Return to Cold Spring

All photos of Cold Spring Baseball Park available on Flickr.

For the final ballgame on our 2-week visit to Minnesota, we traded the grandeur and luxury of Target Field for an evening of Town Ball in my wife's home town of Cold Spring.  Megan and her mom stayed home with the kids while my father-in-law and my parents who were also visiting headed down to the yard.  Anyone who is married understands the constant grandstanding between the parents on who will pay for anything, but my father-in-law was gracious enough to let my dad pay for the tickets this evening.  After he promptly figured out the rouse that admission is free, a $4 Miller Lite sufficed and we crammed into a bench a few rows behind home plate for the game.

I visited and documented Cold Spring Baseball Park almost 4 years ago to the day, so I won't re-hash all the specifics of the park nor the romanticism of Town Ball here.  Anybody familiar with Town Ball understands that there is certain element of the game being "frozen in time" that is a large part of the appeal, but you wouldn't know that from visiting Cold Spring.  There is a major amount of civic pride and community involvement that has gone into some pretty significant renovations to their park over the past 10 years or so, including new lighting, the renovation I wrote about in my 2018 post, and on deck for our next visit to the ballpark - a proposal for a new field house for updated batting cages, restrooms, and a community room.  It's not the flashiest or most comfortable park to watch a ballgame in the world (all of our backs and knees could attest to that by the 6th inning), but it's absolutely incredible to me that a park and team with almost zero sustainable income to speak of has not only existed for nearly a century, but that it exists to the quality it is.  Many folks that enjoy Town Ball would be perfectly fine with just a folding chair and a chain link fence, but Cold Spring has a park that I'm actually excited to visit every summer we visit.

As was the case with my last visit, there are no real stats kept for this team nor the league, unless you subscribe to one of the local papers.  The website is very "hit or miss" to put it lightly and all I can really tell from it is that the Springers have a record of 10-2 on the year.  It's always an adventure just finding out if the team is even playing ball that day.  There have been times we've tried to go where a game was cancelled or moved on a whim with very little notice, sometimes the day of.  I'm not joking when I say that a game might be cancelled if a couple of players need to work late at their day jobs or they can't find an umpire.  This particular game had only one ump, who did more walking to and from his house across the street than he did during the actual game.  But somehow, I did remember one particular player from my last visit - Jordan Barth.  Probably because I wrote about him last time and he stood out among the players, but at that time he was just finishing college and now he's still on the team so obviously Augustana College is not heavily scouted.  I would estimate that there were about 75-100 people there and it was a brisk game as you might expect, about 2:20.  Cold Spring held on for the victory against the Raymond Rockets by a score of...Christ, I can't find it...the hell with it.

STANDINGS AND UPCOMING SERIES AS OF 6/21/22:

Brewers 39-30, +1.0; 4 v. Cardinals, 3 v. Blue Jays, 2 @ Rays, 4 @ Pirates

Twins 38-30, +1.0; 3 v. Guardians, 3 v. Rockies, 5 @ Guardians, 3 v. Orioles

2022 GAMES ATTENDED:

Erik - 1

Peter - 9