As I pulled up to the park in Goodyear, I was struck by two things.  The first was how shockingly empty the parking lot was.  The second was how architectural the ballpark looked.  It honestly looked like a Frank Lloyd Wright building, in the middle of the desert.  Its flat lines echoed the desert landscape.

Goodyear Ballpark

From the photo you will see the major statue at the front, the one that looks like a baseball that had been shoved through a straw.   (Here’s where my liberal arts background is going to pay off.  Thank Mom and Dad.)  While the building echoes the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, this statue is an homage to Constantin Brancusi, an early 20th century sculptor.  Brancusi’s most famous work might be ‘Bird in Space’ which represents a bird in flight as it might be in the world of Einstein and energy and matter are relative. See:

Brancusi's Bird in Space

Later I found that the statue outside the stadium stood 60′6 high, the same distance from the pitching rubber to home plate.  See, baseball is the thinking man, err, woman’s sport.

So as I entered the ballpark I was set to fall in love with it.  I mean where do you ever see a ballpark so tied to art?  I thought if they spent so much time on the outside, what’s it going to be on the inside?  But inside, it was just another ballpark.  There are some nice features.  There is a wiffleball field stocked with balls and bats for the kids to play on.  There is plenty of room for kids to run around.  There is also plenty of room for expansion, which may be in the plans down the line. But over all, inside this was just your basic minor league park.  The grassy berm even seemed like an afterthought, just thrown in in the space left over.  Not sure why you would spend so much money for the outside effect, if you weren’t going to do something with it inside.

The baseball was pretty good.  The Cleveland Indians nor the Oakland Athletics brought their complete starting line-ups, but both brought pretty good ones, and the game see-sawed back and forth.  Carl Pavano started for the Indians, and pitched 4 giving up 4 runs to the Tribe. He seemed to have a fair amount of trouble with location and consistancy.  The A’s begin generally patient hitters were able to take advantage of the umps strike zone and Pavano’s location problems.  When Pavano left in came Scott Lewis, who looked quite crafty in his work for the rest of the ballgame.  Lewis is not a hard thrower.  According to Baseball America he has 4 pitches which he can throw at almost anytime, and he seemed to be keeping hitters off balance throughout the game.  Eventually, the A’s got two more runs off of him, but overall, he looked quite good.

The A’s brought some young pitchers, mostly a few guys that won’t start at the big league level but should be there by the end of the season.  In the end, the Indians won the game 7-6.