Mercer County Waterfront Park

Mercer County Waterfront Park, Apr-2001.

A view of the seats, luxury boxes, and press box.

From behind home plate, you can see the Delaware River and on into Pennsylvania.

Chronological Tour: Stop 63

• Location: Cass Street at NJ 29, Trenton, N.J. (map it using Google Maps)
• Opened: 1994 as Mercer Co. Waterfront Park
• Additional names: Arm & Hammer Park (2013-20)
• Home team: Trenton Thunder, Eastern League (1994-2019), MLB Draft League (starting 2022); Buffalo Bisons, Triple-A East (2021)
• Capacity: 6,440

Rating: 4 baseballs

Due to a rough winter, the park’s opening was delayed slightly, and the sod never exactly took that initial season, creating rainouts on evenings when the sky was clear.

That didn’t take away from an outstanding design job, however. The upper concourse is spacious, and the park looks out over the Delaware River. Numerous fly balls each season land in the drink, and several of them are even fair.

In 1999, about 400 seats were added to the park, a feat accomplished by building a few new rows in certain sections. This had the effect of reducing the amount of foul territory in the park, as well as cutting down on the number of dates on which the only tickets available were standing-room.

After spending the 1994 season as a Detroit Tigers affiliate, the club served the Boston Red Sox from 1995 to 2002. Uniform numbers retired by the Thunder include Tony Clark of the Tigers and Nomar Garciaparra of the Red Sox. For 2003, the Red Sox switched their affiliation to Portland and the New York Yankees moved their affiliation from Norwich to Trenton. To commemorate this, the batter’s eye was painted Yankee blue. For a short time, it also featured a painted Yankee Stadium façade along the top; this was in place in June 2004 but gone by August.

The Yankees abandoned Trenton for the seemingly greener pastures to the north in Bridgewater for 2021, but the Thunder will play on as members of the MLB Draft League, an amateur league featuring the top draft-eligible players from high school and college. The Draft League team will start playing in Trenton come 2022, as the continuing closure of the Canadian border due to the COVID-19 pandemic caused the Toronto Blue Jays to relocate to Buffalo, N.Y., for the 2021 season. That, in turn, brought the Bisons to Trenton, where, as part of the deal to use Waterfront Park, the team will play home games as the Trenton Thunder.

Getting to the Game

The park is about a mile and a half from the Trenton train station, served by Amtrak, NJ Transit, and SEPTA. NJ Transit’s River LINE light rail service, which runs to Camden, has a stop at Cass Street and NJ 129, half a mile from the field, but service is irregular.

Watching the Game

The Thunder provide a free roster insert at every game, and the lineups are posted on a whiteboard on the back of the press box. The club generally does a good job posting the name of the batter on the message and video boards, and the announcer is proficient.

There is no wrap-around concourse here; the outfield is taken up by a four-sign-high advertising wall except down the right-field line, where views of the Delaware River are preserved. A new, large-format video board replaced a more conventional display board in right field for 2013, but it takes up the same footprint. There are picnic areas down the lines, but no accessible grass berm.

Except for the area directly behind the press box, the game is visible from the concourse, although one might not expect to see the game while ordering food at the concession stands, as the concourse is wide enough to allow for significant foot traffic.

Enjoying the Game

Concession prices for staples such as hot dogs and fries are reasonable. There are also specialty stands located down either foul line, offering New Jersey-specific items such as sandwiches made with pork roll (a delicacy that originated in Trenton in the late 19th century and remains popular in the state, often called “Taylor ham” for its largest purveyor).