by: Brandon Loomis The Republic | azcentral.com
By day, the lights are about the least obvious visual attractions at Phoenix Municipal Stadium. But what else around the Cactus League shouts louder about ba…seball’s hopeless devotion to the past?
The rusty sandstone buttes of Papago Park loom large beyond the outfield, and a perfectly groomed lawn is center stage on game days. The posts that raise the lights 100 feet above the playing field have shined down on all of this and much more.
The park, built in 1964 and updated twice since, is the oldest active home to Arizona’s spring-training circuit, now that Tucson’s Hi Corbett Field is no longer in the mix. But as anyone walking the concourse behind the stands along the third-base line may have read in a concrete inscription added a decade ago, it’s those 10 tall, steel cylinders that really speak to the good old days.
Willie Mays watched his drive float past them when he hit the park’s first home run. But even that wasn’t the beginning.
The San Francisco Giants brought the poles with them when they moved their training here in 1964, but not from Candlestick Park. The towers with the fist-size anchor bolts came from the Polo Grounds, the New York park that the Giants left behind for California in the 1950s. That park was dismantled after the New York Mets moved to Shea Stadium several years later.
“Don’t know the reasoning,” said stadium manager James Vujs, a city employee and baseball enthusiast. “A nostalgia thing for the Giants? Cost? I don’t know.”
The Giants left for Scottsdale in 1982, and now their cross-Bay rivals, the Oakland A’s, use the Phoenix stadium. The poles stayed put. The lamps they hold up have been updated to 1,500-watt metal halides, and they’re illuminating new chapters of baseball history. Imagine the throng of Japanese reporters following Hideki Matsui when he played for the A’s in 2011.
Who knows what they’ll illuminate in a couple of years? Oakland’s contract is up next year, and there’s talk that Muni could become the Arizona State University Sun Devils’ home if the A’s shuffle over to Mesa to inhabit HoHoKam Park once the Chicago Cubs vacate it for a new Mesa stadium.
Vujs recounts how the A’s banned power duo Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco from taking batting practice in the practice field next to the stadium because they kept hitting cars that drove by on Van Buren Street.
With pride in his tenant organization, he also notes that the A’s brought the Cactus League’s first World Series title here in the early 1970s.
It’s not just the lights that show flashes of history. If you’re sitting in the grandstand, look down and notice the narrow gap in the concrete at the base of your seat. That’s where the Giants tried what Vujs believes was baseball’s first air-conditioning system. A central evaporative cooler pumped cool breezes at fans’ feet, for a very short experiment.
“They realized it only cooled your ankles,” he said, “and they never used it again.”
Flourishes like that and the original stone berm cradling the seating bowl remain, but an $8.6 million upgrade in 2003 — with new seats, deeper dugouts, better shade and a big-league press box — left the rest of Muni looking thoroughly modern.