The Years at TELUS Field
User Story
By Alex Karen
2007/2008 Season
Ahhh. Nothing like being in the stands on Sunday watching a good old Edmonton Trappers game. Got my Sprite. Got my soft pretzel. And one of my favorite players, Valentino Pascucchi, is up to bat. This…this is the life. The crack of the bat, fly ball out to left field. All the players are so friendly. How do I know this? I am one of the few people who got to watch these guys practice. Get up, game day, first thing in the morning. Dave Huppert, a manager at the time, was renting out the basement. He would take me out to the empty field to watch the team practice, and even have breakfast with the boys.
Some of the souvenirs were absolutely amazing. One of the many: an authentic Louisville Slugger full-sized baseball bat. Yet another: a baseball signed by all the players on the team at the time. All this memorabilia is still important to me to this day. The Trappers had officially some of the best family-friendly fun events to date. They had the home run contest which consisted of a child running the bases against the mascot. If you won, you got a lunch kit full of souvenirs. Anyone could run the bases after most games if you wished too. But then it was all gone.
2008/2009 Season
The days of the Trappers are over. Now the Cracker Cats Club is located at TELUS Field. This is absolutely atrocious. These guys come in, take out a family barbeque area, and replace it with a no minors pub. They took every single inch of family-friendliness out of that stadium. At the second season opener there were more people on the benches than in the stands for that very reason. That, my friend, is depressing. And if that happens to a team, you know they are going to go under. Within two seasons, they did.
2009/2010 and 2010/2011 Seasons
Edmonton’s been going through baseball teams as if they were dollar store socks, but we are a resilient town when it comes to sports. And I think we’ve finally settled on a team: the Edmonton Capitals. They have the perfect balance between half-decent baseball and family-friendly sport, and it’s more fun than monkeys in a barrel. They’re pulling in more people than the Cracker Cats ever did. They will be popular so quickly too, especially with all the promotions. I mean they have fireworks on the last Friday game of every month, drive-in movies, toonie Tuesday, wiener Wednesday and much more! I hope the Capitals can stay around a long time.
