USRT Florida Day 5 - Clearwater’s Bright House Field
Today’s report comes to you from Clearwater, Florida, the Spring Training home of the Philadelphia Phillies.
The Phillies have called Clearwater home since the 40s, and used to play at the old Jack Russell Stadium in a neighborhood just north of downtown. In 2004 they moved several miles to the east, to a sparkling new facility along US 19 and adjacent to their minor league practice complex.
Bright House Field is everything you would want to have in a Spring Training venue - modern amenities, concession areas and pleasant seating areas and extensive berm areas for the fans, clean and modern player clubhouses and outstanding playing surfaces, and gleaming office and lobby spaces for the team’s management. This place has that and more, and we left the building this afternoon with the assessment that this is among the elite of the MLB training venues which we have visited so far in either the Grapefruit or Cactus leagues.
No surprise there - We’ve ranked Citizens Bank Park in Philly as the top ballpark in all of MLB. We would expect that they would make everything top notch and first class in their Spring Training venue as well.
After checking in to the media room and enjoying a delicious lunch, we self toured the ballpark - nice concession stands, a local joint selling cheese steaks, Pete and Shorty’s 4-pack burger sliders are a must have, and Frenchy’s Tiki Bar in the outfield is the place to hang out. Yuengling beer is widely available, and a “Beers of the World” stand, offering over 60 different brands, is located right next to the spacious team merchandise store. The entire set up here is awesome. Also, the Single-A affiliate of the Phillies, the Clearwater Threshers, play here from April to September in the Florida State League.
The second level of the park features suites, a nice club seat porch down the first base side, and state of the art press facilities and broadcast booths. On this day the place was absolutely packed, with every seat and the outfield berm filled to the brim. For the hometown Phillies fans, it would be a disappointing day however, as the visiting Cincinnati Reds scored 4 in the first and held on for a 5-3 win. Former Bison Brandon “The King of Buffalo” Phillips was 2 for 5 at the plate for the Reds.
This was such a nice, nice day and we want to thank P.R. Director Larry Shenk at the Phillies and Deb Rinaldi back at the Phillies offices in Philadelphia for the media credentials and for being such gracious hosts. (Philadelphia always shows the USRT lots of love!) We will have a full profile and story on Bright House Field in the May edition of Sports and Leisure Magazine.
After the game we headed down to St. Pete Beach for some grub and to say hi to some old friends of mine. (Separate post on that to come.) And the best news of the day came via a phone call while we were enroute to Clearwater - game tickets for the NCAA East Regionals in Charlotte have been secured! Ron Bertovich, former Sabres Exec VP and now Deputy Commish of the Colonial Athletic Association, made some calls for us and got us a full set for both Thursday’s Sweet 16 AND Saturday’s Elite 8 games in Charlotte, no small task considering this is one scorching hot and hard to get ticket. So THANKS RON and it looks like we’ll be extending this Florida adventure by one more day - heading to Charlotte Thursday, over to Norfolk Friday, and then back to Charlotte Saturday. That also means we won’t be back to Buffalo in time for Sunday’s Sabres game against the Bruins.
Tomorrow it’s a short hop to Kissimmee and Osceola County Stadium - the Houston Astros host the Cleveland Indians and it’s a 1:05PM first pitch.
Hopefully those bullpen players under the umbrellas aren’t actually drinking Yuenglings!
One beautiful ballpark!
The marquee main entrance to the stadium on the Old Coachman Road side
Mmmmmmmedia Food! Pulled pork sandwiches, burgers and dogs as well as a fruit plate and cookies/brownies
buffawhat Says:March 26th, 2008 at 6:49 am
Andy, glad to see you guys having a blast, and oh my! Shorts!!!! Oh, and you look about ten years younger in that picture, keep up the hard work, it shows!
Nick Isby Says:March 26th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
Brighthouse Field is not only one of the best spring traing parks, it is one of the nicest in all of baseball. They have lots of great food, like you mentioned Pete and Shortys and the chesse steaks are great too. If you are over at the Beers of the World stand I would suggest a Phillies Red, very tasty. Aside from the great food, the gift shop has lots of cool stuff to buy and the seating is great from any view.
One other cool note, they give you a real pencil with Phillies logos on it when you buy a program, not just some little golf pencil to try to keep score with.