I had done an Easter vacation trip for many years and then the pandemic started. In 2020, I was supposed to do Louisville, Wichita, and Los Angeles during Easter vacation. Of course, that didn’t happen (I ended up going to Louisville in the summer of 2021). There was no Easter vacation trip in 2021 or 2022. But this year I was able to take an Easter vacation trip once again. I wanted to do three stops with stops 2 and 3 being Texas and Los Angeles. I thought about going to Notre Dame and doing a baseball game there for my first stop. But there were a number of reasons by I ended up not doing that:
1. I’ve been to Notre Dame baseball games before (not many, but I’ve done it).
2. The weather at Notre Dame in early April is a huge wild card.
3. The Oklahoma City Dodgers were home and it would be easier to get from Oklahoma City to Texas.
4. They’re the Oklahoma City Dodgers. I’ve been to a lot of minor league games in the last decade, but the only time I’ve seen a Dodgers’ affiliate was in 2015 in Montana for a rookie league game (that level of the minor leagues doesn’t exist anymore). This was triple-A so I would get to see some high ranking prospects and some players that I knew so that was cool.
5. I had only been to Oklahoma in 2014 when I stopped at Mickey Mantle’s house during my Missouri (St. Louis and Kansas City)/Arkansas/Oklahoma/Kansas trip. So this was the first time I was going to see a sporting event in Oklahoma and spend a night there.
I got to my hotel around 4:00 and the game was at 6:00 so I didn’t have time to do anything else really. I took a walk around the stadium and saw the statues of Mickey Mantle, Johnny Bench, and Warren Spahn. Those are three legendary players. Warren Spahn is a player I don’t think about much, but he has more wins than any left-handed pitcher ever (363). I would have to do more digging into numbers, but my initial thought is that the five greatest left-handed pitchers of the last 100 years are Sandy Koufax, Clayton Kershaw, Warren Spahn, Randy Johnson, and Steve Carlton (not necessarily in that order). My next group of five would be Lefty Grove, Tom Glavine, Whitey Ford, Carl Hubbell, and CC Sabathia.
It’s definitely appropriate to have a Mickey Mantle statue at a baseball stadium in Oklahoma, but it does seem a little weird to have a Mickey Mantle statue outside a stadium that’s home to a team named the Dodgers.
Inside the stadium was pretty cool. There was a pretty good selection of food and beer. It was $2 beer night for the cheap stuff. The good stuff was $3. I had a COOP Aleworks American Lager. I had a COOP beer as part of my four-state beer flight in Omaha in 2018. There were a number of COOP beers on tap at the stadium. I went with the American Lager because it seemed appropriate for my first baseball game of the season and also the tap handle said “OKLA” with the LA being the Dodgers’ logo. It was pretty good, but I suspect I would have liked the Amber better. I just had a hot dog to eat. Like I said, there were other options, but again I went with the appropriate choice for my first game of the year. Unfortunately, there was only yellow mustard available, which is the worst version of mustard (calling it mustard is a stretch).
This was my view for most of the game.
