Tour 2019: TVA Credit Union Ballpark

All photos of TVA Credit Union Ballpark available on Flickr.

Our Saturday in Asheville followed a similar format to Friday: pool, lunch, breweries, ballgame.  After each of us downed a total of 3 cheeseburgers yesterday and with another $2 cheeseburger night awaiting us in the evening, we opted for a break with some tasty BBQ for lunch at Buxton Hall Barbecue.  While waiting for Buxton's to open, we made a quick stop for a flight at Bhramari Brewing Company.  This was one of our favorites of the weekend with a lot of funky beer and drinkable sours.  After Bhramari, it was off to Buxton's.  This place is an institution in Asheville and makes a traditional North Carolina style BBQ.  Unlike the tangy and spicy ketchup-based sauces of Missouri and Texas, North Carolina has a style all its own with a vinegar-based sauce, traditionally served with whole-hog style BBQ.  Erik and I both had delicious pulled pork sammiches drowned in vinegar.  Conveniently next door to Buxton's in the same building was Catawba Brewing, which happened to be celebrating their 20th anniversary that day.  I did not much care for this one as they had pre-determined flights and we really didn't get to try the beers that we wanted.  From Catawba we went to Green Man and Hi-Wire.  Green Man is another one of the AVL originals and has been doing it for over 20 years, now with a brand new "Green Mansion" right next door to their original brewery.  They had a wide range of styles and a pretty cool space with some sort of weird rock-stacking game to keep drinkers occupied.  Hi-Wire is a circus-themed establishment crammed into a really small warehouse space that seemed to be one of the more popular ones of our trip.  It's only been open a few years but has already won an NC Best Brewery award and was packed from the moment we walked in.  It was amazing to me how almost every place we went to was full of people despite having so many options.  We had been slowing our pace considerably by the time we got to Hi-Wire because we had another hour-long drive ahead of us for our evening game in Johnson City, Tennessee.

Our drive today was up I-26 instead of the "highway" we went up to Greeneville and we got to the park about 5:30 for a 6:30 game, so we had a little bit of time to play catch before first pitch.  Johnson City is a town of about 65,000 and is part of a "Tri Cities" area along with Kingsport TN and Bristol VA, hence the name "TVA Credit Union."  The ballpark is situated east of what you might call downtown, but it is separated from the rest of the city by the interstate so it was kind of hard to get a sense of direction when we arrived.  It was built in 1956 and was known as Howard Johnson Field up until a few years ago.  We bought GA seats in the main grandstand for only $7 apiece and grabbed our leis at the front gate for yet another Margaritaville Night.

Remember our discussion on "charming" vs "dumpy" regarding the Asheville park?  Well, this park is definitely showing its age and is hurting for some TLC, so we found this park to be more on the dumpy side of the spectrum, although somehow it won the fan vote for Rookie League Ballpark of the Year on Ballpark Digest in 2017 and 2018.  We really didn't see anything that would warrant this other than the rabid fan base that most Cardinals affiliates have.  I do like the covered grandstands found in older ballparks, which this has, but to me it was only a slightly nicer version of Beloit or Waterloo.  The steel was all rusting, the benches were extremely tight and uncomfortable, and there was a ridiculous of amount of obstruction to support all the netting.  Don't get me wrong, I am very pro-netting, but it seemed to be a lot of smaller sections held up by a lot more poles and apparatus than should be necessary.  It also jogged back behind the dugouts and it made it very difficult to see the game from anywhere other than just behind home plate.  We ended up having to move all the way down by the corner bullpen to watch the last few innings because our backs were killing us from the benches and we couldn't see anything from anywhere else.  Unless you are of the company that just likes old parks only for the sake of being old, there is not much to write home about from Johnson City.  As I would imagine is the case with most Appy League parks, it's a sleepy community with not much else to do, so if anything the fan support was impressive.  It was one of the more well-attended games of the weekend despite the temps pushing into the 90s.  A hat full of ice and a generous helmet sundae saved my life on this night and were all I could muster to put down, but from the looks of it they had a remarkable craft beer selection.  Had I not tried most of the beers they sold in the last 48 hours, I would have definitely partook.  The other thing I did like about this park was the game and activity area they had out in right field.  There was a beer stand out here that sold until final out along with some bags sets and a picnic bench area that seemed to draw a good amount of the crowd as the game dragged on.

