We’re in the final day of voting in the Best of the Ballparks 2020 fan vote for MiLB Low-A facilities, with Four Winds Field vs. Whitaker Bank Ballpark in the fifth and final round. Less than 200 votes separate the pair, so your vote counts!
In the last round, Four Winds Field, home of the South Bend Cubs, narrowly edged Atrium Health Ballpark, home of the Kannapolis Cannon Ballers, while Whitaker Bank Ballpark, Lexington Legends home, had a more comfortable margin of victory against Joseph J. Riley Jr. Park, home of the Charleston RiverDogs. With a Sally League ballpark in the Final Four, we may see the Midwest League’s stranglehold on the title be broken. So go vote! Polling ends at midnight Central.
We have a fuller explanation of the background of this vote and the competition here. However, we’ll include the ballot again at the bottom of this page to allow you the chance to vote again.
We do have one takeaway from this year’s vote. In 2019, 83,013 individual voters participated at one point or another in the Low-A vote. Coming into today, 79,845 fans have participated in the Low-A vote, and we expect the final tally to come close to 2019’s total. When we launched this year’s Best of the Ballparks vote, we expected to see a decrease in totals from 2019: in-game promotions of this competition, we felt, were a big part of its success both for us and for teams. The fact that we won’t see much, if any, decrease in the participation numbers from 2019 to 2020 says a lot about the resiliency and popularity of Minor League Baseball across the country. As the sport faces an uncertain future, the fact that fans are turning out virtually to support their teams should be a sign to Major League Baseball that a severe contraction for 2021 may not be the wisest course. Growing the sport seems to be an activity that’s been totally forgotten by the commissioner’s office, which now acts more as lawyers for owners than stewards of the game. In a multi-billion-dollar industry, eliminating Minor League Baseball across wide swaths of the country is a bad business decision.