We’ll have a new champion for 2020, as the results of the first round of the summer collegiate Best of the Ballparks 2020 fan vote yielded only a few close votes and plenty of blowouts. So we move on to the Sweet Sixteen round of voting!

Travis Field, home of the Brazos Valley Bombers (Texas Collegiate League), was voted down in the first round, but last year’s runner-up, Turtle Creek Stadium, home of the Traverse City Pit Spitters, is alive after a first-round win. The ballparks receiving the most votes in this first round: Turtle Creek Stadium, Grayson Stadium (Savannah Bananas) and Duncan Field (Hastings Sodbusters) (tie), Riverfront Stadium (Waterloo Bucks) and Bill Taunton Stadium (Willmar Stingers).

Most summer-collegiate leagues decided to pass on a 2020 season because of COVID-19 concerns, but some did not. For this competition, we’re focusing on the ballparks hosting league play in 2020, including those hosting a “pod” of teams and minimizing travel. Normally we’d have a tough time limiting this competition to voting on 64 ballparks, as was the case in 2019, but this year the lack of play in markets like Madison, WI, dramatically lowered the number of ballparks in this competition. We did not seed the participants in this competition, either, deciding on a random system to generate the brackets.

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.

We began this competition with last year’s winner and runner-up–Travis Field, home of the Brazos Valley Bombers, and Turtle Creek Stadium, home of the Traverse City Pit Spitters–and randomly generated the rest of the brackets.

https://ballparkdigest.com/2020/07/03/sweet-sixteen-time-in-summer-collegiate-best-of-the-ballparks-2020-fan-vote/