We went to a couple games at the stadium, and the overwhelming focus was on the Dodgers. At the Dodgers – White Sox game, there were roughly 3x more people watching Dodgers workouts.

The Dodgers still carted out Tommy in his jersey to meet the fans and sign autographs, and players were stopping and interacting with fans on their way to/from the clubhouse before the game. I saw the same string barriers that existed in Vero Beach – something almost nonexistant anywhere in Arizona.

To me, it’s not about what’s plastered on the wall or what the place looks like when the team isn’t there – on the contrary, it’s about what the team transforms the facility into while they are there. The fact that the Dodgers can pull that off here and make it a real Dodger experience is what I appreciated most.

Finally, I think everyone has to accept that most new spring training facilities that are built with public funds are going to have to be two-team venues. The economics just don’t work otherwise.

Thanks for the link to your experience. What’s interesting is that we didn’t experience nearly as many problems as you did with parking. While traffic started building after we got on street after the freeway exit, it kept moving so we didn’t get stuck in a backlog. We did get funnelled into the dirt lot with the long walk on day one. As I mentioned in the post, the walk was long and fine for me, but would have been trouble if I had my two year-old nephew or pregnant sister-in-law with me. We arrived super early for the second game (10:00 a.m.), so didn’t experience any parking issues, but I was still pretty surprised to see a steady flow of cars going into the primary parking lot. Based on my experience, the biggest parking issue is that walk from the dirt lot to the stadium. If you’re not expecting it, you could pass up the bicycle cabs (and their fee) and then feel you made the wrong choice about 10 minutes into the walk. In hindsight, that was a really long walk! Maybe it didn’t seem as long to us as we were amped up on our first visit. Not sure what the Dodgers can do about this other than alert people to the length of the walk when they leave their cars.

That has to be some kind or recornd man. Contact guinness!

So I would be curious: where did you end up parking? Maybe it’s a case of differing expectations, but my experience was vastly different.