If big-league baseball sometimes seems to be getting too big for its own good, with stadiums as tall as skyscrapers and ticket, food, souvenir and parking prices that require a $150 trip to the money machine, there is still a place where the game is played on a human scale (and at affordable prices).
It’s the minor leagues, which offer three snug little ballparks in Chicago’s suburbs.
At Alexian Field in northwest suburban Schaumburg, Philip B. Elfstrom Stadium in west suburban Geneva and Hawkinson Ford Field in south suburban Crestwood, less is truly more. And the confines are really friendly.
In some of these facilities, at least, the ballpark is shoving aside the mall as a civic symbol and as a focal point for community life and small-town fun.
These are places where the lady from the popcorn stand may be called upon to sing the national anthem, or where the numbers on the hand-operated scoreboard are turned by a young woman who is baseball’s version of Vanna White. They are places where kids go onto the field between innings for sack races or games of musical chairs.
While the architecture of these ballparks varies widely — Alexian Field is the best of the bunch, while the other two rate mediocre marks — all of them are good spots to watch the summer game and observe fresh evidence of how Chicago’s suburbs are becoming more and more like the city their residents left behind.
The suburbs already have skylines and convention centers and more department stores than State Street — so, the thinking goes, why shouldn’t they also have their own ballparks and their own ball teams, like the Kane County Cougars, the Schaumburg Flyers and the Cook County Cheetahs?
“They drop the ball as good as the Cubs and Sox,” says 48-year-old Bill Grebnehgerb of Orland Park, who sold his Wrig-ley Field tickets the other day and decided to watch a Cheetahs game instead.
But for all that these ballparks represent the urbanization of suburbia, baseball in the suburbs is still a lot like life in the suburbs — it revolves around kids and cars, especially kids. Child-oriented entertainment, including goofy mascots that dance with umpires, is a must for luring children and, thus, their parents to the ballpark.
“If the kids aren’t happy, you’re outta there. They control the whole thing,” says Rich Ehrenreich, the managing owner of the Schaumburg Flyers.
And while just about everybody loves making a trip to the ballpark, no one wants it in their back yard, as the out-of-the-way sites for the parks show: The Cougars play next to a garbage dump (oops — it’s officially known as a landfill); the Cheetahs play alongside towering Com Ed power lines; the Flyers play just south of the Elgin O’Hare Expressway, with its screeching cars and trucks.
It is a huge challenge for architects to create a sense of place at such locations. Yet in many ways, they’ve been up to the task, aided by what might be called the Inverse Theory of Ballpark Architecture: As the quality of play drops, the level of intimacy rises proportionately. In other words, don’t expect to see Sammy Sosa blast a home run, but expect to have a blast because you’ll be so close to the game.
The stadium by the landfill
The New York Yankees play in the House that Ruth Built; the Kane County Cougars, the Class A affiliate of the Florida Marlins, play in the House that Trash Built.
The 10-year-old, county-owned stadium, which is named for the powerful politician who brought baseball to the Fox Valley, was built with more than $2 million in donations from Waste Management of North America Inc., the parent company of the firm that operated the Settler’s Hill Landfill east of Geneva.
Some questioned whether Kane County should accept such gifts, but today, no one disputes the drawing power of Elfstrom Stadium, which attracted an average of 7,400 fans a game last year and even outdrew Comiskey on some nights — despite the fact that it sits next to the landfill, five miles north of the East-West Tollway.
The ballpark’s popularity is all the more surprising because it was designed by HOK Sport of Kansas City, Mo., the firm that did Comiskey, and reflects the same utilitarian design philosophy that produced the sterile South Side stadium.
The Cougars’ lair consists of a concrete seating bowl that wraps around a sunken field and, behind the bowl, an open-air concourse ringed by ugly concrete and corrugated metal sheds that house concession stands and souvenir shops.
What saves Elfstrom are its sightlines and its setting. The architects wisely oriented the field away from the landfill and toward a big grove of trees that gives the impression that the game is occurring in a park. Lawn seating areas along the first and third base lines reinforce the bucolic feeling, as does a fish-stocked pond outside the right-field fence.
