‘Welcome to the new Loeb Stadium:’ Opening night just the start
Lafayette Mayor Tony Roswarski stood in the concourse just above the first base dugout of the new Loeb Stadium Wednesday afternoon, the first fans filing in the Wallace Avenue entrance and waving commemorative opening day ticket stubs his way.
“Welcome to the new Loeb Stadium,” Roswarski said over and over – to city council members, to parents of Lafayette Jeff and Central Catholic baseball players there to christen the $21 million facility at Columbian Park and to anyone else in the sold-out crowd of roughly 1,300.
Against a stiff breeze blowing in from left field, one that Roswarski said made him make a detour home to get a winter coat for a baseball game, the mayor told Lafayette City Council member Lon Heide something he’d repeat during on-field opening ceremonies several minutes later.
“It’s a new day – it’s a new beginning,” Roswarski said. “You know, this is just the start.”
That new day, marked by Lafayette Jeff’s first game at its rebuilt home field, was years in the making. And not just in the 20 months it took between the demolition of the original Loeb Stadium following a final Lafayette Aviators game in August 2019 and the March 31, 2021, dedication of the new one.
The last substantial repairs to an aging Loeb Stadium, a cornerstone of Lafayette’s Columbian Park since 1940, came in 2015. At that point, Roswarski already was pressing for a complete overhaul for Loeb as part of bigger aspirations for the stadium, for the park and for the neighborhood’s place as a destination and as an eventual entrance to downtown.
“We knew that we wanted it to be about baseball,” Roswarski said. “We knew that we wanted to create memories here. But we also knew we wanted it to be more than that.”
Roswarski has talked from the beginning about how the city took pains to design the new Loeb to accommodate other events, including concerts, football games and possibly as a lure for a soccer team.
The new Loeb Stadium flipped the field layout 180 degrees so home plate, the grandstands and the ticket office back up to the corner of Main Street and Wallace Avenue. That gives the city a new façade along Main Street, heading toward the Five Points intersection, where Lafayette is hoping for the next redevelopment extension stretching from downtown. Roswarski put the new Loeb Stadium in with what he calls the “three L’s” – the Long Center and the newly acquired Lafayette Theater in downtown as the others – as venues the city has for events.
“I’m not sure any community in the country, our size, is going to have that kind of flexibility,” Roswarski said.
Wednesday was about showcasing the stadium for baseball fans for the first time.
“I don’t know what else to say except that this is incredible,” Dave Ehlers, who has been coming to Lafayette Jeff baseball games since 1978, said. “Just look at this place.”
The new stadium seats 2,600 people, with 1,910 of those in chairback seats that replace the former Loeb Stadium’s metal bleachers on concrete stands. (Opening night was limited to 50 percent capacity due to COVID-19 precautions.) Tables on concourse patios and lawn seating, along with second-level suites, will make up much of the rest of the capacity.
Fences are 340 to left, 315 to right and 414 to straightaway center. The field, including basepaths and the warning track, is synthetic turf. Lafayette Jeff baseball coach Scott McTagertt said the turf, lined with a shaved coconut and cork backing, would play a bit slower than some rubber-pellet backed turf fields players might see elsewhere. (Pro tip: McTagertt also said he’d been warning his team after watching his players adjust to the difference between sliding on turf and on dirt. “I guarantee,” McTagertt said, “you’ll see two or three guys slide past the bag until they get the feel for it.”)
A 24-by-43-foot videoboard, with live feeds from the game, looks in from left field, near the waterslides of Columbian Park’s Tropicanoe Cove.
As his Bronchos warmed up Wednesday, McTagertt reminisced about the old Loeb Stadium, where he’d gone to games as a grade-schooler, threw a no-hitter during the 1984 Colt World Series as a teen and then played and coached with Lafayette Jeff. He said he’d met dozens of strangers who’d drop by Loeb Stadium to visit during a layover in Indianapolis and tell stories about how they’d played there in high school or in the Colt World Series the city hosted for more than four decades.
