Now here is a topic dear to my heart ... I was just as interested in baseball stadium architecture at age 12, as I was golf course architecture. Happy Thanksgiving, John.
In olden days ballparks were asymmetric, because they were built into city blocks that were also asymmetric. Fenway has the Green Monster in left field because there's a street right behind it; home runs that clear the nets usually wind up on the roof of the building across the street, although occasionally balls bounce over that building [475 feet] and down toward the Massachusetts Turnpike. But Fenway was far from alone. Ebbets Field and Baker Bowl were the same, only right field was shorter. Yankee Stadium had a big grandstand in left field and right field, but it was short down the lines and then very long from left-center to right-center field; the Polo Grounds were an even more extreme version of that.
The thing about these different parks is that they introduced strategy into pitching. When Jim 'Catfish' Hunter was with the Yankees, and the Red Sox came to visit, announcers would talk all day about these long fly outs that "would have been home runs at Fenway". No one understood that better than Mr. Hunter ... he was just pitching to the park, secure in the knowledge that the Red Sox hitters would be content to hit their long fly balls and then complain about the park.
The modern retro ballparks are generally much better places to watch a game, and they've done pretty well at introducing little quirks to give them a character of their own. Sometimes these quirks go overboard ... Tal's Hill in Houston, for example, is a nod to an old rise to the warning track in left field at Crosley Field in Cincinnati, but the new version is very unnatural. It's comparable to all the Redan or Biarritz greens on modern courses, many of which don't get the tilt or firmness quite right so they actually PLAY different.
Most of all, few of the quirks in new ballparks actually create any strategy that the pitchers or hitters can utilize, as many of the old ballparks did, because the modern architects are afraid to affect the game that much. As in golf, most of the real strategy only happens when the conditions of the ground force the architect's hand.