Baseball Stadium Tour 2017: Community Field

Our final stop on our Brewer/Cardinal Road Trip was Burlington, IA for the T-Rats and Bees game. It just worked out that the T-Rats were playing the Bees that night. The Burlington Bees are the LA Angels A team.

Community Field, the home of the Bees, is your typical small town ball park. There was no parking lot and we parked for free on the grass. The stadium was remodeled to accommodate the needs of the league. However it was still very old school. The locker rooms were right next to the bathrooms -- visitor's next to the men's room and the Bee's next to the women's room. The umpire room was accessible from outside the park. I am used to stadiums with several concession stand windows -- Community Park had 1 and it looked like something you'd find at the community pool. There might have been a second one down there third base line. 

There is not a lot of seating in community park and almost all of it is protected by netting. Like usual we sat right by the dugout. Unfortunately there weren't really seats down the lines. Most of the seating was behind home plate in an old school grand stand set up. Luckily there weren't many people there so we could move down so we could see the scoreboard better. Speaking of the scoreboard... I have seen high school fields with better scoreboards. It was your basic scoreboard that said Visitor instead of being digital for the teams. 

Unlike the other minor league ball parks we've been to, there was very little fan fare between innings. I think they had about 3 promotions and all done by kids in the stands. I am not even sure what they won. If I remember correctly, there was a t-shirt toss with 3 shirts towards the end of the game. However with the netting tossing things in the stands is difficult and the shirts were tossed (or handed out) from the stands.

The game itself wasn't very good. T-Rats played poorly and it was a like 9-3 or something like that. Because of the netting and lack of setting down the lines, it was difficult to get foul balls. The hubby tried to beat a kid for a foul ball in the grassy area outside of the seating area but wasn't quite fast enough. I stood around for a good 10 minutes and another one didn't get hit our way. Luckily the T-rats catcher handed us one later in the game.

As far as ballparks go I wasn't impressed but the hubby loved the old school ball park. I think I have just gotten used to the all the amenities and fanfare that comes with Minor League Baseball. Maybe I am just spoiled. Either way it was still a nice night at the ballpark. I hope the Burlington Bees and Community Park keep the baseball alive in the town because it is good cheap entertainment.