The playing field is only part of the work. The Yankee Stadium setup comes together gradually over two or three weeks. That’s compared to a three- or four-day process of converting the University of Phoenix Stadium, home of the NFL’s Cardinals, to host the Fiesta or a national title game. But it works, because it improves sight lines and looks better than leaving the Diamondbacks’ right field wide open beyond one sideline.Ĭonverting Chase Field from baseball to football takes 10 days of 12-to-16-hour work from a team of laborers, Balich said. The Cheez-It is the only one of the ballpark bowl games that’s wheeled seats out onto the field. But I would say with last year’s game, it was definitely more intimate.” They both have their perks, obviously, or their positives and negatives. “It’s much tighter than a normal open-air stadium. “I just say that it provides a much different feel and atmosphere,” said Justin Balich, who worked as Fiesta and Cactus operations director. How it looked a few years ago, when it was called the Cactus: Chase Field, dressed up for the Cactus Bowl.
The operations team at the Fiesta Bowl (which also runs the Cheez-It) brings in 3,800 seats and lays them in the Chase Field outfield, enclosing the field and making for a significantly more intimate gathering. (It got little attendance in Miami.) “A football field fits like it should in a baseball park.” A lot goes into making a baseball stadium a football stadium. “There hasn’t been a time that anybody’s looked at it and said, ‘Boy, this doesn’t fit right,’” said Scott Draper, who’d been the executive director of that game before it relocated to Frisco, Texas.
The configuration was different at Marlins Park, which hosted the Miami Beach Bowl, but it worked there, too. It’s not a happy accident that a football field at Yankee Stadium runs fairly symmetrically from home plate to dead center field. We were fortunate to be able to do a lot of the homework on the front end.” “We worked very closely with our architects to make sure we were able to do these types of events and do them in a manner that meets the Yankees’ standard, that it feels Yankee, that it feels Yankee Stadium. “In fairness to Wrigley, they’re a very old venue that didn’t have the luxury we did of going into this with a business model in mind,” Doug Behar, the stadium operations vice president for the New York Yankees, told SB Nation in 2016. Neither offense used this end zone in the 2010 Illinois-Northwestern game at Wrigley Photo by Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images It’s a far cry from Wrigley Field, whose dimensions demanded in 2010 that Illinois and Northwestern only use one end zone. They were built, to a large degree, with these specific accommodations in mind. Pete, football-hosting ballparks were all built in 1998 or later. With the exception of Tropicana Field, which hosts the St. The newer generation that hosts football games doesn’t look like those. Think the old Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia, Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, RFK Stadium in Washington, or the Kingdome in Seattle. There was a time when baseball stadiums were massive concrete donuts, big circles that could be purposed however they needed to be. Pete’s artificial turf looks like a scene out of a dystopian fanfic. Petersburg’s Gasparilla - come off fine every year, even though the St.
The four recent and current ballpark bowls - the now-moved Miami Beach, Arizona’s Cheez-It (formerly the Cactus), New York’s Pinstripe, and St. It doesn’t always look natural.Īnd yet, it works. It requires fitting a 120-yard-long rectangular peg into a diamond-shaped hole. Most major stadiums are multi-purposed in some fashion or another, but football games in baseball parks is a weird match. So have a few regular season games over the years. For much of the 2010s, around one in 10 college football bowl games has been played in an MLB stadium.
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