After Move, a Breaking In Process

"That's been one of the great debates around here -- whether it's a hitter's park or not," said Mike Flanagan, the Orioles' executive vice president for baseball operations. "Camden actually plays bigger in the alleys, for doubles and triples, but is middle-of-the-pack in terms of home runs."

Flanagan has the distinction of having played on two different teams that opened new stadiums -- the Toronto Blue Jays (SkyDome) in 1989, and the Orioles in 1992. In both cases, he said, it was "a good couple of years" before the team felt it held any sort of home-field advantage in its new park.

"It takes that long to get a feel for it," Flanagan said, "where you felt the local knowledge of bounces and gaps and dimensions gave you an edge."

Still, the Orioles felt strongly enough about the potential for offensive explosions at their new stadium that they went out and acquired two expensive starting pitchers during the offseason preceding the opening of Camden Yards -- former Cy Young winner Rick Sutcliffe and former 19-game-winner Storm Davis. In all, the Orioles' payroll went up around 44 percent over the previous year.

But the Orioles, while vastly improved, only managed a third-place finish in 1992, and it is rare for teams to have wildly successful seasons in the first year of a new stadium -- one recent exception being the St. Louis Cardinals, who won only 83 regular season games in 2006, the year the new Busch Stadium opened, but sneaked into the playoffs and wound up winning the World Series. The Cardinals' success, however, was not due to wild spending. In fact, their payroll actually declined slightly in 2006 over the previous season.

While some owners seek to "make a splash" by bringing in some expensive players in the first year of a new stadium, those teams are typically perennial losers who need the help anyway.

"In our case," said Hunsicker, speaking of the Astros' move in 2000, "we had just come off three straight postseason appearances, and we felt we had a pretty good ballclub. That was as big a reason as any why we didn't make any significant changes."

Kasten's Braves were coming off a second straight NL pennant when Turner Field opened in 1997. "We were a very stable team," he said. "We had turnover every year at the bottom half of our roster, but the top half was very stable and at the top of its game. We didn't have need to go out and get free agents just to do it."

The 2008 Nationals, though, are not coming off three straight playoff appearances, or two straight NL pennants. And they will not open Nationals Park with a roster full of expensive superstars. The approach here, we are told, will be more methodical and measured.

For now, in other words, the stadium itself must be the draw -- although gazing out at the grass field in the sunshine, amid all that gleaming structure, perhaps you can envision what it will look like when the diamond is full of stars and championship pennants wave in the breeze beyond the outfield walls.