It was a loss for the home team on this night, as the Cards dropped one to the Braves affiliate, 4-2.  It was looking promising as Cardinals 9th round draft pick Todd Lott went yard in the bottom of the 1st, and that lead stuck until Danville tied it in the 4th with a double by Ray Hernandez.  The Braves would score again in the 5th and 7th and the lead stuck.  The aforementioned Lott not only had the best night of any player, but was far and away the best player on either team.  It's easy to not pay attention to what's happening in a game when there is no jumbotron and you don't know any of the players, but I distinctly remember Erik and I keeping track of when his spot in the order would come back up so that we could watch him hit again.  He went 3-4 on the night and was a triple shy of the cycle, and he was miles ahead of every hitter, with an .830 OPS on the season.  Look for him to earn a promotion to A-ball by the end of the season.  Both starters faired well, giving up 1 in 4.2 and 2 over 6 respectively.

After another brisk game, we drove back and had a nightcap at our 12th and final brewery of the weekend at Thirsty Monk, which was right next door to our hotel.  This was more of a brewpub than a brewery and had several different levels.  We sat by the open garage door at the front and enjoyed watching all of the drunk people way too dressed up waiting in line for the VIP rooftop level.  We were in bed around midnight on our last night in Asheville.

park rankings and statistics: 

aesthetics - 3

views from park - 6 (hills/woods)

view to field - 3 (lots of obstructed view)

surrounding area - 3

food variety - 4 (basic ballpark fare)

nachos - 6

beer - 8

vendor price - 8

ticket price - 9 ($7 GA)

atmosphere - 5

walk to park - 2

parking price/proximity - 10 (adjacent lot for free)

concourses - 4 (not really a concourse)

team shop - 4

best food - $2 cheeseburger

most unique stadium feature - covered grandstand

best jumbotron feature - n/a

best between-inning feature - mascot Jay Cee stuffs front of shirt with beach balls to honor Margaritaville Night

field dimensions - 330/400/315 

starters - Alec Barger (DAN) v. Julio Puello (JC)

opponent - Danville Braves

time of game - 2:22

attendance - 2889

score - 4-2 L

Brewers score that day - 8-3 W

Tour 2019: Pioneer Park

All photos of Pioneer Park available on Flickr.

Day 2's of our trips generally start off with us fighting off the effects of an overzealous Day 1, and this trip was no different.  A brisk dip in the pool and a stop at local burger joint Burgerworx were the perfect remedy.  It was one of the better fast food hamburgers I've had, sort of akin to a Shake Shack burger or a Smashburger.  With a good base built, we walked about a mile west to the new sprawling New Belgium campus on the western bank of the French Broad River (there is also a French Broad Avenue which is hilarious).  Asheville is known so much as a beer city that they actually have two satellite breweries in town for larger conglomerates: the aforementioned New Belgium and also Sierra Nevada.  The beer here was familiar but the digs certainly were not.  Most of the breweries we went to on this trip were dank urban shell spaces, but this was a beautiful new building overlooking the river, with an expansive deck to really soak in that hot wort smell on a summer day.  Case in point: our next stop was Wedge Brewing just on the other side of the river, which was a return to the dank pit variety of brewery.  We killed a couple of hours here with bags and enjoying one of the few breweries that didn't just concentrate on IPAs and sours.  Our journey down to this part of town was entirely downhill and we certainly weren't walking back up in upper 80s heat.  We took a Lyft back to our hotel and were on the road by 4pm to our Friday ballgame in Tusculum, Tennessee.

