Baseball’s back: Wichita fans try on a new team, new stadium on opening night
Fourteen years and $75 million later, major league affiliated baseball is back in River City.
The Wichita Wind Surge took the field Tuesday for a season opener in the new Riverfront Stadium in front of 7,908 enthusiastic, if somewhat cold, fans on a breezy 55-degree night.
The home team lost a tight 3-2 battle to the Amarillo Sod Poodles, the crowd loudly booing the umpire when he punched the Surge’s last batter out on a called third strike with runners on first and second.
It’s been a long wait. The last time an affiliated baseball team played in Wichita was 2007, before the Wranglers bolted for Arkansas.
The Surge replaced the Wichita Wingnuts, an independent league team that occupied the old Lawrence-Dumont stadium until 2018 when it was closed to make way for the new $75 million ballpark.
“It’s great for Wichita to have professional baseball again,” said Phillip Seemann, an accountant and Oakland A’s fan. “If you want to compete with the Oklahoma Cities and Kansas Cities of the world, you have to have professional sports, like these guys.”
One big addition that the old stadium didn’t have is a grassy outfield berm where kids spent a fun evening rolling down the hillside.
“I like that it’s new grass,” enthused 9-year-old Moriah Salts, a student at Washington Elementary School. “I think it’s fun that the ball gets over the fence sometimes.”
The family lives in the neighborhood and watched the stadium being built for what was supposed to be an April 2020 opening, but turned out to be a lost season due to the COVID-19 pandemic, said her father, Alan Salts.
“I waited a long time for this,” said Salts, who was a regular attendee at Wrangler and Wingnuts games.
Tuesday’s opening was bittersweet because the pandemic also claimed the life of Lou Schwechheimer, the late managing partner of the team who engineered its move from New Orleans, where it was known as the Baby Cakes.
Video tributes to Schwechheimer played on the jumbo screen in left field, before a recording of former Mayor Jeff Longwell throwing out the ceremonial first pitch.
Longwell was the chief negotiator for the city and landed the ballclub, which was then a Triple-A affiliate of the Miami Marlins.
A shakeup of the minor-league baseball system ultimately wound up with the team being realigned as a Double A farm club for the Minnesota Twins.
Each division has its upside.
Triple-A games are generally better played, with players one step away from the majors and big league stars working their way back into shape after injuries. Double-A teams feature an organization’s top prospects and better chances of seeing budding superstars on their way up.
The current mayor, Brandon Whipple, recorded a video welcome for the big screen and watched the game from the city’s luxury suite with other local officials and his 3-year-old son Julian.
He said the season opener was more than a baseball game.
“It feels like it’s the beginning of reopening, of getting back to normal,” he said. “Even though we’re wearing masks and taking our precautions, it’s a completely different feeling than it was a year ago. It’s a hopeful feeling.”
Sen. Oletha Faust-Goudeau, who’d made the motion in the state Legislature for sales tax bonds that partially funded construction, said it’s a transformative project for Wichita.
“I was used to the old stadium and when I walked up here tonight it was like, whoa, where are we?” she said. “It’s like I’m in a different city.”
In the crowd Tuesday was Tom Tingle of DLR Group, the chief architect of the stadium.
A veteran of 30 years and 25 stadium projects, he won’t say how Riverfront ranks compared with the others. “It’s kind of like, who is your favorite child,” he said.
But he did say Riverfront is unique in a couple of ways.
It’s a lot more varied than most minor-league parks from the wider seats and extra leg room in the main bowl, to luxury boxes with patios and garage-style doors, to outfield picnic areas and special touches like an outfield bridge and an overlook area at the center field wall where fans can watch the action on the field and in the bullpen.
“I’ve never had this much variety in places to experience a ballpark in my career,” Tingle said, more than a trace of pride in his voice.
It also was the fastest stadium project he ever did — 15 months from start to finish when a comparable facility would usually take at least 22 months, he said.
The accelerated schedule wound up being for naught with the cancellation of the 2020 season.
Tingle had worked with Schwechheimer on other stadiums, and said “we always talked about his dream to do one from scratch.”
Many of the special features in Riverfront were Schwechheimer ideas and it’s sad he never got to see a game played in it, Tingle said.
“I know he’s looking down on us,” Tingle said.
This story was originally published May 11, 2021 at 9:54 PM.
