Designated for Assignment, Part III: Harrisburg Senators

Ah, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Gateway to the...umm...well...it's kinda near Hersheypark, I guess. While Harrisburg has many admirable qualities, proximity to other major metropolitan areas is not necessarily one of them. It's about an hour and a half away from Baltimore, and probably about 3 hours from both Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Everywhere else is pretty much inaccessible...kinda like being in Little Rock, Arkansas: Well, I'm kinda near Memphis...*sigh*...or I guess I could go to Tulsa...*sigh*...oh, nm.

Anyway, Harrisburg just happened to be the next stop on our tour of minor league ballparks. It became the next stop pretty much by default: I had planned on going to Salisbury, MD, but we figured traffic would be absolutely horrible due to the Memorial Day weekend, and the Harrisburg Senators just happened to be playing the Bowie Baysox (AA affiliate of the Orioles)!

Sweet, I'll get to see one of our top pitching prospects: Jake Arrieta!

Oh, wait. He pitches on Friday. I get to see Bobby Livingston. That's...almost as good...*sigh*.

Turns out he pitched a pretty good game, but enough about that - let's get to what everybody flocks to my blog to read about: what kind of crazy crap the Senators have outside their ballpark!

An old bridge!



Skeeball!



Batting Cages!


Psychedelic Dentists!



An old red shed that is used as a ticket box office!


Batting Cages!

Seriously, I have to hand it to the Senators: they give you some awesome extra-curricular activities to play with. There's a whole arcade area that is outside of the stadium that has a collection of old-school stand-up video games, try-to-get-the-claw-to-grab-the-toy games, skeeball lanes, and all other kinds of token-operated fun. None of these diversions holds a candle to the batting cages, however, which are available to anyone (12 pitches for a buck) and come in baseball and softball versions with speeds from 35 - 90mph. Yours truly stepped in the 55mph cage and promptly made a fool of himself. I blame the fact that I was wearing sandals, my loose and floppy batting helmet, and the fact that I suck at baseball.



The stadium itself is an interesting design - there are assigned seats behind home plate and along the third and first base lines, but all of the rest of the seating is general admission bleacher seating. And there's a lot of it. What is weird is that in front of the bleacher seats, which go all the way to ground level, is the concourse where everyone walks to get food/play on the Senators Slide/get autographs from the poor sonovabitch who got stationed in the autograph booth that day, and then in front of the concourse is another section of assigned seating. It's not unlike a moat of people. We liked sitting in the front area as it kept us well away from the riff-raff and common folk of Central PA.




We were lucky enough to attend during "Superhero Day", which basically consisted of the cheer/energy/lame-o squad dressing up in ridiculous superhero costumes and the scoreboard operators blasting old animated clips of 60's-era superhero cartoons in between innings. And also Diego, from the Nickelodeon show. I think the most bizarre event of the evening occurred when the Senators switched pitchers and the scoreboard operators took that opportunity to play a clip from the Diego show, which consisted of a small leopard singing a cheery song about how much bigger and stronger he was getting every day. The players looked a tad on the bewildered side.

They also are strongly in the running for most bizarre/awesome inter-inning gimmick: a human hamster race!



did i mention they had batting cages

I have to say that I really, really enjoyed Harrisburg's stadium, except for the fact that they currently name the park after a bank, and are planning on changing the name to another bank - Metro Bank Field or some such B.S.. They are in the process of renovating it, and it should be really great after they get done, but so far I have to say that with it's combination of small-park feel, extra-curricular activities, great scoreboards, separated 'elite' seating sections, and the fact that you can get a tall draft of Yuengling, I'm liking Harrisburg the most out of all the stadiums we've been to so far.