Louisville was the home of Dodger legend Pee Wee Reese. After the Yankees, you’re talking about the Dodgers, Cardinals, Giants, Red Sox, and A’s if you’re talking about the teams with the best history (actually success would be a better word, the Dodgers have a better history than all of those teams). And Pee Wee Reese is one of the greatest Dodgers of all time. He’s second to Clayton Kershaw in franchise history in WAR. I’m a much bigger fan of stats that count or measure things that actually happen in baseball games. So if we use those, Reese is second to Zack Wheat in hits (Reese probably would have ended up around 2,600 if not for missing three years because of World War II, but that would still put him around 200 behind Zack Wheat). He’s the Dodgers’ all time leader in runs scored and walks. The story about Pee Wee Reese putting his arm around Jackie Robinson in Cincinnati is partially legend (that might have happened at some point, but not in Cincinnati in 1947 the way the story is always told), but he is known for being a Southerner who accepted Jackie Robinson as his teammate. If we’re ranking all time Dodgers, Reese is probably third or fourth on the list of position players (behind Duke Snider and Jackie Robinson in some order and possibly Roy Campanella) and I’d also put him behind Sandy Koufax, Clayton Kershaw, and Don Drysdale. So I have him as the sixth or seventh best Dodger of all time. He’s also the only player to play in every World Series game between the Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers (44 games from 1941-1956). Anyway, I visited Pee Wee Reese’s home town last week.
Last April, I had my Easter vacation trip planned to get to baseball games in three different cities, Louisville, Wichita, and Los Angeles. Why Louisville and Wichita? I have spent very little time in Kentucky and Kansas. My Kentucky experiences are driving through Kentucky on the way to and from the Notre Dame-Georgia Tech game in 2006 (Dennis liked the Kentucky accent when we stopped at Arby’s) and the Cincinnati airport. I’ve spent even less time in Kansas. I did some driving through Kansas in 2014 and made one stop pretty much just to actually set foot in Kansas. Besides spending very little time in Kansas, Wichita had a brand new minor league stadium (I was supposed to go to what was supposed to be the second game there). I used the credit I had from my canceled trip to do a trip to two of those cities. I stopped in Louisville on my way out to Los Angeles. Wichita will have to wait. Maybe I’ll get there next year. Iowa and Oklahoma are two other states where I’d like to see some minor league baseball at some point. I visited the Field of Dreams and spent a night in Iowa, but I didn’t see any sports there. I visited Mickey Mantle’s house in Oklahoma, but I didn’t see any sports there either. And Oklahoma is home to the Dodgers’ triple-A and double-A teams. Oklahoma might be combined with a trip to Texas to see a Rangers game since that’s the only Major League stadium I haven’t been to and it’s where the Dodgers won 11 playoff games last year (I thought about doing Oklahoma and Texas on this trip instead of Louisville, but it didn’t quite work out with my schedule).
Anyway, I got to Louisville in the late afternoon and just hung out until the game. It was triple-A baseball between the Gwinnett Stripers (Braves) and the Louisville Bats (Reds). Triple-A is fun because there will be players that you know. This game had Christian Pache, Eddie Rosario, Orlando Arcia, Johan Camargo, and Ender Inciarte. It was a quick game with really good pitching except for the fifth inning. Gwinnett got a grand slam from Eddie Rosario (who finished this game hitting .083 in the minors, but he’s spent most of the season in the majors, where he’s hitting .254). Louisville got a run on a groundout in the bottom of the inning. And that was all the scoring for the game. The only other almost highlight for the rest of the game was a foul ball coming near me. I was in the first row under an overhang. If not for the overhang, the ball probably would have landed a row behind me and maybe three or four seats to my right. The game was over in a quick two hours and 21 minutes. The box score says the attendance was 3,532. I would estimate that the actual attendance was less than a third of that. There was nobody sitting near me (I was in the section behind the visitors’ dugout, but I was several rows back).
 |
| This was my view for the game. |
 |
| As you can see, there were a lot of empty seats. |
There was a pretty good food and beer selection. If I had been able to go to more games this year, I might have gone for a turkey leg, but since I only got to seven games this year, I wanted to stick to hot dogs for the most part since it is the classic baseball food (and when done right, they are delicious). There were different versions of hot dogs there. Most of the concession stands had two versions of hot dogs, but then there were a couple of stands that had two versions of premium hot dogs. The Grand Slam Dog was huge, so I opted for the Slugger Dog, which was the smaller premium hot dog. It was very good, but unfortunately they only had yellow mustard. The beer selection was good, but it seemed like all the craft beer was in cans. All the beer on tap was the cheap stuff. I had a Country Boy Cougar Bait, a blonde ale from a brewery in Lexington, Kentucky. It was probably my favorite beer that I had enjoyed at a baseball game this season to that point.
Louisville Slugger Field was a very good minor league stadium. I’m going to rank it fifth on my list of minor league stadiums. It’s a nice looking stadium with good food and beer, but there was no atmosphere with a capacity of 13,131 and about 12,000 empty seats (in my estimation). It was a Wednesday night during a pandemic and the weather wasn’t great (hot and cloudy with a little rain) so the small crowd was understandable (and it was nice being able to watch a baseball game without a lot of people around), but that contributes to Louisville Slugger Field being only number five on my list. If you had 10,000 fans there, I might rank it as high as number 1, but I can only rank these stadiums based on the experience I had in each one.
This was my only minor league game of the season (I was supposed to get to one more, but as things sometimes go in 2021, that didn’t happen), but it was my second game in a minor league stadium as I saw the Blue Jays at Sahlen Field. So I have to rank that one as well. We’re putting that one in at number 13. Here are the updated rankings:
24. Arm & Hammer Park in Trenton
22. Arvest Ballpark in Springdale
20. TD Bank Ballpark in Bridgewater, New Jersey
17. Newman Outdoor Field in Fargo
16. Isotopes Park in Albuquerque
15. TD Ameritrade Park in Omaha
14. Daniel S. Frawley Stadium in Wilmington
12. Greater Nevada Field in Reno
11. NBT Bank Stadium in Syracuse
10. Richmond County Bank Ballpark on Staten Island
9. Dickey-Stephens Park in Little Rock
8. Joseph L. Bruno Stadium in Troy
7. Bethpage Ballpark in Central Islip
6. Four Winds Field in South Bend
5. Louisville Slugger Field
4. Frontier Field in Rochester
3. Joseph P. Riley Jr. Park in Charleston
No comments:
Post a Comment