Of course, the real reason I went to Baltimore was to take in a few baseball games. I deliberately picked a week where the Orioles would be in town, and bought tickets to two games – conveniently with different visiting teams.

Now I have to admit that Oriole Park at Camden Yards (to use the full, official name) is a lovely place to watch a ball game. Clean sight lines, a nice backdrop, and easy to get to. Worth noting is that it doesn’t have any deliberate quirks that one finds in many of the newer stadia. No giant wall with a home run train on it, no corner of a building serving as a foul pole, no weird walls or angles “just because”…. OK, the left field wall drops back really quickly from 333 feet at the pole to 371 feet, and there is that building behind Eutaw Street in right field. But those things aren’t forced; they feel perfectly natural.

But there is one thing that really irks me; and it’s an absence rather than a presence.

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