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

Tour 2019: McCormick Field

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