Miller Park

Miller Park is a baseball stadium located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It is home to the Milwaukee Brewers and was built as a replacement for Milwaukee County Stadium.

	Capacity		43,000
	Opened		April 6th 2001
	Owner		Southeast Wisconsin Professional Baseball District, Milwaukee Brewers
	Cost		$400 million
	Architect		HKS Inc, NBBJ, Eppstein Uhen Architects

Miller Park was built with $310 million of public funds, which was controversial, particularly due to the fact that the team owner, Bud Selig (also the Commissioner of Baseball) was highly unpopular locally. Construction was subject to numerous delays. Groundbreaking took place on October 22, 1996, in a parking lot behind County Stadium. Construction had already been slowed, and the originally planned opening date of Opening Day 1999 had already been pushed back and was delayed even further after three construction workers were killed in a tragic accident. The massive Lampson Transi-lift crane (nicknamed “Big Blue”), brought in to build the roof, collapsed while lifting a 400 ton roof section on July 14, 1999. The stadium did not open until Opening Day 2001.

The stadium has a retractable roof, built in a unique convertible style, with the roof panels opening and closing simultaneously in a sweeping manner from the first base and third base sides towards center field. The huge roof explained a large part of the $400 million cost of the stadium.

The stadium design follows the trend of retro-designed ballparks with current amenities that began in 1990′s. The design of Miller Park most closely resembles that of Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers from 1938 to 1957.

The unconventional fan-shaped roof has proven to be more problematic than most contemporary retractable roofs. Because of its height and size, the fixed roof panel on the stadium’s west side casts a shadow on the infield during most of the day. This led to unexpected problems with the growth of the natural grass surface on the first base side. At one point during the 2002 season, the Brewers publicly broached the possibility of having to replace the natural grass surface with an artificial surface, such as FieldTurf. To this point, however, a switch to an artificial surface has not been seriously considered. The roof has also been the butt of jokes in the local media for its tendency to leak during summer rain storms. The Brewers, in response to critics, have claimed that the roof was never intended to be water tight. Major elements of the pivot system behind home plate and the outfield roof track have had to be repaired or even replaced at the cost of millions of dollars since the stadium’s opening in 2001.

In time for the 2006 season there were three noticeable additions to the stadium. Two different sets of LED scoreboards were added. One replacing the formerly manually-operated “out of town” scoreboards located along the left and right field walls with a new set of LED scoreboards along the left-field wall. The new “out of town” scoreboards show continually updated information about other Major League games including the score, hits, errors, outs, and an image of the field displaying the runners on base. A second-tier scoreboard was also added along the bottom of the 200-level of the stadium stretching from foul pole to home plate to foul pole. The section of the second-tier scoreboard above home plate displays statistics for those unable to see the main scoreboard above the center-field wall. The final addition to Miller Park for the 2006 season was the addition of a field-level picnic-area in the corner of right-field. The picnic-area has a capacity of 75 and provides a place for fans to watch the game in a leisurely setting and be within feet of the right-fielder.

(source .. wikipedia) reproduced under GFDL

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Miller Park wikipedia entry
Milwaukee Brewers website

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