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