Asia’s baseball form continues to meet the challenge of new functionality through generational ballpark change

Like the players themselves, these ballparks carry the weight of their achievements and have a place in my and many other fans’ hearts.  And like any good player they adapt to a changing game to continue to be successful.  

In Taiwan, in my home country of South Korea and particularly in Japan, we have a generation of stadia designed for the significant growth of professional baseball, which we are asking more and more of to keep up with changing fan expectations. 

As baseball fans like me increase in attendance, venue owners now need even more from their iconic and culturally significant stadia; they need to be multipurpose, flexibly adapting from hosting a baseball game to a K-pop concert in a matter of days. 

In Japan, baseball fields can be a distance from the seats of fans who want to get the best view possible at a concert, and many older venues have too few amenities that cater to VIP and corporate audiences.   

As Mako Ihara, Senior Principal at Populous says, many current ballparks will need renovating over the next 10 to 20 years to meet future needs.   

Other upgrades such as adding retractable roofs, more modern digital technology for audio visual effects and improvements to food and beverage as well as suite and changing facilities will be required to meet fan and player expectations, including for international visitors. 

In South Korea, Populous is working with the Seoul Metropolitan Government on Asia’s first baseball dome that will be home to two professional teams.  Jamsil Dome will also include a 306 room hotel, maximising the use of an asset located on prime inner-city land. 

Projects like Jamsil have an increasing focus on universal design and ensuring accessibility for everyone, including people with disabilities – something that was not fully considered in most ballpark designs 40 years ago. 

In contrast to these challenges, it’s exciting to see where we can take the design of Asia’s ballparks.  In Taiwan, Taipei Dome’s multipurpose design and capability of hosting 58,000 fans in concert mode exemplifies this focus on being multipurpose.  Taipei Dome is designed primarily around a Major League Baseball (MLB) field.  The player match facilities have the country’s first designated male and female umpire’s lockers, and there are lounges as well as operational back of house and media spaces, food and beverage areas, and VIP and function spaces.  Taipei Dome is a model for other baseball stadia in the region to follow. 

Taipei Dome is also an example of a baseball arena that gives back to and is integrated into the surrounding precinct.  As the first-of-its-kind integrated mixed-use development in Taiwan, Taipei Dome, located in the center of Taipei City, combines themed retail, offices, apartments and a hotel on the historic old Song Shan Tobacco Factory site.  

In Taiwan, a surging interest in sport has made Taiwanese cities keen to organize international or domestic multi-sports tournaments, which has made the redevelopment of ballparks and the construction of new stadia like Taipei Dome increasingly important. 

As Brett Wightman, Senior Principal at Populous says, the ownership model of ballparks is evolving in Asia, helping to promote this integration of the ballpark into the broader precinct.  

Working on the design of Changwon City baseball park in South Korea, was an opportunity for me to bring a new level of fan experience to the country’s baseball venues, while at the same time allowing the venue to maximize its use on non-event days. The Populous-designed ballpark and surrounding parklands are created so people can enjoy the site every day of the year. The new park is the only open concourse and the first no wall ground level concourse stadium in South Korea. 

Our challenge with Changwon City baseball park was to improve the fan experience while also increasing revenue potential. We considered stakeholder needs and baselined the fan experience across the NC Dinos’ home ground and other stadiums across South Korea to better understand fan expectations. We then compared this with fan experiences at other Populous designed ballparks in the U.S., including the Atlanta Braves’ new home ground at Truist Park.  Our role was then to develop a seamless fan experience across the key touch points from commercialization (sponsorship and advertising), wayfinding and non-game day content to drive revenue during off- season, food and beverage sales and merchandise.

While audiences in Asia and the U.S. are very different in terms of what they want out of their fan experience, I see many similarities between the Asian ballpark reinvention and the upgrades, renovations and new stadia that the north American market has gone through over the past decade. 

Populous has been working with MLB clubs in the US and Canada for more than 40 years, upgrading major venues such as Rogers Centre in Toronto.  The Toronto Blue Jays partnered with Populous for a privately-funded renovation that will modernize the ballpark for future generations of fans – the first large-scale renovation in its 34 year history. 

In fact, Populous has worked with the majority of MLB teams, designing many of the MLB stadia, including the iconic Yankee Stadium.  As the original Yankee Stadium neared the end of its life in the early 2000s, Populous was set the challenge of designing not just a replacement, but a new American icon.  Most commentators thought it would be impossible to emulate the intangible glory of the old ballpark, but when the new Yankee Stadium opened in 2009, it forged a bridge between eras – a place where fans could revel in shared memories, just as new stories were being written in the ongoing narrative of America’s favorite pastime. 

But while there are similarities between the MLB and professional leagues in Asia such as Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball (Nippon Yakyū Kikō) league, you can’t just take the north American model and apply it literally to venues in our region. 

There is growing excitement and ever increasing commercial opportunities around baseball in Asia, from the presence of MLB teams regularly playing exhibition games in the region, to Japanese players like Ichiro Suzuki and Shohei Ohtani who have excelled in MLB and are inspiring a new generation of local athletes, to Asia bringing baseball to the world and the world watching baseball in Asia.  This includes through events such as the World Baseball Classic and baseball being played at the Olympic and Paralympic Games. 

This is inspiring the next generation of high school and college baseball players and as this new generation looks back on what our ballparks and those who played in them achieved, it is looking ahead to the future of ballparks in Asia.  Our team is collaborating across regions to reimagine and reinvent what a ballpark is – to offer an experience like no other.