Decent Idea, Poor Execution

The expansive Cardinal Stadium is way too big for minor league baseball games.

Another view of the football stands in right field.

Chronological Tour: Stop 113

• Location: State Fairgrounds, Louisville, Ky. (map it using Google Maps)
• Opened: 1956 as Fairgrounds Stadium (1968 for baseball)
• Additional names: Cardinal Stadium (1982)
• Closed: 1999 for pro baseball
• Demolished: 2019
• Home team: Louisville Colonels, International League (1968-72); Louisville Redbirds, American Association (1982-97); Louisville RiverBats, International League (1998-99); University of Louisville Cardinals, Conference USA (1998-2004)
• Capacity: 33,500 (19,900 for baseball)

Rating: 1 baseball

As a result, the park had a football horseshoe configuration, giving it very strange dimensions for a baseball game (though not as bad as those at Winnipeg Stadium). Worse yet, the game was played on artificial turf here, just as it was in Winnipeg.

A new baseball-only park opened for the RiverBats in 2000, and the college opened a new Cardinal Stadium for football in 1998. The University of Louisville baseball team moved into Cardinal Stadium on a temporary basis, starting in 1998, while they awaited the renovation of Parkway Field, an old minor-league facility on the U of L campus. The original plan called for a new stadium to be built around that field, which was built in 1923 but which saw its grandstand razed in 1961. However, the Parkway Field project was eventually abandoned, and Cardinal baseball is now played at Patterson Field.

Cardinal Stadium’s ultimate destiny was merely as an exhibition field at the state fairgrounds. But after several years in which the State Fair Board deemed the seating unsafe, demolition of the facility was authorized in 2018 and completed in 2019.