American Family Fields of Phoenix

All photos of Scottsdale and American Family Fields of Phoenix available on Flickr.

Our game on Friday was at the newly renovated home of the Brewers, formerly known as Maryvale Baseball Park.  With the move of the Athletics to Mesa a few years ago, the Brewers are now the only team that actually trains in Phoenix proper.  They will remain so for years to come following an extensive $60 million renovation this past offseason, which was funded largely by the team unlike most Spring Training facilities.  The renovation focused mostly on player areas and the entry sequence.  The jewel of the project is a new 2-story buiding that houses team offices, player workout and sport science spaces, locker rooms, ticket office, and team store.  This building also houses new concessions stands on the stadium side of the building and is flanked by a new half-field and agility fields on the parking lot side.  

The things that fans will notice the most is a completely redone parking and entry sequence and the new desert adobe color slapped on pretty much the whole stadium.  Beyond charging $5 now, we found the parking situation to be very frustrating and inconvenient.  It's a very circuitous route to park your car and because of the new office building, it's a tighter footprint.  If there is a silver lining for the parking situation, it forces you to meander past the practice fields on a distinct pathway into the ballpark.  There are some spring training ballparks where you can basically park and enter the stadium and never even see the rest of the complex unless you go out of your way to.  AmFam Field purposely shows off the newly redone complex and we walked by all of the practice fields on our way inside.  We stopped to watch the Brewers catchers entertain spectators with a game of who could throw a ball from homeplate into a net behind 2nd base.  Past that field was the office building, done all in earth tones and reflective glass as per the norm in Phoenix, with an added touch of some cool board-form concrete.  The last portion of the walkway to the park features display areas of the various Brewers retired numbers and a brand new monument sign.  This was the nicest part of the renovation in my opinion.  It provided great wayfinding and many opportunities, and served to delineate a clear main entry.  The grounds really lacked the character of other complexes and this renovation hit a homerun with that portion of the renovation.

Once inside, the most noticeable change is the brise-soleil that was formerly pretty captivating, and now is brown like everything else in the desert.  The Brewers really made a huge mistake in making this building blend in with everything else when they previously had a unique white and blue color scheme.  The area where you used to enter has now been infilled with concession stands, but nothing really stood out at the new stands.  Similarly to Camelback, the concessions were definitely the most disappointing part of the "new" ballpark.  Pretty standard fare and expensive for what it was, including the beer.  How do you overhaul a stadium for a team called the Brewers and not upgrade the craft beer situation?  I was however happy to find the Asian noodle stand that I crushed at just about every park my last time out here.  The new jumbotron and team store, while nice, are really just standard things that fans expect at a ballpark now and were long overdue.  Overall I was not super impressed with the inside portion of the stadium renovations.  Even after widening the concourses they were still a logjam at only 3/4 capacity.  Again I really think painting the shades brown dramatically changes the feel of a park that used to be very light and airy.  I'm sure all of the new player facilities were worth every penny but this park remains near the bottom for Spring Training facilities.  There were a lot of missed opportunities with the vending and the outfield areas in particular that would not cost much money.

From our seats above the Brewers dugout we witnessed a 6-3 victory over the local Diamondbacks.  I was quite impressed with the number of D-Bag fans that showed up on a weekday afternoon when they can already see them pretty much anytime they want.  Rotation-hopeful Freddy Peralta got the nod for the Crew and tossed 3 shutout innings with 3 Ks, but again the bullpen did not look too hot.  Fat Albers continued his 2018 horribleness into this season and gave up a couple of hits in a shaky inning.  Junior Guerra then followed him with a 2-run outing.  Travis Shaw and top propsect Keston Hiura provided team with all the offense they would need on 3 homeruns between them.  This was the first time I actually saw Hiura in person and his quick hands at the plate are definitely as advertised.  I can't wait to see what this kid does on the big league club, hopefully this year.  We were actually about to leave in the 8th and I wanted to see Hiura hit one more time, and sure enough he tagged the first pitched he saw onto the left field berm.  Ryan Braun also decided to join the team today and went 1-3 in his spring debut.  It will be interesting to see how his publicized swing overhaul plays this year at age 35.

Following the game, we spent some time in Old Town Scottsdale near my parents condo.  One more game on Saturday vs. the Athletics!

park rankings and statistics
(updated from 3/28/11):
aesthetics - 5 
views from park - 2 
view to field - 8 
surrounding area - 2 (bad area of town) 
food variety - decreases to 3
nachos - 5
beer - decreases to 2
vendor price - decreases to 3
ticket price - decreases to 8
atmosphere - 4
walk to park - increases to 9
parking proximity - increases to 6 (surprised to see that parking was even more in 2011)
concourses - decreases to 6 (not a fan of the brown paint)
team shop - increases to 9 (two large ones)
complex - increases to 7

best food - Asian noodles (you can find these at every Cactus League park)
most unique stadium feature - brise soleil over concourse
jumbotron - yes
best between-inning feature - Sausage Race

field dimensions - 350/3400/340
starters - Zack Godley (ARZ) v. Freddy Peralta (MIL)
opponent - Arizona Diamondbacks
time of game - 2:39
attendance - 7073
score - 6-3 W
Brewers score that day - 6-3 W