“That place meant everything to me – and to my family,” McTagertt said. “My daughter even said she was going to chain herself to the old Loeb Stadium before they tore it down. But then you get this. … I figured it was all going to be a tad bit more, with all the excitement over it. What they put together, it’s just unreal. They didn’t miss a thing.”
Loeb Stadium will be home to the Lafayette Aviators in the Prospect League, which is devoted to teams of college-age players using wooden bats. (The city plans another round of opening day celebrations when the Aviators open their season June 1.) But as central to Loeb Stadium’s remake, Roswarski said, was keeping it as the home of Lafayette Jeff. A third of the seat rows are branded with the Bronchos’ logo.
Lafayette Jeff Principal Mark Preston, whose son started at catcher for the Bronchos on opening night, directly addressed the players during pregame ceremonies: “Don’t ever take it for granted. … Few teams across the country have a facility like this to call their home field.”
McTagertt said that didn’t seem to be an issue, based on the first few weeks of practices.
“Mr. Preston talked about it, and we’ve talked about it,” McTagertt said. “The kids, they all stick around, they want extra ground balls, they stick around for another hour and enjoy themselves. They sit in the locker room and talk. That wasn’t happening at old Loeb. It’s helped improve the culture, I guess.”
Wednesday was a night of firsts. Paul “Spider” Fields, legendary Lafayette Jeff baseball coach surrounded by his players from the ‘60s and ‘70s, threw out the first ball at age 94. (Afterward, Roswarski announced that an anonymous donor stepped up to name the Loeb Stadium entryway for Fields and his wife, Amelia.) Central Catholic’s Mark Cramer was the first to reach base, hit by a pitch in the top of the first inning. Jeff’s Caleb Koeppen had the first hit, a triple to right field in the bottom of the first. Koeppen scored the first run later that inning.
The first victory went to the Knights, who held off a Jeff rally in the bottom of the seventh to win 7-4.
Behind home plate, Maurie Denney, a Lafayette parks board member and former Lafayette Jeff athletic director, was taking things in from what he jokingly dubbed “the GODS suite.” (He and fellow Lafayette Jeff backers Gail Gripe, Bill Olds and Carlynn Smith each chipped in for the suite for the high school season, while chipping in a letter each for the GODS acronym.)
“I’m up here thinking about what the parks superintendent and the project engineer must have been thinking when they looked at Loeb Stadium back in 1940,” Denney said. “It was state-of-the-art and an amazing place. But we squeezed everything possible out of that old place.”
Denney called the new Loeb Stadium “a corner diamond” anchoring other improvements at the park, from the addition of giant water slides at Tropicanoe Cove three years ago, construction of a carousel house just past Loeb’s centerfield, a new amphitheater going up on Memorial Island and a rebuilt seawall at Columbian Park’s lagoon.
“I hope in 50 years, people come back and say this Loeb Stadium was even better and provided more memories than even the last one,” Denney said.
By the end of game Wednesday, temperatures dipped into the upper 30s, as winds picked up. More than half of the 1,300 people who snagged those commemorative tickets and rally towels the parks department had made for the day had gone home long before the final out.
Not Margaret Smith. The Lafayette resident said she didn’t have a rooting allegiance to Jeff or CC. Cold even under the blankets she brought – “My feet are like blocks of ice,” she said – Smith said she was just a baseball fan, happy to see the season start. And happy to see Loeb Stadium open after watching it go up.
Though, she suggested maybe there should have been souvenirs for those who stuck it out, shivering through the seventh inning.
“Not that I’d need that,” Smith said. “What a great night. What a great place.”
Welcome to the new Loeb Stadium.
Written By: Dave Bangert
Sponsored By: Scott Brown – Real Estate Brown Team
Greater Lafayette Real Estate News Presented by the Real Estate Brown Team at Keller Williams Lafayette 