Most sports venues get torn down and replaced every few decades, but baseball is different. A handful of MLB ballparks have stood for more than a century, hosting generations of fans in the same seats where their grandparents watched the game. These cathedrals of baseball are part of what makes the sport feel timeless. So which is the oldest MLB stadium still in use, and how big is the gap between the ancient classics and everything else?
The two oldest parks were both built before World War I and are still going strong, while the third-oldest did not open until half a century later. The rest of the league is far younger, with most current ballparks dating to a building boom around the year 2000.
The chart below ranks every MLB stadium from oldest to newest, with the year each one opened and the team that calls it home. Take a look, then we’ll dig into the history.
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The Oldest MLB Stadium
The oldest ballpark in Major League Baseball is Fenway Park in Boston, home of the Red Sox, which opened on April 20, 1912. More than a century later it is still in use, famous for its towering left-field wall known as the Green Monster and its single lone red seat marking the spot where one of the longest home runs in its history landed. Fenway has been modernized many times over the decades, but its cramped, quirky, history-soaked character is exactly why fans love it.
The Second-Oldest: Wrigley Field
Just two years younger is Wrigley Field in Chicago, home of the Cubs, which opened in 1914. Known as the “Friendly Confines,” Wrigley is instantly recognizable for the ivy covering its outfield brick walls, first planted in the 1930s. It was the last MLB park to install lights for night games, not doing so until 1988, and in 2020 it was designated a National Historic Landmark. Together, Fenway and Wrigley are the only two parks remaining from before 1962.
A Big Jump to Third Place
After Fenway and Wrigley, there is a 48-year gap to the third-oldest park. Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles opened in 1962 and is both the third-oldest and the largest ballpark in the majors, seating 56,000. It was built when the Dodgers moved west from Brooklyn, and it remains one of the most admired venues in baseball. Behind it come Angel Stadium (1966) and Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City (1973), rounding out the five oldest active parks.
The Ballpark Building Boom
The reason so few old parks remain is that MLB went through a massive wave of new construction around the turn of the millennium. A large share of today’s stadiums opened in a roughly twenty-year stretch between the early 1990s and 2010, as teams replaced aging multi-purpose stadiums with modern, baseball-only parks. That boom is why the league’s age list jumps from a few genuine antiques straight into a dense cluster of parks all built within a couple of decades of each other.
Old Parks, Small Parks
The oldest ballparks tend to also be among the smallest, since they were built in an era before giant modern stadiums and were squeezed into tight city blocks. Fenway and Wrigley both rank near the bottom of the league in seating capacity, which is part of their intimate charm rather than a drawback. If you want to see how the size rankings shake out, our guide to the smallest MLB stadiums ranks all 30 parks by capacity and explains why some are so compact.
The Bottom Line
The oldest MLB stadium is Fenway Park, opened in 1912, followed by Wrigley Field in 1914, with Dodger Stadium a distant third from 1962. Only those two pre-war parks survive from baseball’s early era, preserved and modernized while nearly every other old stadium was replaced in the building boom around 2000. In a sport obsessed with tradition, these century-old ballparks are living history, and there is nothing else quite like watching a game in them.