Tusculum was about a 1:15 ride that was both terrifying and beautiful.  We decided that we wanted to take a more scenic route through the mountains as opposed to the freeway, and we were greeted with a lot of tight hairpin turns and rolling hills at what seemed like too high of an appropriate speed limit, but the scenery that I was able to enjoy was amazing.  Tusculum is a neighboring town of Greeneville, Tennessee, and home to the Greeneville Reds and Tusculum University Pioneers in a shared facility called Pioneer Park.  This was our first Appalachian League game ever and from what we had read, we were expecting something very simple given the size of communities and class of baseball that this league is in.  We certainly were not expecting to be greeted by this gem of a ballpark that certainly could have passed for a facility well above Rookie ball.  It was completed in 2004 and seats about 4,000 people, built in a familiar retro style.  What I enjoyed most was the contrast of the exterior to the interior and how they worked together.  The outside is primarily composed of a brick to match the other buildings on campus, as most universities outside of the two I attended normally do.  However, on the inside, a beautifully ornate expanse of steel structure covered the concourse.  The trusses and steel detailing in this ballpark are unlike anything I've seen in a minor league park, outside of maybe Hammons Field in Springfield.  The main concourse was ringed with little brick concessions and out-buildings, and on the inside were the press buildings and steel columns framing the concourse, over all of which the main trusses covered.  There was then another extension of steel framing that jutted out from the concourse to form a very intricate canopy over the majority of the seating bowl, something that was welcome in the heat and you don't see a lot in parks this size.  Pioneer Park took something that every park needs in a structural frame and turned it into the focal point, and for a ballpark that I can only imagine was on a very tight budget, it was a commendable solution.  Without this detail that could have been easily overlooked, it would have just been another boring campus building, but instead it was Erik's favorite park of our trip and certainly a nice one in my mind as well.

We got 2nd row seats for this game, as not surprisingly for a Rookie League game on a hot night, it was pretty sparsely attended (the paid attendance was listed as 2,906 but there's no way it was even half that).  Upon entering the stadium, there is a platform that gives a great vantage point to the field and allows you to overlook the concourse activity, another nice touch.  This wasn't the type of ballpark you could walk around the outfield, but we had enough to hold our attention in the main concourse.  We both grabbed $2 cheeseburgers and $2 Lime-a-Rita's for our first of two consecutive "Margaritaville" Nights and settled in for the action.

The Appalachian League has a reputation for harkening back to a simpler era of baseball purity, primarily in very small towns, really emphasizing the game with no frills and only holding the interest of super-fans.  We definitely got that impression from where we were sitting.  There was a guy in front of us decked out in full Reds gear monitoring the play-by-play on his phone during the game.  There were several couples to our right who clearly knew this guy and also had some sort of affiliation with some of the players, possibly a host family - I don't even want to know how little money players make at this level.  And then of course, we had the usual gaggle of scouts behind us.  We were all in for a really brisk game as the Reds defeated the Elizabethton Twins in just over 2 hours.  It's not easy to know at this point who on these teams are considered Top 30 prospects as most of them were all just drafted last month, and normally the cream of the crop prospects are moved on to the next level by now or skip it entirely.  AJ Bumpass was one of the better performing players on the season in this game, and easily the winner for best name.  Despite being a 39th round draft pick of the Reds, he leads the team in OPS and added a 2-run homerun on the evening, his 3rd of the year.  Both pitchers were on short hooks likely due to pitch count rules and already having pitched a full college season.  Tyler Garbee and Sawyer Gipson-Long went 5 and 3 innings respectively but both pitched quite well.  Garbee gave up 2 runs but struck out 8, and Gipson-Long gave up just one hit in his 3 frames.  A 2-run 8th with RBI by Ivan Johnson and Danny Lantigua were enough to give the Reds the lead and earn the victory.

Following the game was a brief but impressive fireworks display, and then we decided we did not want to take the scary state road back in the dark and opted for the longer route on the real highway, which was only slightly less treacherous.  It was straight to bed when we got back to Asheville to rest up for another big day of breweries and baseball.

park rankings and statistics: 

aesthetics - 9

views from park - 6 (hills/woods)

view to field - 7

surrounding area - 3 (Tusculum University)

food variety - 4 (basic ballpark fare)

nachos - 5

beer - 6

vendor price - 8

ticket price - 9 ($8 behind home plate)

atmosphere - 6

walk to park - 6

parking price/proximity - 10 (adjacent lot for free)

concourses - 8 (partially blocked view but beautiful)

team shop - 5

best food - $2 cheeseburger

most unique stadium feature - structure

best jumbotron feature - n/a

best between-inning feature - coconut toss

field dimensions - 331/400/331 

starters - Sawyer Gipson-Long (ELZ) v. Tyler Garbee (GRE)

opponent - Elizabethton Twins

time of game - 2:16

attendance - 2906

score - 4-2 W

Brewers score that day - 10-7 L