Families like the between-inning shtick provided by the Cougars’ cuddly mascot, Ozzie, and other acts. Sometimes, the entertainment gets out of hand, interrupting the game. Yet on the whole, despite that neighboring landfill, Elfstrom Stadium is a sweet place for baseball — more Field of Dreams than Field of Smells.
In a suburb that is often reviled for its mega malls and anonymous glass office towers, Schaumburg’s Alexian Field is an extraordinary surprise: An architectural gem that is an instant landmark.
Retro school of design
Built by its co-owners, the village of Schaumburg and the Schaumburg Park District, the ballpark clearly belongs to the retro school of design. Such is its fidelity to the past that its outfield dimensions precisely duplicate those of Wrigley Field.
While this sounds like a sure-fire way to produce a Disneyfied version of baseball, the reality of Alexian Field, which sits at Schaumburg’s southwestern edge and is now in its third season, turns out to be altogether different.
Designed by Denver architects Sink Combs Dethlefs and named for a health care company that supplied funding, the $17 million facility is a skillful reinterpretation of traditional ballparks and a hit with fans. The Flyers, who play in the independent Northern League, drew an average crowd of 5,500 people last year.
Visitors move from the parking lots around Alexian Field to an entry plaza where rows of brick and painted concrete cleverly suggest a baseball diamond. It’s a fine forecourt for the building, whose exposed steel construction and decorative brickwork manage to recall old ballparks without being cloying.
The inside of the ballpark is a crisply modern, twin-tiered setup that consists of a seating bowl and, above it, 16 skyboxes and a restaurant. As at Elfstrom Stadium, the sightlines are good, but there is something extra — a place to get out of the rain and, more important, enough height to create a feeling of enclosure.. The chief fault is a hand-operated outfield scoreboard, which is too small to hold its own visually in this ballpark and has tiny, hard-to-read lights indicating the number of balls, strikes and outs. Nevertheless, it is fun to see a real person — Katie Stott’s her name — hang numbers on the scoreboard like a game show hostess.
Shaped by power lines
If Alexian Field is the Lincoln Town Car of minor league ballparks in the Chicago’s suburbs, then Hawkinson Ford Field, which is named after a car dealership in south suburban Oak Lawn and cost about $7 million, is the Ford. It’s a good, unpretentious place for watching baseball.
On the other hand, there are some bizarre aspects to its design.
The chief reason has to do with the site, which sits just south of the Midlothian Turnpike and two blocks east of Cicero Avenue. Com Ed power lines sweep to the south and west, almost touching the ballpark on the south.
Their encroaching presence led the designers, the Kansas City, Mo., firm of Devine deFlon Yaeger Architects, to do an asymmetrical plan. It has a small lower deck, with just seven rows of seats, and an open-air concourse on its power line-crowded south (or first base) side.
Meanwhile, the west (or third base) side, which has more breathing room, combines a tiny lower deck with a much-larger upper deck.
This arrangement is largely a functional success, with the upper deck giving general-admission fans something they can’t get at the other suburban parks — an excellent perch that affords a nice overview of the game. The sunny concourse works well as a spot for parties.
But aesthetically, the result is a disaster — a ballpark that looks like half a ballpark. A first-time visitor could be forgiven for wondering if the village of Crestwood, which built and owns the stadium, had run out of money. The bad site and the mediocre design may help explain why the Cheetahs have yet to establish themselves as firmly as the Cougars and the Flyers; the team attracted an average crowd of just under 2,000 fans last year. But if their ballpark doesn’t rate high on architectural charm, it still has a charming flavor unique to the minor leagues.
The other day, for example, the St. Christopher church choir gathered around home plate and belted out “The Star Spangled Banner.” After the choir finished, David Fitzgerald, the Cheetah’s PR man, admitted that getting singers to do the national anthem is not easy.
“If we don’t have a group, we resort to Beth Purdy in Concession Stand A,” he said. “She sells popcorn as well as sing the national anthem.”