The game was the Dodgers against the Sugarland Space Cowboys. Normally I don’t care about who wins a minor league game, but it was the Dodgers’ affiliate against the Astros’ affiliate so I definitely wanted the Dodgers to win. The Dodgers’ number three and four prospects were playing. Michael Busch was starting at second base and Gavin Stone was the starting pitcher. Busch had a double and a walk. Gavin Stone had a really good season in the minors last year. He went from single-A to triple-A and was good at every level. On this night, he was good for three innings, but then he gave up a solo home run in the fourth and he couldn’t get anybody out in the fifth. The Dodgers trailed 3-0. They ended up coming back and tied the game in the bottom of the ninth on a bases loaded walk with two outs. Unfortunately they could not win the game on the ninth. So it went to extra innings. My policy on extra innings is that if it’s up to me, I will not watch extra innings of a game that I don’t care about (I cared about this one more than most minor league games, but it was still a minor league game so I didn’t really care). That was not my policy before, but the runner on second base to start extra innings is pretty much tied with the DH for the stupidest rule in baseball (the difference is that the DH makes every game worse, but the runner on second base in extra innings only makes games that go to extra innings worse). If it’s a game that I actually care about, I’ll stay. If I don’t care but I’m with people, it’s up to them. In this case, I was by myself and I didn’t really care so I got up and left as soon as the ninth inning ended. The box score says there were 3,856 people there. I’m guessing it was actually a little less that that (my guess before I saw the box score was about 3,000). It was a Tuesday night in April so the small crowd isn’t too surprising. The stadium was pretty good. It seems that it’s bigger than it needs to be. There are two decks. All the seats down the first base line on the second deck have been taken out and they have ads in those areas now. So that’s not particularly aesthetically appealing, but it was a nice stadium other than that. And although it wasn’t a big crowd, they were into the game. So I’ll rank Chickasaw Bricktown Ballpark pretty high on my list of minor league stadiums. I was initially going to rank it behind Louisville Slugger Field, but then I remembered that they played Vin Scully saying “It’s time for Dodger baseball!” when the game was about to start and that bumped it up a spot. Here are the updated rankings (click on each ballpark if you want to read my blog post about them):
25. Arm & Hammer Park in Trenton
23. Arvest Ballpark in Springdale
21. TD Bank Ballpark in Bridgewater, New Jersey
18. Newman Outdoor Field in Fargo
17. Isotopes Park in Albuquerque
16. TD Ameritrade Park in Omaha
15. Daniel S. Frawley Stadium in Wilmington
13. Greater Nevada Field in Reno
12. NBT Bank Stadium in Syracuse
11. Richmond County Bank Ballpark on Staten Island
10. Dickey-Stephens Park in Little Rock
9. Joseph L. Bruno Stadium in Troy
8. Bethpage Ballpark in Central Islip
7. Four Winds Field in South Bend
5. Chickasaw Bricktown Ballpark
4. Frontier Field in Rochester
3. Joseph P. Riley Jr. Park in Charleston
2. Dunkin Donuts Park in Hartford
1. Regions Field in Birmingham
The next day I was on the train to Fort Worth and a Lyft to my hotel. Whenever I’m in Texas, I’m amazed at how much open space there is. I guess it makes sense. Texas has about 1.5 times the population of New York, but it’s 5.5 times bigger geographically. If you compare Texas and California (after New York, the states where I’ve spent the most time are probably Indiana, Virginia, Florida, and California), Texas is about 1.7 times bigger than California, but California has a population that’s 1.3 times bigger than Texas. So New York and California are much more densely populated than Texas. Dallas/Arlington/Fort Worth are all medium-sized to big cities (Dallas is the 9th biggest by population in the US, Fort Worth is 13th, and Arlington is 50th), but most of the area seems rural to me.
That’s a statue of Nolan Ryan in the foreground.
After going to a game in Oakland in 2019, I had been to all 30 Major League Baseball stadiums. But then Globe Life Field opened in 2020 and I was back down to 29. I probably would have gone to Globe Life Field in 2020 if not for the pandemic. I didn’t get around to going until this year. It was built right by Globe Life Stadium (now Choctaw Stadium) and AT&T Stadium. I got there early and Matt arrived shortly before the start of the game. I wanted to get there early to get something to eat at the Hurtado Barbecue stand. I had done my research on the stadium and there were some concession stands with barbecue that doesn’t measure up to Texas standards, but Hurtado was legit. Normally, I’d wait to get food until the game started, but I had read that the lines at Hurtado were ridiculous and it was my first Major League game with the pitch clock. So I didn’t want to spend four innings standing on line (I was thinking of the Shake Shack lines when Citi Field opened). Also I was thinking about how I couldn’t remember what I ate at the old stadium when Matt and I went back in 2015 so I checked the blog post and it turns out that we had issues waiting on line back then and didn’t eat anything at the game. So anyway, I was able to get brisket tacos without a wait. They were quite tasty. I walked around the stadium while I waited for Matt to arrive.
