The Shadows of Mount Rainier

Walking up to Cheney Stadium, Aug-2004.

A good look at the seating areas.

The view from behind the plate. Mount Rainier is off to the right, and obscured anyhow.

Chronological Tour: Stop 168

• Location: Tyler Street and 19th Avenue, Tacoma, Wash. (map it using Google Maps)
• Opened: 1960 (most recent renovation: 2011)
• Home team: Tacoma Giants (1960-65), Cubs (1966-71), Twins (1972-77), Yankees (1978), Tugs (1979), Tigers (1980-94), Rainiers (1995-present), Pacific Coast League
• Capacity: 9,600

Rating: 3 baseballs

It’s a 1960 park, with a nice unobstructing roof covering the grandstand. Additional bleachers have been erected along the foul lines (it’s here, not in the grandstand, that one can see Mount Rainier). The upper rows of the grandstand are aluminum benches for general admission; the area below the walkway is box seating, which features modern stadium seats.

Ben Cheney.

Well, no longer. The 2011 renovation of the park turned the main seating bowl into a more modern facility, with folding stadium seats. It also built a new suite and press box area above the main bowl. (New photos will follow soon.) A prior round of renovations for the 2007 season also saw significant upgrades to the ballpark. The left-field bleachers have been removed to make a triple-tiered picnic area. A new wrought-iron fence surrounds much of the park, and new art adorns the outside of the stadium.

Other oddities at Cheney include the fences, which are high (at least 15 feet) and shaped almost like a box, so 325-foot baselines become a 425-foot center field; and the bronze statue of Ben Cheney, forever holding his scorecard and eating his peanuts, in the first row of one of the grandstand sections.

Every so often, plans are aired to make major upgrades to Cheney. Instead of building a downtown park near the Tacoma Dome, one plan had the Rainiers keeping the same field and expand the existing stadium, going half-high down the right-field line and double-high down the left-field line as well as lopping off some of the right-field roof. This would have the effect of dramatically increasing the number of seats with views of Mount Rainier. That plan has gone nowhere, however, and there is continual talk about the team moving, perhaps as far as Honolulu. With the more recent rounds of renovations, however, those talks have died down. That said, the popularity of the park has made parking for games more difficult. Parking is also expensive, $10 per car as of 2017.