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PrintA couple of errors at Huntington Park
Last year, I was among the 666,797 people who helped make Huntington Park’s first season a record-setting success.
As my reward this year, I’m sitting down. This is something I had a hard time doing at every Clippers game I attended last year—and not because I was cheering.
Huntington Park is no doubt a vast improvement over Cooper Stadium, which sported nostalgia as its strongest attribute. (It was next to a cemetery, of all places.) In the new Arena District location, attendance increased 24 percent over the previous season. An average of 9,525 fans came to each game, for a total that was the most in the International League. And with the Clippers’ final record at 57-85, it’s safe to say fans were actually coming for the park and not the team.
This season’s attendance through May was down to 7,493 a game, likely because the weather hadn’t gotten nice yet and some of the novelty had worn off. Last season, it wasn’t unusual to see young women teetering in high heels as if they were heading to a cocktail party—a sign of just how far Clippers baseball had come with the new digs.
Success means the individual grandstand seats often sell out, leaving $6 general admission or “standing room only” tickets available. This doesn’t sound so bad when the Clippers PR folks tout all the open spaces SROs can sit. That is, until you actually try to sit in any of them.
I went to half a dozen games last year and at every single one I was turned away from at least one “open” seating area. The reason is another nifty feature of the snazzy park that allows for multiple areas to be rented. Which is awesome if you’re the group renting them. For everyone else, it can create an odd feeling of exclusion at a minor league ballpark that was otherwise designed with a feeling of openness. Both bar levels of the AEP Power Pavilion beyond the outfield can be rented. So can the right field upper deck above City Barbeque and the plaza below. Heck, you can even rent the picnic tables in the outfield.
At least the bathrooms are first come, first serve.
Clippers games were nearly ruined for me when I attended with an obviously pregnant friend and most “standing” areas were rented and no one would give her a seat in the bar. Not entirely the park’s fault, but still poor form. Seating attendants also wouldn’t let my boyfriend’s mother, with her two knee replacements, sit in an empty handicap area halfway through a game, even after he calmly explained why she needed to. (They finally let her after he re-explained, less calmly.)
And I know a special needs nurse who took a group of her kids to the park this year only to be told the handicapped among the group couldn’t be joined in their seating area by their friends who weren’t.
While these are small bad moments in an otherwise great experience, they should be a reminder to park staff not to take themselves too seriously. There’s a reason that during Dime-A-Dog night in May it seemed as if more people were in line than in the stands. The park is great regardless of the game, and fans want to enjoy it.
So let us.
If all of the for-rent areas are taken, how about a sign at the ticket window saying so? And do the bleachers on the third floor of the AEP pavilion really need to be assigned? They’re so far from the field you couldn’t throw a chicken wing and hit the outfield.
Huntington deserved to be named Ballpark of the Year over the new Yankee Stadium. But that doesn’t mean the Clippers’ home needs to cultivate the same air of elitism.
I will say that I did, however, recently discover a surefire way to get a seat with an SRO ticket: Go when it’s raining.
