Le Stade de Québec

Exterior of le Stade de Québec, from a nearby pedestrian walkway, Jul-2001.

The seating bowl and press box.

That’s a chicken on the scoreboard, posting zeroes for the visiting team.

Chronological Tour: Stop 201

• Location: Victoria Park off Laurentian Autoroute (QC 175), Québec, Qc. (map it using Google Maps)
• Opened: 1939 as Stade municipal
• Additional names: Stade Canac (2017)
• Home team: Québec Athlétiques, Québec Provincial League (1939-40), Canadian-American League (1941-42); Québec Alouettes, Canadian-American League (1946-48); Québec Braves, Canadian-American League (1949-50), Provincial League (1951-55); Québec Carnavals (1971-75), Metros (1976-77), Eastern League; Les Capitales de Québec, Northeast League (1999-2004), Can-Am League (2005-19), Frontier League (2020-present)
• Capacity: 4,800

Rating: 3 baseballs

The building has dual indoor concourses, one to the reserved seating and one to the general admission area which is achieved through portals on each side of the main lobby. I’m sure the wooden seats in the general admission area and the reserved seats behind the plate are original.

And then there’s the manual scoreboard, complete with chicken. Some have called it a goose, because it posts the goose eggs for the visiting team, but it’s definitely a chicken and it, or the public address system, makes chicken noises. Seems that in French, zeroes are chicken eggs, oeufs (the French l’oeuf, the egg, gave us the tennis term “love” meaning a zero score). Sadly, as of my 2015 visit, the chicken no longer appears, although the visiting team still gets goose eggs on the board (while the home team gets standard zeroes).

The ballpark has a sister facility upstream in Trois-Rivières; the two parks, built to the same blueprint, have often been used by league rivals, in the old Can-Am League and its successor Provincial League in the 1940s and ’50s, as well as for seven years in the 1970s in the Eastern League. The stadiums again housed rivals in the independent Can-Am League starting in 2013. The cities are a mere 78 miles apart on the A-40 freeway.

Both this ballpark and the one in Trois-Rivières have short fences. The distance to the center field wall at each park is only about 372 feet. A higher wall makes up some, but certainly not all, of the difference.