All photos of Asheville and McCormick Field are available on Flickr.
The most exciting week of our baseball calendar has again quickly come and gone - my annual ball trip with Erik. This year's trip took me to my 2nd mountain range in 3 weeks as we checked off 4 more ballparks, all nestled within the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. We set up camp in Asheville, North Carolina, a city that has grown notorious for its brewery tourism and hilly scenery. Most importantly to us, it is also home to the oldest minor league ballpark still in use and is within 2 hours of about a dozen minor league teams. This radius of ball teams allowed us to spend a lot more time in one city than we can normally afford. We took full advantage of that by trying to visit as many breweries as possible in two days.
We both flew into Charlotte around noon on Thursday, and after a beautiful 2-hour drive west to Asheville, our first stop was checking in to our accommodations for the next three nights. After 15 years of baseball travels together - many of those years on a tight college and intern budget - our standard for a "nice hotel" has always been a bit lower than most people's. It's certainly evolved as cost of living has increased (the days of the $40 motel are over) but really all we care about is having two clean beds and working plumbing - and even those items have leeway. I guess my point of this aside is to say that for anyone visiting Asheville, Downtown Inn & Suites should probably not be your first choice. It definitely ranked in the upper half for places we've stayed at, and the staff was excellent, but it has obviously not been updated in decades. Two nice perks were an outdoor pool and being right in the center of downtown, the latter of which definitely came in handy for our afternoon brewery crawls. A warning: there is going to be a fair amount of brewery review in the Tour 2019 posts, so feel free to skim over those parts if you only care about baseball.
Our hotel was directly north of what Asheville calls the South Slope Brewing District, so we probably had at least 15 breweries within reasonable walking distance of us. Asheville itself has well over twice that many in total, giving it the honorary title of Beer City USA. Something about the clean mountain water makes this an ideal climate for brewing beer. Being from Milwaukee, I would never refer to another city as "Beer City," but for a city of 90,000 people that is quite impressive. That makes Asheville 2nd only to Portland, Maine in terms of breweries per capita. We stopped at three on our way to the Tourists game and two on the way back, about a 2-mile roundtrip. We had perhaps my favorite meal of the trip right off the bat at Asheville Brewing Company, a homemade pizza. If you are looking to grab a bite and sit outside in a comfortable environment while enjoying your beverage, then this is the place for you. Just as we were leaving, a group of people was escorting four llamas into the back patio area which sort of set the vibe for the entire weekend. We also hit up Burial Beer Co, Eurisko, Wicked Weed, and One World - all very different but great in their own way. Burial has a wide IPA and DIPA selection with morbidly wonderful beer names and an eclectic interior, while Eurisko could not have been more of a contrast in one of the newer spaces we visited. Eurisko had my favorite beer of the entire weekend, a lactose DIPA aged on coconut called My Little Coconut. Locals do not seem to care much for the original Wicked Weed anymore as it has been sold to Anheuser-Busch, but they have opened a second more experimental location called The Funkatorium for relief from the tourists. If I'm being honest, I do not remember much of One World, but they were the one place we went to with live music so I appreciated that. All in all, Asheville Brewing was my favorite from Day 1. It is one of the flagship breweries in town that started the trend in the 1990s and is a must-visit.
