cut costs: one site, one set of operating staff and one stream of public money to justify. Football had grown in popularity, and the football teams wanted large seating capacities that a baseball-only park would not need.
The financing was usually public. A city or county built the stadium, and the clubs paid rent. That arrangement gave the clubs a modern facility without the cost of building one, and it explains why the clubs did not fight the multipurpose design: they had little say in it. The long-term consequence, which became clear in the 1980s and 1990s, was that the clubs lacked control over revenue from suites, concessions and naming rights, and that gave them a reason to want new parks of their own. Our story of Camden Yards and the retro ballpark era shows where that thinking led.
The four stadiums at a glance
| Stadium | City | Home club's years there | Pennants in that span | World Series titles | Best season attendance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Riverfront Stadium (later Cinergy Field) | Cincinnati | 1970 to 2002 | 1970, 1972, 1975, 1976, 1990 | 1975, 1976, 1990 | 2,629,708 (1976) |
| Three Rivers Stadium | Pittsburgh | 1970 to 2000 | 1971, 1979 | 1971, 1979 | 2,065,302 |
| Veterans Stadium | Philadelphia | 1971 to 2003 | 1980, 1983, 1993 | 1980 | 3,137,674 |
| Busch Memorial Stadium (Busch Stadium II) | St. Louis | 1966 to 2005 | 1967, 1968, 1982, 1985, 1987, 2004 | 1967, 1982 | 3,538,988 |
Two cautions about that table. The historical record assigns a team to a park for each season, and seasons in which a club split its home games between an old and a new park (1970 for Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, 1966 for St. Louis) are listed under both. The pennant and title columns count all the seasons in the span, including the early years in the older parks, so they describe the clubs more than the buildings. Even so, the list shows that the stadiums were home to real success.
Cincinnati: Riverfront and the Big Red Machine
Riverfront Stadium opened in the middle of the 1970 season, on the bank of the Ohio River in downtown Cincinnati, and the Reds won the National League pennant in its first partial season. Under manager Sparky Anderson, who won 863 games and lost 586 for the club between 1970 and 1978, the Reds won pennants in 1970, 1972, 1975 and 1976 and World Series titles in 1975 and 1976. In 1976 they swept the Yankees four games to none. The club's highest season attendance in the database, 2,629,708, came in 1976 at Riverfront.
The stadium later became Cinergy Field, renamed for a utility company in the late 1990s, and the Reds won another championship in 1990 while playing there. The club left after the 2002 season for Great American Ball Park, which opened in 2003. The replacement park has its own page in our ballpark section.
Pittsburgh: Three Rivers at the point of the rivers
Three Rivers Stadium opened in 1970 near the spot where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers meet to form the Ohio, which is where the name comes from. The Pirates won the World Series in 1971 and 1979 with the park as their home. Danny Murtaugh, who managed the club for 2,068 games between 1957 and 1976, led the 1971 team, and Chuck Tanner, who won 711 games between 1977 and 1985, managed the 1979 champions.
The stadium's best season attendance was 2,065,302, the lowest of the four. The Pirates moved to PNC Park in 2001, where the historical record shows a best attendance of 2,498,596 in 2015, about 21 percent higher than the best crowd Three Rivers ever drew.
Philadelphia: Veterans Stadium
The Phillies and the Eagles moved to Veterans Stadium in 1971, when it opened in the sports complex in South Philadelphia. Its turf had a reputation among players for being hard. The Phillies won their first World Series title in 1980 while based there and also won National League pennants in 1983 and 1993. Mike Schmidt, who hit 548 home runs for the club between 1972 and 1989, spent his whole career with the Phillies, and so played his home games at the Vet.
The stadium's best attendance was 3,137,674. When the Phillies moved to Citizens Bank Park in 2004, the best season at the new ballpark in the database was 3,680,718 in 2011, a gain of about 17 percent over the Vet's best. The Vet was demolished in 2004. The new park has its own ballpark page, and the club has a team page.
St. Louis: Busch Memorial Stadium
The Cardinals moved from Sportsman's Park to Busch Memorial Stadium during the 1966 season, in the heart of downtown. It was the earliest of the group, and many fans remember it for the view of the Gateway Arch beyond the outfield. The Cardinals won the World Series in 1967 and 1982 there, and pennants in 1968, 1985, 1987 and 2004. Whitey Herzog's teams of the 1980s were built around it.
