Where you should sit at baseball games
Explainers

Where you should sit at Baseball games

With the MLB season approaching, we wanted to help travelling sports fans dealing with the potentially experience-defining decision of where to sit. MLB probably isn’t as popular worldwide as the NBA or the NFL, but it is played during the warmer months (when more people visit the USA), there are many more baseball games per season than other sports, and it is an iconic American experience. All of these things lead many tourists to find themselves at a ballgame.

For these people, we wanted to provide an easy-to-understand visual guide to help with their decision-making process. Rather than just relying on our own opinions, we decided to compile data from every tip submitted to our site related to where to sit at baseball games into one graphic. We wanted a consensus from all of the baseball fans contributing to our site – or at least something close to it.

So how did we do it?

I can sense you scrolling past this part straight to the results – I probably would, too – but here is how we compiled the data:

We started by making a generic baseball diamond and dividing up the possible seating sections, like this:

Baseball seating: Broken into sections

Then we went through all of the cities on our site with Major League Baseball teams/venues and read all of the seating tips, city-by city:

Where to sit at Fenway Park

…and we allocated each venue 2 “votes”. This was to account for when venues had multiple tips saying different things, or if the ‘top tip’ recommended two different spots. (In the Fenway Park example, above, Jedlow’s tip would have earned at least one vote for the Green Monster, which is in the ‘F’ section of our previous graphic).

THE RESULTS: The best place to sit at a Baseball game is…

Where you should sit at baseball games

According to Sports Where I Am users, the best place to sit in baseball venues across the USA is along the third base line. This is followed by sitting behind the home plate area or along the first base line.

More from Sports Where I Am

Other notes/observations

  • In good news for ‘neutral’, visiting, or indecisive fans, the phrase “there isn’t a bad seat in the house” appeared on many, many venues.
  • Some judgement calls had to be made. For example, there were some great tips about how to get the best value seats or tips about how you can save money by buying a ticket in one place and then moving seats during the game. For the purpose of this guide, we wanted to use people’s ‘best seat in the house’ in general, disregarding price.
  • There are some intangibles that don’t show up in these numbers: for instance, sitting in the bleachers was not recommended by many as the ‘best’ place to sit, but was mentioned as a place to be amongst the “real fans”. Similarly, some unique or iconic places like the Green Monster or the Miller Lite Deck aren’t always in spots with the best view of the action, they’re just unique and iconic, so they got the votes. As always, checking the SWIAM tips for your specific stadium – or contacting our team – before buying a ticket is the best way to make sure you’re getting the right advice.

What do you think about this seating guide?

If there’s something you think we’ve missed or got wrong, please let us know your thoughts on our Facebook page.