This isn't quite as complex as the average FiveThirtyEight post, but Baseball Prospectus alum Nate Silver recently ranked baseball's best ballparks according to... average Yelp ranking. The results clearly don't correlate with on-the-field activity—PNC Park, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates, is the clear winner—but new Busch Stadium has done pretty well for itself since opening in 2006, even without taking the St. Louis Cardinals' play into account; it finished seventh, with an average score of 4.39.
↵Only one stadium newer than Busch finished ahead of it—the Minnesota Twins' beautiful new Target Field, one of a new set of ballparks that has finally dumped the retro approach pioneered by Camden Yards so long ago that it is now itself retro.
↵Of course, my own aesthetic tastes might not be much of a guide here—one of the biggest losers among the new parks is Nationals Park in Washington D.C., which earned just a 3.63 despite being awesome-looking. Stuck at the bottom are two recently renamed multi-purpose parks: The Overstock.com Coliseum, which is the honest-to-god name of the park the Oakland Athletics play in, and Toronto's Rogers Centre, formerly Skydome.
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