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Curve has chance to win Double-A ballpark award

You make the call

Go to the Curve’s Facebook page and click on the best ballpark contest link. Fans can vote once per day, and the contest ends Monday.

By Cory Giger

cgiger@altoonamirror.com

Altoona’s Peoples Natural Gas Field has a chance to be voted the best Double-A ballpark in all of minor league baseball over the next couple of days as it currently is in the championship round of a prestigious online contest.

The Altoona Curve’s home already has advanced through four rounds of voting in the annual ballpark contest held by Baseball Digest, and it currently is in the final against Hartford’s Dunkin’ Donuts Park. Voting ends Monday, and PNG Field held a lead of 54 percent to 46 percent as of late Friday night.

“For us it would mean a lot (to win), especially because it’s something that’s being voted on by fans. That’s the biggest thing about this,” Curve communications and broadcasting director Trey Wilson said. “We don’t have the newest ballpark, we don’t have some of the fanciest things that a lot of these ballparks have that been going up over the last couple of years, but I like to think that our ballpark is a staple of minor league baseball.

“To anyone who’s been there, it’s a favorite. The problem that we find is that we are in a smaller market, especially in Double-A, and not a lot of people have heard of our stadium.”

PNG Field has never advanced all that far in the annual Baseball Digest contest, and this year it was seeded 20th among the 30 teams in Double-A.

“I thought that was a little bit strange,” Wilson said. “The 20th best ballpark in Double-A? There’s no way. Have the people that did this seeding even been to our stadium?”

PNG Field defeated ballparks in Montgomery (Ala.) in the first round (63 to 37 percent); Reading in the second round (61 to 39 percent); and Tennessee in the third round (63 to 37 percent). In the semifinals, Altoona was up against the defending champion from Pensacola (Fla.), the No. 1 seed, yet still won rather handily (54 to 46 percent).

“The opponents that we’ve gone up against have been really tough and some of the most notable ballparks in the minors, and we haven’t really had a close one,” Wilson said. “Our fans have shown up and showed their support for our franchise and our ballpark.”

In many ways, the contest isn’t as much about having the most beautiful ballpark as it is being able to get the word out on social media and encouraging fans to vote.

“All we’ve done is made the posts saying, hey, we’re in this contest, and from there the fans have taken over and shared it and told other people,” Wilson said. “We do have a very good social media following that’s been a staple of the Curve for years.”

Beating Pensacola in the last round was a big upset for the Curve, as that team is owned by star golfer Bubba Watson, who was soliciting votes on his Twitter account to nearly 2 million followers.

The Curve’s opponent in the final, Hartford, has some ESPN celebrities stumping for it on social media.

“We’re going to need a lot of help,” Wilson said. “Hartford’s tough. They have some ESPN personalities up here that they’re friends with that are going to be helping them, so we’re going to need everybody to vote every day.”

The Curve’s home ballpark has never won any type of recognition as the best in Double-A, either by a publication or in a fan vote. So if the franchise can pull it off in this contest, it would be quite a feather in the team’s cap.

“It would be fantastic to be recognized nationwide, even though everyone in Blair County has always made Peoples Natural Gas Field feel like the greatest ballpark,” Curve general manager Derek Martin said.

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