After decades of being the norm across both leagues, multi-purpose stadiums met their demise at the turn of the century.
Throughout much of the latter half of the 20th century and into the new millennium, there were few sights that invoked the month of September more than the gridiron field painted over a baseball diamond.
While every NFL and MLB team now play in sport-specific stadiums, that has only recently become the case. Coinciding with the NFL’s meteoric rise in popularity throughout the 1960’s and 1970s’, a massive boom of multi-purpose stadiums began across the U.S., with these large facilities designed to host both a city’s NFL and MLB team.
Football on a baseball field certainly wasn’t new – legendary parks like Fenway Park, Yankee Stadium and Wrigley Field all hosted professional football teams before and during this era – but several new stadiums were designed and built for this exact purpose.
These multi-purpose stadiums, or “cookie-cutters” as they are sometimes pejoratively referred to, all looked fairly similar with layouts relatively indistinguishable from park-to-park.
Parks such as the original Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia and Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh offered similar features – a circular stadium (the source of the cookie-cutter nickname) with at least three large seating bowls that encompass the entire stadium.
While these parks were commonplace and suited NFL teams quite well during their heyday, their lack of utility for baseball began to become apparent by the time the 1990’s rolled around. As teams like the Baltimore Orioles and Cleveland moved from multi-purpose facilities into retro-inspired modern baseball-specific stadiums, cookie-cutter parks quickly became obsolete.
Among the notable weaknesses of a multi-purpose stadium for baseball were the poor sightlines in many of the park’s seats, especially in the outfield upper deck, leading to rows of empty seats for most non-playoff games played at these parks.
By the turn of the century, several teams had started their moves into baseball-specific stadiums. The Pirates left Three Rivers Stadium for PNC Park before the 2001 season, while the Seattle Mariners moved from the Kingdome into then-Safeco Field midway through the 1999 season. In addition to those two clubs, nine other teams left multi-purpose stadiums in favor of more modern baseball parks in between 1995 and 2006.
From that point on, multi-purpose stadiums were on life support in MLB. The Washington Nationals, who had relocated from Montreal ahead of the 2005 season, played three seasons in the multi-purpose RFK Stadium (which was no longer home to Washington’s NFL team) before moving into Nationals Park in 2008.
With a hallmark of a past era quickly fading by the late 2000’s, here’s a look back at the final three stadiums to play host to both an NFL and MLB team:
1. Oakland Coliseum, 2019 (Oakland Raiders, Oakland Athletics)
The final holdout of the multi-purpose generation, Oakland Coliseum hosted its last-ever NFL games during the 2019 season, which was ultimately the Raiders’ final campaign in Oakland before relocating to Las Vegas.
The park’s connection to football also runs deeper than many other stadiums of its kind, with the coliseum hosting the Raiders from 1966 to 1981 prior to their move to Los Angeles in 1982. In an effort to get the team back more than a decade later, the team added the infamous Mount Davis seating section to the stadium in 1995, the same year the Raiders returned to Oakland.
The gargantuan upper deck section was maligned by fans for blocking what was a photogenic center field sightline, with its utility also falling out favor not long after as well. The A’s began covering the section with tarp for almost all home games beginning in 2006, with the Raiders even doing the same starting in 2013.
The Raiders went on to leave Oakland and the coliseum after 2019, with the Athletics following suit after the 2024 season, leaving the East Bay city without any major professional sports franchises.
The A’s currently play their home games at the minor league Sutter Health Park in West Sacramento, with the team slated to move to Las Vegas as well before the 2028 season.
2. Sun Life Stadium, 2011 (Miami Dolphins, Florida Marlins)
While this stadium remains the home of the Miami Dolphins today as Hard Rock Stadium following a renovation to make the stadium football-specific, it long served as the multi-purpose home for the Dolphins and the then-Florida Marlins.
The Marlins called the oft-renamed stadium home from the birth of their franchise in 1993 through the 2011 season, with the team moving from Miami Gardens to Miami city proper and undergoing a rebrand as the Miami Marlins ahead of the 2012 season.
While the stadium seemed to change naming rights just about every week during its heyday as a multi-purpose home, it saw plenty of baseball history as the home of the Marlins, most notably with hosting two World Series’ in 1997 and 2003. Although the upper deck was typically closed off for baseball games, the sections were opened up during the 1997 World Series, leading to a baseball attendance record of 67,498 for Game 6 of the series.
Though the facility remains utilized and ideal for football, the park was known for being perhaps the league’s most treacherous visit during its days as an MLB stadium. Due to South Florida’s sweltering tropical climate and frequent thunderstorms, poor attendance, frequent rain delays and suboptimal playing conditions, Sun Life Stadium was noticeably behind its contemporaries in essentially every regard as an MLB facility.
The Marlins played their final game as the Florida Marlins at Sun Life Stadium on Sept. 28, 2011 against the Washington Nationals, with the team moving into what is now known as LoanDepot Park in 2012.
3. Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, 2009 (Minnesota Vikings, Minnesota Twins)
A stadium that truly put the meaning of multi-purpose to the test, the Metrodome is the only facility in pro sports history to have hosted a Super Bowl, World Series, MLB All-Star Game and NCAA Men’s Basketball Final Four.
In operation from 1982 to 2013, the Metrodome hosted the Vikings for nearly the entirety of the stadium’s history, while serving as the home of the Twins from 1982 to 2009.
Though never hailed as one of baseball’s best atmospheres, the domed environment made plenty of sense for the cold Minneapolis climate while providing a booming atmosphere during playoff games, best exemplified during Game 7 of the 1991 World Series.
While the Twins were already on their way out by the end of the 2000’s, returning to outdoor baseball in the new Target Field ahead of the 2010 season, the Vikings held on for a bit longer, or at least, as long as they could.
After heavy snowfall in the Minneapolis area in December 2010, the Metrodome’s air-supported roof tore open, sending snow spilling onto the playing surface and necessitating expensive repairs for a stadium that was already on its way out.
The incident caused the Vikings to move a home game to the University of Minnesota’s TCF Bank Stadium, with the roof eventually being repaired ahead of the 2011 season. The Vikings went on to play three more seasons at the Metrodome before the historic facility was demolished in early 2014.
The Vikings played two full seasons at TCF Bank Stadium while their current venue, U.S. Bank Stadium, was under construction. The Vikings have called the fixed-roof U.S. Bank Stadium home since the 2016 season.
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