Where Would Raleigh Put an MLB Ballpark?
An interactive map that scores every developable parcel in the Triangle to find where a Major League Baseball stadium could actually go, and drops a true-to-scale ballpark on each site.
What it shows
There is real momentum behind bringing a Major League Baseball team to Raleigh, and the city has said it needs candidate sites identified to be taken seriously. So I built the thing that answers the obvious question: if a team came, where would the stadium actually go?
The tool ranks the best locations across Wake, Durham, and Orange counties, and when you tap one it drops a true-to-scale ballpark onto the real parcel so you can see it fit. Each site gets a transparent 0 to 100 score, a list of pros and cons, the existing buildings shown in red, and a verdict on whether a stadium needs any demolition.
How I built it
Every candidate comes from real data, not a guess. I pulled every parcel of three acres or more straight from each county’s public GIS, kept the developable ones, and fused adjacent lots into assembled sites big enough to hold a ballpark. Then I scored each one on what actually matters: population centrality, transportation access (real interstate and rail geometry from OpenStreetMap), and a geometric fit test that finds the largest stadium-sized circle that fits inside the parcel’s shape.
The neat part is the demolition check. For the finalists I pull the real building footprints from OpenStreetMap and test whether a stadium fits the open land. If it can be built around the existing buildings, the site is not charged for clearance. The overlay even orients itself East-Northeast, the way Major League Baseball recommends, to keep the setting sun out of the batter’s eyes.
It is a data experiment, not a proposal. But the top of the list lines up with the places people actually talk about.