Chaos and Kanji is the blog where I write about my adventures through Japan!

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Tuesday, May 10, 2011

On Location: Lake Elsinore Diamond

Each card will present a stadium or other baseball landmark I've visited. This is card number six in the series...


 The Diamond is a very nice park. It feels like it belongs in the area. The green roofing, brick walls, and clocktower give the impression that you are out for a day by the lake, which is only a stone's throw away. The trees, mountains in the background and use of dark foresty colors throughout the stadium give you the feel that you're out in nature. It's a beautiful stadium - and it wasn't cheap. Originally supposed to cost $8 million, the total price for this beauty was $22 million. Like most of the LA-area stadiums, this sits a bit out of the way, south of the metro area along I-15.
The clocktower and roofing features are visible inside the park as well as outside. As with most minor league stadiums, a grassy lawn seating area sits in the outfield sections.
The video scoreboard sits hidden amongst the many advertisements that line the outfield wall in the Diamond. There are fire lookout towers on top of one of the scoreboards.
That's right, one of the scoreboards. There are actually two video boards at this stadium, which you don't really see at the minor league level. (Even the Dodgers have only one real video board - the other is a dot matrix board.) You can see the right field scoreboard sitting at the left end of the gigantic wall of ads. And yes, there is another scoreboard stuck inside that wall as well. Standing behind that scoreboard is a man in a rabbit suit, and every time the Storm score are a run, the rabbit pops out of the Baskin Robbins ad and dances on the warning track!

In the baseball card image at the top of the page, you can see two white circles above center field. These are the two retired jersey numbers, belonging to Joe Urso and Jake Peavy. You'll also notice, as you look around the ballpark amongst the advertisements, the popular Storm logo eyes staring back at you. In fact, on the right field wall above, I see it at least six (and a half) times.

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