Onto the main event of the day: McCormick Field. Quite frankly, I've wanted to visit Asheville for a long time just to see this stadium, and the brewery thing was only an added bonus. The park was built in 1924 and has hosted some form of the Tourists for the past 95 years, making it the oldest minor league park still in regular use. As is appropriate for Asheville, it gets a lot of its mystique from being built into the side of a wooded hill, which makes the stadium periphery very intimate and the field dimensions very short, only 373' to dead-center and less than 300' feet to the RF pole. The stadium makes up for this by having very tall walls all the way around the outfield, with a 36' tall wall in right field which is basically the equivalent of the Green Monster in Boston. Other than various cosmetic makeovers and replacing the wood portions with concrete in 1992, the guts of the stadium is still the original structure. There is a very fine line in stadiums between being "dumpy" and "charming," and it's certainly different for everyone, but you kind of just know it when you see it. It's always a debate even in regular architecture whether or not something has historic value or if it is just old and beyond its useful life. McCormick Field was definitely more on the charming, historic side for me. The simple but well-crafted masonry work, the classic grandstand, and the wonder of the setting are just things you don't see in modern ballparks anymore. It's kind of funny how in a 20-year old park, you might find something like a cramped concourse with no view to the field pretty annoying, but in a park this old, it gives it character. I don't have many objective reasons why I should love this park, but I do. This should give you insight to how much of a crapshoot our "rankings system" really is, but if "intangibles" was one of the categories, it would get a 10. It's nothing more than 15 rows of seats, a concrete canopy, an advertisement-laden wall, and a press box shanty, but somehow it all fits together to give you that nostalgic and comfortable feeling. In terms of hard data, ticket and concession prices are both more than fair, and as you would expect, there is pretty decent craft beer selection. Somehow, the smallest and oldest park we attended this weekend had the best team store, but that may just be a subjective opinion because the Tourists have one of my favorite logos in all the minor leagues (again, our rankings system is complete bullshit). I purchased my long-awaited cap and a plush doll for my daughter immediately after we walked in, and we took our seats for the night about halfway up behind the 3rd base dugout.
Whatever end of the "juiced ball" debate you are on, hitters seemed to have no problems teeing off onto and over even a RF wall that size; perhaps being a Rockies affiliate since their inception, playing in a hitter-friendly park isn't a huge concern. Daniel Montano of the Tourists and Greg Cullen of the Rome Braves both went deep into the trees over the wall with solo jacks. The highest prospects on these two teams were Grant Lavigne of the Tourists and Justin Dean of the Braves, ranked #5 and #28 respectively within their organizations. Lavigne took the collar with 2 strikeouts on the night and Dean went 1-5 with a single. The game was tied at 3 going into bottom of the 9th when former Gopher Terrin Vavra got the inning started with a single up the middle on a 2-2 breaking ball and was bunted into scoring position, both of which I was amazed to see in A-ball. Three batters later, the bases were loaded with 2 outs, and Kyle Datres knocked in the game-winning run for the walk-off victory.With 9 innings, countless beers, and a long day of traveling under our belt, we slept well to rest up for Day 2.
park rankings and statistics:
aesthetics - 8
views from park - 8 (hills/mountains)
view to field - 8 (a small ballpark)
surrounding area - 9 (Asheville Brewery District)
food variety - 6
nachos - 8 (excellent helmet 'chos)
beer - 7 (good selection but points deducted for stupid NC liquor law)
vendor price - 8
ticket price - 8 ($9.50 GA)
atmosphere - 9
walk to park - 8
parking price/proximity - n/a (we walked but very small parking lot)
concourses - 5 (pretty but cramped with no view)
team shop - 7
best food - helmet nachos
most unique stadium feature - site / setting
best jumbotron feature - not much more than player names
best between-inning feature - kids race Ted. E. Tourist on inflatable horses
field dimensions - 326/373/297
starters - Dimer Mejia (ROM) v. Frederis Parra (ASH)
opponent - Rome Braves
time of game - 2:40
attendance - 3303
score - 4-3 W
Brewers score that day - 5-1 W
STANDINGS AND UPCOMING SERIES AS OF 7/22/19:
Brewers 53-48, -2.0; 3 v. Reds, 3 v. Cubs, 3 @ Athletics
Twins 60-38, +3.0; 3 v. Yankees, 4 @ White Sox, 3 @ Marlins
2019 GAMES ATTENDED:
Erik - 6
Peter - 16
touch with baseball when his childhood heroes Robin Yount, Paul Molitor, and Jim Gantner retired but the Great Home Run Chase of 1998 reignited his passion. As a student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Erik became involved with the campus chapter of Habitat for Humanity. With this group Erik traveled to Portland, OR and Baltimore, MD to work on construction projects and help the group raise $25,000 to partially sponsor a house in Milwaukee. Also at UWM, Erik met Peter Nagel. The two attended their first Brewers game together during Opening Weekend 2003. Despite their failure to ignite the coals at their first tailgate, the two had a blast and were soon making weekly trips to the ballpark. Erik has gone on to several colleges and changed careers several times, and has moved all the way out to New Hampshire, but has always stayed true to his baseball roots by holding part-time stadium usher jobs. To this day he looks back fondly on his incredible cross-country journey.