Avista Stadium

Spokane Indians, Northwest League

10/10

A nice summer evening sees Spokane host Yakima. This is the only picture from my original trip deemed worthy of staying.

The exterior before the first Saturday home game of the season vs. Eugene.

A great crowd was on hand considering the weather was overcast with occasional showers.

Pre-game vs. Eugene in 2014, you can literally see the moisture.

We attended Avista Stadium in Spokane on night 1 of a 3 game tour of Washington and Oregon, which was my first trip specifically to go to new ballparks. This explains why my pictures were somewhat lacking, and all generally of the same thing. The park is the top draw for attendance in the Northwest League every year. The park may have something to do with it, but Spokane has approximately 650 thousand people in the area surrounding and into Idaho, so there are more than a few people to market the team to.

I don't have many photos of this one and don't remember much about it, so this will be brief(I realized this after and took many more photos of the other two parks, both in Eugene and Yakima). But it is a relatively run of the mill minor-league stadium. There is the mascot a "Spokanasaurus." We were grilled mercilessly by our border guard on the way down, even being told "What you wanna go to Spokane for? I been there. There's nothin' there. Nothin'."

As far as I remember, the park was very average. The game was an eyelash over 5 hours, not wrapping up until around quarter after 11. Writing this, I realize that Spokane may end up on my list for this summer, possibly even as a long weekend road trip. For now, it will be remembered as an average park, with an average score.

Update 2016: I was typing this in early 2014 and mentioned it to my then girlfriend and alluded to needing to go back at some point. She just said "Let's go!" I checked and seeing  it was around 12 or 13 hours from the house, I knew it was possible. So we went down in June 2014 and I am now engaged to the same girl. The next year, on a trip to California, I was looking for an NWL game for night 2. When it was only the all star game, I hoped that it would be in Spokane and sure enough it was, with a new format featuring the Pioneer League all-stars vs. the Northwest.

Having a bit more to work with as far as sample size, I realized this place is great. The stadium was built in the 1950's, but I originally thought it was from the 80's, it's so modern(ish). There's both box seating further back and decent seats closer to the action, if you can get them. I've never had my pick of seats here, it's usually what's left. The smallest crowd in 3 games here was still 4,500, with for Short Season A is really good. This leads into a good atmosphere here, baseball first, random stuff second. Lastly, is the food, with stand names like "Intentional Wok" for a Chinese food booth, you know you're doing ok. While the dollar hot dogs in 2014 had gotten quite cold, I still think the concessions here are good as well and while I can only remember so much about them, the variety of items was some of the best I've seen anywhere. Overall, this place was vastly underappreciated under my old review and a few more visits have put me up to a 10/10. There's not a thing wrong with this park, which is why it's a perennial attendance leader(2nd of 8 in 2015) in the NWL.


Linescores
2007-07-17
                                        123   456    789   R  H  E
Yakima Bears(ARI)             200  120   050   10 13 3
Spokane Indians(TEX)        100   600   100  8   7   7
Temp: 90F  Time: 3:38  Att: 4,518

2014-06-14
                                      123   456    789   R H  E
Eugene Emeralds(SD)      010   000   200   3  9   1
Spokane Indians(TEX)      202  100    00x   5 12 0
Temp: 65F  Time: 2:25  Att: 6,709

2015-08-04
                                                123   456    789  10  R H E
Pioneer League All-Stars            011  001    020   0   5 9  0
Northwest League All-Stars        100  010    021   1    6 10 1
Temp: 88F  Time: 3:28  Att: 7,083