Today I begin a project I’ve been wanting to undertake for quite some time. Unilocal may or may not be the appropriate place to start this project, but what the heck, I think it’ll work. In some cases it will be appropriate, in some cases it won’t. Anyway, my project is to document every professional baseball stadium that I have had the pleasure of attending a game. I’ve already written a few reviews of places I’ve been to recently(see the associate list for more info), but now I’m going to go back in time and review all the other places. Should be interesting… Baxter Stadium — home of the Catskill Cougars — Visited in 2000 while I was an intern for the Elmira Pioneers. If there has ever been a ballpark more out in the middle of nowhere, I just can’t imagine it. Baxter Stadium was located four miles off of New York Rt. 17 — the Southern Tier Expressway — on a dimly lit and completely deserted road in the middle of the Catskills near the little, itty-bitty town of Mountaindale. Getting there was quite the experience in and of itself. Then trying to find a cash machine somewhere when we realized that we didn’t have any cash and the team didn’t take cards… Yikes. We had to drive down into Mountaindale and we were lucky to find one, yes one, cash machine in all of town. We had no idea that we were going to be so out in the boonies. Why would they build a ballpark way out in the middle of nowhere like that? I’m still not completely sure how that plot of land was chosen, but the theory when it opened to house the Sullivan County Mountain Lions of the independent Northeast League in 1995 was that they would be able to attract the city kids from all of the hundreds of surrounding summer camps. They did do that, to an extent, but I think they wildly miscalculated how many kids were up there and every team that tried to make a go of it failed miserably. The last professional team to call Baxter Stadium home was the Catskill Cougars in 2000. We attended a game and actually had a great time. The place seated around 3,000 mostly in bleachers down each foul line and on that night, it was a little bit more than half full. They had a large and decently priced concession stand directly behind the backstop seating and a very nice little bar and BBQ area behind one of the bleachers. The surrounding hills and woods made for a beautiful setting and with a bunch of camp kids in the place that night, the atmosphere was raucous and high energy. It turned out to be one of their few really good crowds of the entire season. On our way out that night, we noticed a sign in the parking lot that read«Parking reserved for Catskill Cougars general manager». Being the thieves that we were at that time, we just had to have that little souvenir from our league rivals, so without hesitation we pulled the entire pole from the ground, stuffed it in my car, and hightailed it out of there. Boy, I hope the statute of limitations has run out on that one. Sadly, but not unsurprisingly, the Catskill Cougars folded after that season and though there were rumors for years that Baxter Stadium would house an independent team again, nobody ever set up shop. The stadium was dismantled in 2007.
