One of the best things about baseball is that the sport refuses to throw away its past. Walk into Fenway Park or Wrigley Field and you are standing somewhere a fan from 1920 would still recognize, watching a game on ground that has held more than a century of it. No other major American sport keeps its history this close, and that is exactly why ballpark age is such a beloved corner of baseball trivia.
The catch is that “old” splits sharply in two. There are the two pre-war cathedrals that predate everything else by half a century, and then there is the rest of the league, where the oldest park opened in 1962. After Fenway and Wrigley, the drop-off is enormous.
The chart below ranks every active MLB ballpark from oldest to newest, with the year it opened, the team that calls it home, and a note on what makes it worth knowing. Take a look, then we’ll dig into the stories behind the standouts.
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Two parks in a class of their own
The story of baseball’s oldest stadiums is really the story of two buildings. Fenway Park opened in Boston in 1912, the same week the Titanic sank, and Wrigley Field followed in Chicago in 1914. After that pair, the next-oldest active park, Dodger Stadium, did not open until 1962, leaving a 48-year gap between the second-oldest and third-oldest parks in the league. Nothing else in American pro sports comes close to that kind of separation.
Fenway is defined by its quirks, above all the Green Monster, the 37-foot left field wall that turns routine fly balls into doubles and long drives into loud outs. The Red Sox have hosted legends from Babe Ruth to Ted Williams to David Ortiz on that field, and the current ownership has spent two decades renovating around the bones rather than replacing them. No Boston fan wants to hear about a new park.
Wrigley is the ivy and the rooftops, the hand-operated scoreboard, and the stubborn tradition of day baseball that held until lights were finally installed under protest in 1988, making it the last MLB park to play under the lights. It opened as Weeghman Park for a Federal League team, the Cubs moved in for the 1916 season, and it took the Wrigley name in 1927. In 2020 it was designated a National Historic Landmark, which is about as official as baseball nostalgia gets.
The 1960s survivors
Once you get past the two old cathedrals, the next tier is a small group of 1960s parks that have quietly become venerable in their own right. Dodger Stadium, opened in 1962 in Chavez Ravine, is the third-oldest park in baseball and the largest by capacity, seating around 56,000. It is also the rare ballpark that has never expanded its seating, and it has appeared in so many films, from The Sandlot to the Fast and Furious franchise, that even non-fans have seen it.
Just down the freeway, Angel Stadium opened in 1966, only four years after Dodger Stadium, a fact that surprises people who assume “The Big A” is much newer. It is best known for the artificial rock formation and geysers beyond the center field fence, a leftover from its Disney-era renovation. Kansas City’s Kauffman Stadium, opened in 1973, rounds out the older group and is regularly called one of the prettiest parks in the game thanks to its outfield fountains and the crown-shaped video board that gives it a distinct, slightly less corporate feel.
The two parks that moved house
Two entries on the list come with asterisks, because their teams have been displaced. The Athletics left the Oakland Coliseum after the 2024 season and now play at Sutter Health Park in Sacramento, a minor league stadium they share with the Triple-A River Cats. It is currently the smallest park in the majors, and it is meant to be a stopgap through 2027 before the franchise’s planned move to Las Vegas in 2028.
The Rays had a more dramatic detour. In October 2024, Hurricane Milton tore the roof off Tropicana Field, leaving the St. Petersburg dome unplayable and forcing the team to spend the entire 2025 season outdoors at the Yankees’ spring training home, Steinbrenner Field. After more than a year and roughly 58 million dollars in repairs, the Rays returned to a rebuilt Tropicana Field for the 2026 season, complete with a new roof, new turf, and the fan-favorite ray tank back behind the outfield wall. Their long-term future remains an open question, but for now the Trop is home again.
The ballparks older than the major leagues themselves
If pure age is what you are after, the truly ancient ballparks are not in the majors at all. Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama, opened in 1910 and is recognized as the oldest professional ballpark in the United States, two years older than Fenway. It has hosted unforgettable baseball history, including a 1931 exhibition where a 20-year-old outfielder named Willie Mays hit two home runs for the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro Leagues.
Other historic grounds carry the same kind of weight. Centennial Field in Burlington, Vermont, dates to 1906 and once hosted a Montreal Expos and Boston Red Sox game in 1994 after a roof collapse at Olympic Stadium. Wahconah Park in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, built in 1919, is one of the last wooden-grandstand ballparks left and was the site of a 33-inning minor league marathon in 1981, the longest professional game ever played. And Luther Williams Field in Macon, Georgia, opened in 1929, gave a young Satchel Paige a mound to pitch from in the Negro Leagues. These parks are living museums, and many still host summer-league and minor league teams today.
Final Word
The appeal of the old ballparks is that they collapse the distance between eras. You can sit in a seat at Fenway or Wrigley and watch the same game, on the same patch of ground, that fans watched a hundred years ago, which is a kind of time travel no other sport really offers. The rest of the league may be newer, but even the 1960s survivors and the repurposed minor league parks each carry their own slice of the story.
If your goal is to visit all 30 MLB parks, a popular bucket-list pursuit for serious fans, the best advice is to start with the oldest ones. The newer stadiums will always be there, but standing inside a century of baseball history is the experience that makes the whole project worth doing. Knock off a couple a year, begin with Fenway and Wrigley, and the appreciation for everything that came after takes care of itself. And if you want to know what you are walking into capacity-wise, our guide to MLB stadium capacity and field dimensions breaks down every park.