Janet Marie Smith: In her words

“It was a very important moment in the project because there was an initial thought that Camden Yards should have one level devoted to private suites and another level devoted to club seats. And this was very early in the design. We were concerned that it looked so big compared to the warehouse and to the houses on the other side that it was going to seem out of scale. So HOK ended up studying these options for us and proposing that we sandwich the suites and the club seats together, which had the net effect of dropping the whole thing down 30 feet. So you save money on the steel structure, on the elevators, on the escalators, the concrete. And we wound up with the ability to put twice as much money into the finishes on one level than if we had done two.

“Well, John Henry and Tom Werner had come back to Larry with a ‘Here’s what we want to spend’ number. I remember I was in Larry’s office. They were on the phone. And they asked Larry, ‘What projects should we recommend to the partnership for this year?’ Larry has always had a two-thirds rule. Don’t do everything you can, just do two-thirds of it. And I thought, that two-thirds rule is going to kick in. I was certain they would choose the most visible of the projects.

‘“I was elated when they selected the Big Concourse as one they would do the first year, because I thought it was so important to show our fans that we really cared. Nothing says we really care like doubling the width of the concourse, tripling the size of the bathrooms and putting good food in.

“When I first started working there, someone in operations said that we’ve got, like, 14 blues. And I said, ‘I am going to straighten that out.’ Now, four years later, we have like 28 different blues. Turns out that if it’s inside, it doesn’t look the same as if it’s outside. And outside, the morning sun was so different from the afternoon sun that the blues looked different, so the right field is painted one shade and the left field is painted the other.