The sunniest seats in baseball

Published July 29, 2026 · ShadeMe

We ray-traced every modeled seat row in all 30 MLB ballparks, across all 905 day games on the 2026 regular season schedule, and measured one thing: how many minutes of a game the average seat actually spends in direct sunlight.

Baseball is the only major sport that regularly asks its fans to sit outdoors, in the middle of a summer afternoon, for three hours. Where you sit decides whether that is pleasant or punishing. But "which seats are in the shade" has always been answered by anecdote: a forum post, a friend, a stadium guide that says "the third base side, usually."

It is a geometry problem, and geometry can be computed. So we did.

The ranking

Every bar below is one 190-minute day game at that ballpark, split into the share the average seat spends in sun and the share it spends in shade, averaged across every day game that team plays at home in 2026.

Every number here is also in the full table below, and the raw per-section data is linked at the bottom.

Sacramento is not close

Sutter Health Park is a roughly 14,000-seat Triple-A ballpark in West Sacramento that the Athletics are using as a temporary home. It has one main seating bowl with a shallow second level above it, grass berms in the outfield, and almost nothing overhead. What it does not have is a deep upper deck, and in a normal MLB ballpark the upper deck is the single largest shade-casting structure there is. At Sutter Health Park the upper level is small enough that its own outer rows are the sunniest seats in the ballpark.

The result is a park where the model finds essentially no shaded seating at all. Under our definition of a genuinely shaded seat, one shielded from at least 80% of the sun available during the game, 0.8% of the Sutter Health Park bowl qualifies. The league median is about 26%. Even the shadiest area in the park, the lower bowl behind home plate, still averages 165 minutes of sun.

West Sacramento afternoons in July and August regularly climb into the high 90s and past 100. That combination, a hot valley city and a ballpark with no roof structure, is why this one is not a close call.

The two oldest parks are the shadiest

At the other end, ignoring Tropicana Field and its fixed roof, sit Fenway Park (57 minutes) and Wrigley Field (63 minutes). Both are more than a century old, and both share a feature that essentially disappeared from ballpark design after the 1950s: a real roof over the grandstand.

Fenway's covered Grandstand and the deep overhang above the Loge Boxes take about 39 minutes of sun off the average seat compared with a generic modern bowl. Wrigley's two roof levels take off 56. Oracle Park, whose Club and View decks are cantilevered slabs that hang over the deck below, takes off 16.

The schedule is a shade decision too

Sun exposure is not only architecture. It is also when you play, and no two teams play under the same sun.

Across the Red Sox' 34 home day games, the average height of the sun above the horizon is 36.6 degrees, the lowest in baseball. Three things stack up: Boston sits at 42 degrees north, 12 of those 34 games fall in April or September when the sun stays low all day, and 14 of them start at 4:00 PM or later. A low sun throws long shadows, and a seating bowl blocks far more of it. Strip Fenway's roof out and substitute a generic modern bowl, and Boston still finishes as the shadiest schedule in the league, 96 minutes against a league average of 119.

The opposite end is Houston at 59.7 degrees and Sacramento at 58.3, where almost every day game is a midsummer early afternoon start under a nearly overhead sun.

The Cubs are the interesting middle case. Wrigley plays 43 home day games, the most in MLB by six, and 39 of them start at 1:20 PM, right into the strongest part of the afternoon. Wrigley is shady in spite of its calendar, not because of it. That is the roof doing the work.

All 30 ballparks

Sunniest zone and shadiest zone are the average across that area of the bowl, not a single seat. Click any ballpark for its full per-section guide and a live map you can set to your own game.

One pattern holds almost everywhere: at 26 of the 30 parks the sunniest place to sit is the outer rows of the top deck, which have nothing above or behind them and take close to the full 190 minutes. The clear exceptions are two famous outfield perches that out-bake their own upper decks: Wrigley's left field Bleachers and Oracle Park's Arcade above the cove. Fenway's Monster Seats technically edge out its top level too, but by 0.2 minutes, which is inside the model's resolution, so call that one a tie. Tropicana Field is the thirtieth park, and with the roof on, every area there reads zero.

◆ ballpark-specific seating geometry is modeled. ☉ field orientation is a labeled estimate rather than map-derived. "Shaded seats" is the share of the bowl shielded from at least 80% of the sun available during the game.

How this was computed

The engine behind this is the same one that runs the live ShadeMe map, so any number here can be checked against the app.

1. Sun position. NOAA solar position, from each ballpark's exact coordinates and IANA timezone, so daylight saving is handled correctly.
2. Field orientation. Each park carries a home-plate-to-center-field bearing. This decides which side of the bowl the afternoon sun loads.
3. Ray tracing. Every modeled seat row casts a ray toward the sun. If that ray hits the seating bowl, a cantilevered deck lip or a roof slab before it escapes, the row is in shade.
4. The game window. 190 minutes (3 hours 10 minutes, the app default), sampled at 32 points 6 minutes apart. Each sample carries an equal share of the window, and totals are expressed against a 190-minute game.
5. The schedule. All 905 day games on the 2026 MLB regular season schedule, pulled from the MLB Stats API. A day game is one with a first pitch before 5:00 PM local, the usual convention. Night games are excluded.
6. Weighting. Each row is weighted by its arc length, so a wide outfield pavilion counts for more than a narrow infield slice, and the park number is a seating-weighted average rather than a plain mean of sections.
7. Clear skies. No cloud cover is applied. This is a geometry result, not a weather forecast.

What this ranking is not

This is the part most ballpark rankings skip, so we will be direct about it.

What that means in practice:

• The top and bottom of the ranking are solid. Sutter Health Park being the sunniest and Fenway and Wrigley being the shadiest are architecture results, and those four are the parks whose architecture we model.
• The middle 26 should be read as a sky ranking, not a building ranking. Comerica Park sitting above Citi Field reflects latitude, field bearing and schedule, not a claim that Detroit's grandstand is worse than New York's. A park with an unusually deep overhang would land lower than we show it.
• Which side shades first is the robust part. Shade side follows orientation, and orientation is park-accurate. The exact minute a section flips is the approximate part.
• Three parks carry an estimated field bearing (Sutter Health Park, Daikin Park, loanDepot Park), marked ☉ in the table.
• Retractable roofs are modeled open, at all seven parks that have one: Rogers Centre, Daikin Park, T-Mobile Park, Globe Life Field, loanDepot Park, American Family Field and Chase Field. Houston, Texas, Miami and Arizona usually close theirs for a summer afternoon game, which in reality means full shade and air conditioning. Toronto, Seattle and Milwaukee open theirs more often. Read all seven as "if the roof were open."

We would rather publish a ranking with its seams showing than one that quietly implies more precision than the model has.

Common questions

Use the data

The full per-section results, every zone in every park, are free to reuse: charts, tables, quotes, any of it. We only ask for a link back to this page so readers can see the method. If you write about a specific ballpark and want the numbers for it broken out further, or want the model run against a date we did not cover, get in touch and we will run it.

Ballpark by ballpark

Every park has a full shade guide with a live, playable map:

All 30 MLB ballpark shade guides →

More: 32 NFL stadium shade guides  ·  136 college football shade guides

Independent tool. Not affiliated with MLB or any club. Team and ballpark names are used descriptively.

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