I was excited about seeing 2020 Dodgers hero Corey Seager. He was amazing in the playoffs that year (NLCS and World Series MVP) and then the Dodgers traded for Trea Turner and the Dodgers didn’t seem to eager to keep Seager when he became a free agent (I’m sure they would have liked to have him back on a cheap contract, but they weren’t going to realistically compete with the offers he was getting from other teams when they had Trea Turner also). I wish Seager was still a Dodger, but there were no hard feelings at all about Seager leaving. But they announced the lineup and he wasn’t in it. I went on the MLB app and he was listed as being one of the players on the bench. But then I checked ESPN and saw the story that he was out four weeks with a hamstring injury. So it was disappointing not to see him.
This was our view for the game.
Anyway, it ended up being a not very good game. The Rangers took a 1-0 lead in the bottom of the first and then ended up losing 10-1. The game took two hours and 24 minutes. Matt and I talked about how this game would have taken like three hours and 20 minutes if it had been last year. Attendance was 18,380. It’s not too surprising that it was a small crowd considering it was a Wednesday night in April against the Royals. It was good to see Matt. I last saw him about 12 and a half months ago at Jon’s wedding. Hopefully I’ll be able to see Matt and some Notre Dame friends at a football game again in the not too distant future. It’s been far too long.
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| It was a bad game, but it was good to see Matt. |
Globe Life Field will rank pretty high on the list of stadiums with a retractable roof. Fortunately the roof was open. Matt was saying how he had only been to games with the roof closed and he liked it better with the roof open. I rank the stadiums based on my experiences there so experiencing it with the roof open will help its ranking. It’s kind of unique in the way it’s built. Of course, most stadiums you enter on the lowest level. Then there’s Dodger Stadium where you can enter on any level. But with Globe Life Field, you pretty much enter on the middle level. The field is so far below street level that you enter the stadium pretty high up. And the lowest level has suites and stuff that you would usually find higher up in most stadiums. So that was interesting. One negative is the artificial turf. We had gotten down only having two stadiums with artificial turf (Toronto and Tampa Bay), but now we’re up to five (Toronto, Tampa Bay, Arizona, Miami, and Texas). Four of those stadiums have retractable roofs. What are we doing with this artificial turf? One big positive is that the Dodgers won 11 playoff games at Globe Life Field. They swept the Padres, they came back from 3-1 down against the Braves in the NLCS, and then they beat the Rays in the World Series (if you were going to play a neutral site World Series, I was happy that it was against the Rays so that I didn’t have to watch the Dodgers play World Series games in the Rays’ stadium). The food selection was decent, but the beer selection needs work. There was one concession stand called Crafthous ‘72, but it was all Anhueser Busch beer. All the draft beer was Anhueser Busch stuff. I found a concession stand with a decent selection in cans and I got a Rollertown Beerworks Big German (it was labeled as a Kolsch style ale from a Celina, Texas brewery). It was very good. But good beer should be more widely available throughout the stadium. There is big variation throughout the majors as far as the beer selection. Some have a very good selection and some just don’t at all. I don’t get how some stadiums just don’t have a good beer selection in the year 2023.
So I’ve now seen Major League Baseball games played at 35 different stadiums. One of them was Sahlen Field in Buffalo. I included that one in my minor league rankings (14th) even though I’ve only seen a Major League game there because it didn’t really make sense to compare it to Major League stadiums. Anyway, let’s get to the rankings. Click on each stadium for a blog post about it (the Oakland Coliseum blog post contains more explanation of the rankings).
34. Tropicana Field
33. Oakland Coliseum
32. SkyDome (You might know it as Rogers Center, but it will always be SkyDome to me)
31. Chase Field
30. Guaranteed Rate Field
29. LoanDepot Park
28. Minute Maid Park
27. Turner Field
26. Progressive Field
25. Angels Stadium of Anaheim
24. American Family Field
23. Coors Field
22. Shea Stadium
21. Comerica Park
20. Globe Life Park
19. Globe Life Field
18. Truist Park
17. Citi Field
16. New Yankee Stadium
15. Citizens Bank Park
14. Oriole Park at Camden Yards
13. Nationals Park
12. Busch Stadium
11. Great American Ballpark
10. T-Mobile Park
9. Target Field
8. Oracle Park
7. Kauffman Stadium
6. Petco Park
5. PNC Park
4. Wrigley Field
3. Old Yankee Stadium
1. (Tie) Dodger Stadium/Fenway Park
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