If you're asking about the big leagues, the oldest baseball stadium still in use is Fenway Park in Boston. The Red Sox played their first official game there on April 20, 1912, and they've never left.
But that's only one version of the answer. Widen the net to every professional ballpark in the country, and the title goes to Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama, which opened on August 18, 1910. Widen it again to the whole world, and you end up in Canada at Labatt Memorial Park in London, Ontario, where people have been playing ball on the same grounds since 1877.
So the real answer to "what's the oldest ballpark?" is a question back: oldest what, exactly? Here's how each claim holds up, and why it matters that these places are still standing.
Fenway Park: the oldest MLB ballpark (1912)
Fenway's first official game was a nail-biter. According to Britannica, the Red Sox beat the New York Highlanders, the team we now call the Yankees, 7–6 in extra innings. The park wasn't even finished yet. The Titanic had gone down less than a week earlier.
Here's a piece of trivia that's easy to overlook: Fenway didn't open alone. Navin Field in Detroit, later known as Tiger Stadium, opened the very same day. Tiger Stadium hosted its last game in 1999 and came down in 2008–09, which left Fenway as the last one standing from that April afternoon.
Of course, the Fenway you'd walk into today isn't the exact building from 1912. A fire hit the left-field bleachers in 1926, and after Tom Yawkey bought the team, a major rebuild started in 1933. Seats have been added, premium areas built, and the concourses modernized. What hasn't changed is the footprint. The park is jammed into a city block, and that's why the field is so lopsided.
That's also how you get the Green Monster. With left field only about 310 feet down the line, the towering wall is the ballpark's answer to a short porch. If you've watched enough games there, you've seen routine fly balls turn into doubles off the wall, and screaming line drives that would be homers anywhere else get held to singles.
One fun wrinkle for the purists: even Fenway's own history has an asterisk. For the 1915 and 1916 World Series, the Red Sox played their home games at the brand-new Braves Field because it held more fans. Fenway was the regular-season home, but the Fall Classic moved across town. For current tours, seating, and ballpark info, the Red Sox ballpark page on MLB.com is the place to start.
Wrigley Field, and then a very big gap
Wrigley Field is the runner-up, and it's close. The Chicago ballpark hosted its first game on April 23, 1914, just two years after Fenway. It wasn't built for the Cubs, either. It opened as Weeghman Park for the Chicago Whales of the short-lived Federal League, and the Cubs moved in once that league folded.
Wrigley also held out on night baseball longer than anybody. It didn't install lights until 1988, making it the last MLB park to do so.
This is where things get interesting. After Fenway and Wrigley, the list of the oldest MLB ballparks jumps almost half a century:
Ballpark Team Opened Fenway Park Boston Red Sox 1912 Wrigley Field Chicago Cubs 1914 Dodger Stadium Los Angeles Dodgers 1962 Angel Stadium Los Angeles Angels 1966 Kauffman Stadium Kansas City Royals 1973That 48-year hole tells a story. Fenway and Wrigley came out of what's often called the golden age of ballpark building, roughly 1909 to 1915. That's when clubs swapped out rickety wooden grandstands for steel and concrete. Shibe Park, Forbes Field, Ebbets Field, Comiskey Park and plenty of others came out of that boom. Every one of them is gone. Boston and Chicago's North Side are the only two big-league towns that kept theirs.
Rickwood Field: America's oldest professional ballpark (1910)
If Fenway is the oldest ballpark in the majors, Rickwood Field is the oldest ballpark in American pro baseball, period. It opened on August 18, 1910, a year and a half before Fenway's first pitch.
It was built by Rick Woodward, a young Birmingham industrialist who owned the minor league Barons. He named the park by mashing together his nickname and the start of his last name. He modeled it largely on Pittsburgh's Forbes Field, and it's considered the first concrete-and-steel ballpark in the minors.
Woodward also gave the place one of the great opening days in baseball history. He put on a Barons uniform, took the mound, and threw a real, non-ceremonial first pitch. The umpire called it a ball. According to MLB.com's account, the owner was ejected one pitch into his pro career.
The bigger story is who played there. The Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro Leagues called Rickwood home from 1924 through 1960. A teenage Willie Mays made his pro debut with them in 1948, and Rickwood hosted the final game of the last Negro League World Series that October. Babe Ruth, Pie Traynor and Stan Musial all passed through, too.
Is Rickwood really "still in use"?
Yes, but not as anybody's everyday home. The Double-A Barons now play at Regions Field, about three miles away. From 1996 on, they came back for an annual Rickwood Classic.
Then came the ballgame nobody will forget. On June 20, 2024, the Giants and Cardinals played the first regular-season MLB game ever held in Alabama at Rickwood as a tribute to the Negro Leagues and Mays. MLB spent about $5 million getting the field ready. Mays had died just two days earlier, which turned the night into something closer to a memorial.
The park has stayed busy since. In 2025 it hosted a minor league game and MLB's East-West Classic, and in 2026 the Barons brought the Pensacola Blue Wahoos in for an official Southern League game. The Friends of Rickwood , formed in 1992 to save the park from the wrecking ball, deserve a lot of the credit for it still being here.
Labatt Memorial Park: the oldest baseball grounds in the world (1877)
For the true grandfather of them all, you have to head north. Labatt Memorial Park in London, Ontario, held its first game on May 3, 1877, back when it was called Tecumseh Park. Guinness World Records recognizes it as the world's oldest continually operating baseball grounds.
That title came with a fight. In 2007, Guinness briefly gave the honor to Fuller Field in Clinton, Massachusetts, which dates to 1878. The argument was that Fuller's home plate had never moved, while Labatt's had been shifted after floods. Guinness reversed course in 2009 and sided with London. The SABR research on the park's history is worth a read if you like this kind of rabbit hole.
It's no museum piece, either. The London Majors have played there since 1925.
One caveat: Labatt is "grounds," not a grandstand frozen in time. The field has been used since 1877, but the structures have been rebuilt and renovated over the years. That's why it tends to get its own category.
So which answer is right?
All three, depending on the question:
If somebody at a sports bar asks you the question straight up, Fenway is the answer they're fishing for. But the more interesting answer is Rickwood. It's a place where Ruth, Mays and the Black Barons all played, and it came awfully close to disappearing.
The common thread is that none of these parks survived by accident. Old ballparks get torn down all the time. Tiger Stadium, Comiskey and Ebbets Field are proof of that. Fenway, Wrigley, Rickwood and Labatt are still around because enough people decided they were worth fighting for. That's the kind of thing you feel the moment you walk up to one of them.
You can also read our Ketel Marte: Biography, Career, Stats, Position & More , featuring his career journey, playing position, achievements, and connection with the Arizona Diamondbacks.
