After an intense 24 hours of voting, it’s Glacier Bank Park (Glacier Range Riders) vs. Hinchliffe Stadium (New Jersey Jackals) in the finals of the 2023 Best of the Ballparks fan vote for MLB Partner Leagues.
This is quite the interesting matchup, filled with plenty of contrasts. Hinchliffe Stadium is one of the oldest ballparks in the minors, a Paterson, New Jersey WPA project once serving as home to Negro Leagues teams and recently restored, now the home of the Jackals. Glacier Bank Park is one of the more bucolic ballparks in the West, located in Kalispell, Montana, and in its second year as home to the Pioneer League’s Range Riders. This should make for a fascinating matchup.
Glacier Bank Park received the most votes in the Final Four round, followed by defending champ Clipper Magazine Stadium (Lancaster Barnstormers, in an unfortunate matchup), Hinchliffe Stadium and then WBC Park (Lake Country Dockhounds).
There are 49 total ballparks under this classification, but this year’s poll covers the top 32, as determined by last year’s Best of the Ballparks vote. We’ve substituted Hinchliffe Stadium, new home of the New Jersey Jackals, for Yogi Berra Stadium, the team’s former home. (Harry Grove Stadium, home of the Spire City Ghost Hounds, will be featured in our MLB Summer Collegiate vote, while the Empire State Greys is a Frontier League road team.) While this means there are some fine MLB Partner League ballparks left out of this year’s vote, launching a first round with 16 byes doesn’t really work when it comes to drumming up fan interest.
We know from marketing stats that 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.
Clipper Magazine Stadium received the most votes in the 2022 MLB Partner Leagues vote, so the home of the Lancaster Barnstormers automatically received the top seed, with the following seeds based solely on 2022 votes.
Some things to note. First, you are allowed to vote multiple times, but you can only vote once per day. Second, you don’t need to fill out a full slate: partially filled lineups will count. A running tally of the vote will be presented at the bottom of this page in the form of brackets. Vote below:
