If They Could Turn This Park Around ...

Walking into Sky Sox Stadium, by then called Security Service Field, Aug-2009.

The seating bowl, as seen from down the third-base line.

The park overlooks the plain, now rapidly filling with developments, rather than the mountains.

Chronological Tour: Stop 83

• Location: Barnes Road and Tutt Avenue (just east of Powers Boulevard), Colorado Springs, Colo. (map it using Google Maps)
• Opened: 1988 as Sky Sox Stadium
• Additional names: Security Service Field (2005), UCHealth Park (2019)
• Home team: Colorado Springs Sky Sox, Pacific Coast League (1988-2018), Pioneer League (2019-present)
• Capacity: 8,500

Rating: 2 baseballs

Because of issues with the direction of the sun, most fields face eastward. (That’s why a left-handed pitcher is called a southpaw – when he faces west to pitch to the batter, his pitching arm is on his south side.) But Sky Sox Stadium is built at the top of a hill. To the west, you have the Monument River valley and the majestic Front Range beyond, a gorgeous view. But since the field must face east, you wind up looking out over a gentle but barren slope that stretches all the way to Kansas City.

On top of that, the park is one of the last to have been completed before the current “retro” trend. The facility does look OK from the outside, but the interior is utilitarian. Still, until a few years ago it was the only affiliated minor league ball in the Centennial State, as the Zephyrs took off for Louisiana in 1993 with the arrival of the Colorado Rockies in Denver.

Correspondent Chris Moyer of Colorado Springs advised me that since my 1995 visit, the city of Colorado Springs had expanded sufficiently that the view from the park now includes numerous additional housing developments as well as a golf course. In addition, in 2005 the Sky Sox arranged with Security Service Federal Credit Union for an infusion of cash for ballpark renovations in exchange for naming rights. The park became Security Service Field for the duration of the stay of the Sky Sox.

I returned to the park in August 2009, keeping an open mind. Unfortunately, I found too many negatives for me to alter my rating. To start with, they charge $5 to park in the lot, at a park that is still not within walking distance for too many people. In addition, the game staff seems to pay little attention to the true baseball fan, not even making available a sheet with the current rosters for each team. The lineup boards do not have room for uniform numbers. Also, the graphics board operators are more concerned with the Fan Cam than with displaying the name of the new pitcher for more than five seconds. I find this appalling for the Triple-A level.

To the park’s credit, there is a new party deck located down the right-field foul line which joyfully accommodates many fans each evening for all-you-can-eat refreshments.

In 2017, the Elmore Group, owner of the Sky Sox and several other clubs, announced that the Sky Sox franchise would be transferred to San Antonio, to play at Wolff Stadium. Colorado Springs, which has trouble drawing fans in the lingering cold weather of April and May, will instead get a team in the short-season Pioneer League, to be transferred from Helena, Mont. Along with a new team, the park got a new sponsor; it is now UCHealth Park.