With the first round of voting complete, we head to the second round of voting in Best of the Ballparks for the Arizona Cactus League, as we narrow the field from eight to four. And we need your help!
We’re combining efforts with our sister site Spring Training Online to run this tourney. We’ve set up the voting in brackets, tournament style. We began by ranking all 10 Cactus League MLB ballparks, beginning with Salt River Fields and Sloan Park on the top and Hohokam Stadium and Maryvale Baseball Park on the bottom. Our ratings are based on a number of soft criteria, but it’s all centered on a simple proposition: what facility offers the best fan experience? This is, of course, all relative: honestly, the difference between #3 and #9 on this ranking isn’t all that great, and you could argue a totally plausible ranking using your own criteria that differs greatly from this one.
We began the tournament with a first-round play-in, and the votes came out per our seedings: fans preferred Goodyear Ballpark over Hohokam Stadium by a 58%-42% margin, and Surprise Stadium over Maryvale Baseball Park by a 68%-32% margin. That sets up the next round of voting, where were winnow the field from eight to four teams.
Below you’ll find a form for submitting your votes (desktop users see the entire slate; mobile users see one poll question at a time). Only one vote from a device or PC counts; you’re welcome to vote over and over and over again, but the system filters out multiple votes from an IP address, so that effort will be for naught.
Voting for this round has closed.
We know from our marketing/user research stats a third of our readers work in the baseball industry, so we’re tapping into that collective expertise. And we know from our research that a third of our readers sell to the baseball industry, so that expertise will be valuable as well. The remaining third — fans, media, government — will certainly have a different view on things as well. We can’t wait to see what our readers — whom we consider to be the smartest folks in baseball — say about the best of the ballparks.
Here is our ranking of Cactus League ballparks.
- Salt River Fields at Talking Stick
- Sloan Park
- Scottsdale Stadium
- Camelback Ranch-Glendale
- Peoria Stadium
- Tempe Diablo Stadium
- Surprise Stadium
- Goodyear Ballpark
- Hohokam Stadium
- Maryvale Baseball Park
Here are the brackets for the voting:
