Gushers of architectural praise counterbalanced by all the appropriate populist blowback over the two new baseball stadiums in New York will likely consume most of the summer, but with the 2009 season beginning tonight, you wonder sometimes how baseball will sustain itself at some point where it is not constantly demolishing its cathedrals and unveiling new theatres.

At least I do.

Your results may vary.

Wrecking balls and dynamite have taken down 17 baseball parks in the last 30 years, 14 in the last 10, so that only the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs can now be said to inhabit truly old stadiums. But even with the destruction of Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium, the cycle isn't complete.

Minnesota's behated Homer Dome, the Hubert H. Humphrey Center for Big Flies and Baggy Fences, is apparently headed toward its final summer, and hardly without a healthy share of memories. The Twins won two of the most dramatic World Series ever there, and if nothing else, it is the place where Philadelphia Daily News columnist Bill Conlin sat down and re-wrote Grantland Rice.

It was Rice who wrote, from a Notre Dame football game in 1924, "Outlined against a blue, gray October sky, the four horseman rode again," often mentioned as the greatest lead in sports writing

It was Conlin, the best baseball writer of the last 50 years, who wrote from a Minnesota World Series, "Outlined against a blue, gray Teflon sky, the hoarse Norsemen roared again."

A new stadium for the Florida Marlins is also on track, leaving only the Oakland A's among those baseball considers in need of what it calls "a stadium solution." The Pirates officially have a stadium solution; they just need a baseball solution.

Each of the 20 stadiums that have gone up just since 1990 have lifted the game's staging standards in some way, either in the name of simply augmenting the natural beauty of a temperate summer's eve or, in the case of the Yankees, in the name of putting hi-def monitors in the bathroom mirrors in the Legends Club, where some seats retail for $2,625.00.

Per game.

(Don't hyperventilate -- the Yanks are throwing in a complimentary yearbook and a commemorative pin).

The Yankees, and to a lesser extent the Mets, have unwittingly chosen one of the worst spots in America's financial history to open stadiums where large percentages of the seating capacity are given over to vulgar displays of wealth. A full season ticket plan in the Bronx now costs $26,325 for one seat, which is enticing because it's actually a savingsover the single game prices. True, the Yanks are offering $5 tickets as well.

On 12 dates.

Sure you can get a Tuesday in September against Toronto.

Obstructed view, of course.

In a sense, it's worse for the Mets, whose new home is Citi Field.

Seriously.

What, was Bailout Park taken? Every time they drag out the tarp, kids will ask their dads if tarp is an acronym for Troubled Asset Relief Fund. OK maybe not. Way to learn from Enron Field, you young executives.

But the rest of baseball actually seems to getting it. Twenty of the 30 teams have either maintained or lowered ticket prices for 2009. The Orioles are letting kids in free on Tuesdays if they're accompanied by an adult, the Pirates have some buck nights when tickets, hot dogs, and popcorn are $1 each, and the Twins are offering some tickets priced as the first three digits of the DOW from the previous Friday. If it closes at 8,113 on Friday, some tickets Monday will cost $8.11. Let's hope no one gets in for $5.50 this year.

Tickets that don't cost the mortgage are said to be scarce this summer in New York, but you needn't get there anytime soon for the best ballpark experience. Partly because it's opening day and partly because I've never done it before, here the five best and five worst ballparks in the majors, in my opinion, obviously. In the case of the handful of ballparks I haven't been to yet, I'll use the standard employed by Bill Murray when he used to predict the Oscars on SNL's Weekend Update: "I haven't seen it, so it can't win."

The five best, in order:

PNC Park, the perfect marriage of baseball pastoral and urban tradition.

Dodger Stadium, still a California jewel after 45 years.

Wrigley Field, who really needs a World Series when you have this?

Progressive Field, Cleveland, the erstwhile Jake, quirkily downtown perfect, somehow.

Kaufmann Stadium, Kansas City, a bucolic monument to baseball in mid-America.

The five worst, in reverse order:

Turner Field, Atlanta (should have been Hank Aaron Stadium), shadowy playing surface, little personality.

Minute Maid Park, Houston, an airplane hangar with a train running through it (the team's name connotes space travel, right?).

U.S. Cellular Field, Chicago, which, when it opened, was capable of boarding pets, still likely its best use.

Rogers Centre, formerly SkyDome, Toronto, not even Joe Carter could save the place.

Oakland Alameda County Coliseum, which still works best as an abandoned NFL venue.