Beach Bums professional baseball
With its Cape Cod cupolas, snow-white balconies and scalloped trim, Wuerfel Park looks more like a giant beachfront hotel than a ballpark.
That’s no accident. This is Traverse City, the Malibu of Michigan, where (for five months out of the year, anyway) life revolves around the golden beaches of Grand Traverse Bay. In 2006, Wuerfel Park became the home of this town’s first professional baseball team in almost a century: the Traverse City Beach Bums.
“We love the name, because to us it just speaks to the casual lifestyle of this community,” says developer Leslye Wuerfel, who with her husband John owns both the 4,550-seat ballpark and the Beach Bums franchise. “It’s fun to talk to people who don’t know anything about Traverse City. They ask, ‘You mean you have beaches up there?’ and we say, ‘Man, we’re all about the beach!’”
But apparently even hard-core beachcombers can take time for other pursuits, and the prospect of summer baseball has been creating a lot of excitement among residents and visitors to this resort community, where golf, sailing, fishing and boating already attract over two million visitors each summer.
The Beach Bums play in the independent Frontier League, which has 12 members in cities like Rockford, Ill., Evansville, Ind. and Columbia, Mo. The Wuerfels purchased the former Richmond Roosters franchise from Richmond, Ind. last fall, and the 24-member team plays nearly 100 games each season, about half of them at home.
The Beach Bums franchise has built a brand-new stadium near Chums Corner south of Traverse City. The team's season stretches from May through September, and the team plays a grueling schedule of six to seven games per week, about half of them at their brand new $8 million ballpark, Wuerfel Field.
The ballpark features 3,518 permanent chair-back seats, 27 luxury suites, a corporate deck, a private table deck and an eight-foot pedestrian walkway that allows fans to walk around the recessed playing field. And because the field is below ground level, the park doesn’t reveal its true nature until one is actually inside, looking down past its rows of seats to the emerald green of the infield.
“If you drive up to most stadiums, what you see is a huge blank wall,” said John Wuerfel, who was the designing architect and general contractor for the project. “This is a softer design, like a hotel or a condo development, and it fits in better with Traverse City’s distinctive resort architecture.”
The new stadium is located in a rural area south of Traverse City’s beachfront district, and is already attracting new development in its wake – including the proposed Wild Buffalo Lodge, a 400-room resort and waterpark.
Chair-back seats will cost $10 per game, while general admission (lawn seats) sell for $6 ($3 for senior citizens and children five and under). Tickets can be ordered on the team’s Web site at www.traversecitybeachbums.com.