Herzog won 822 games for the Cardinals between 1980 and 1990 and favored speed, defense and good pitching, a style that suited a fast artificial surface and large outfield. That is the clearest example in the group of a club designing itself around its home park. The stadium had the highest best-season attendance of the four, 3,538,988, and the Cardinals moved to the third Busch Stadium in 2006.
How the turf and the shape changed the game
Artificial turf made the ball move differently. A ground ball skipped faster through the infield, bounced higher and took fewer odd hops than it did on grass, and a ball hit into the outfield gaps ran to the wall quickly. The effect was to reward speed: runners could take an extra base more often, and infielders and outfielders had to cover more ground. Teams that stole bases, hit line drives and used fast outfielders were helped, and teams built around slow power hitters were not.
The symmetrical fences and the wide foul territory had effects too. A fly ball that would have been a home run in a short-porch park was a long out in a deep, wide gap. The overall picture, as it is usually described, was a more athletic game: fewer long-ball innings, more triples and more stolen bases. Our guide to weather, wind and baseball totals explains how a ballpark's conditions can shift scoring, and the same logic applies to a park's surface.
The park did not decide everything, either. The Reds of the 1970s were as famous for power as for speed, and Johnny Bench's 389 home runs for the club are the most in franchise history in the historical data. Pittsburgh's champions of 1971 and 1979 leaned on Willie Stargell, whose 475 home runs for the club are the franchise record. A good team found a way to win in any building. The turf shifted advantages at the margins, and over 81 home games a year those margins were enough for a manager like Herzog to exploit.
We would be cautious about attaching precise numbers to these effects without a park-by-park analysis. The historical record has season totals for clubs but not home and road splits, so we cannot show how much of a team's speed advantage came from the building. What the database does show is that clubs such as the Cardinals of the 1980s won while playing a style that fit their home field.
What fans disliked
The complaints were consistent. Seats in a bowl designed for football were far from a baseball diamond, and the upper decks were a long way from the field. The multipurpose layout meant that some seats faced the wrong way for baseball, and others were behind the foul poles. The turf was hot in summer and hard on players' legs. The concrete bowl had little of the personality of older parks, and the surroundings were largely parking lots. Fans who had known Crosley Field, Forbes Field or Sportsman's Park noticed what had been lost.
At the same time, the stadiums were modern for their time, with easy highway access, large parking areas and room for big crowds. The Phillies and Cardinals drew crowds above three million in their best seasons at the Vet and Busch, so the buildings were not unpopular in the sense of being empty. What changed was taste.
The turn to the retro park
In 1992 Baltimore opened Oriole Park at Camden Yards, a baseball-only park with an irregular outfield, brick facade and downtown skyline view, and it set off a wave of imitation. Every one of the four cookie-cutter stadiums was replaced between 2001 and 2006: PNC Park in Pittsburgh (2001), Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati (2003), Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia (2004) and the third Busch Stadium in St. Louis (2006). The multipurpose era had ended, and clubs now wanted their own parks, with their own revenue streams.
The replacements drew bigger best-season crowds in three of the four cases (Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and, barely, St. Louis, by the historical figures above; Cincinnati's best at Great American, 2,534,369, is slightly below Riverfront's 2,629,708, which came in the Big Red Machine's 1976 season). A new park draws visitors for its own sake, and the comparison is not a pure measure of the old building's flaws. Still, the pattern is clear: when a city offered a better setting, fans came.
Other multipurpose parks did not follow the same timeline. Shea Stadium in New York lasted until 2008; see our article on Shea Stadium. Domes and retractable roofs, which kept some multipurpose features, are covered in retractable roofs and domes in the major leagues.
Common questions
Which stadiums are called cookie-cutter? The usual list is Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia and Busch Memorial Stadium in St. Louis. Some lists add other multipurpose stadiums of the 1960s and 1970s.
Why did they have artificial turf? The surface was cheaper to maintain for a stadium that held football and baseball in the same year, and it followed the Astrodome's example.
Are any of them still standing? No. All four were demolished after their clubs moved.
Did they ever host a World Series? Yes, many. By the figures above, the four home clubs combined for eight World Series titles across the spans in the table.
What replaced them? PNC Park, Great American Ball Park, Citizens Bank Park and the third Busch Stadium.
Where to go next
For the current Cincinnati ballpark, see the Great American Ball Park page and the Reds team page. To compare the older irregular parks with the round ones, read about how ballpark dimensions differ, and for the full range of topics on parks and fans, visit the ballparks and fans topic page.