Pensacola went without a minor league baseball team for a season while this ballpark was under construction. This the Blue Wahoos' inaugural season.

After a day of the boys playing baseball, we headed out to downtown Pensacola for an evening with the Pensacola Blue Wahoos — the city’s brand new AA Minor League baseball team. They had a team called the Pelicans until 2010, but for summer 2011, there was no professional baseball in the area. We’re excited to have a team to watch locally now.

About a month ago, the local Boy Scout Council announced that May 5th was “Scout Night” with the Blue Wahoos. Unfortunately, the first two months of games was were nearly sold out and even within an hour of receiving the announcement about Scout Night, I couldn’t get 4 tickets together for the family. So I went ahead and got two sets of two tickets.

There was a Scout parade at 6pm but we didn’t get to the park in time. Instead, we chose to stop for dinner.

The park isn’t that big, it seats 5,000 people, so there weren’t really poor seats anywhere. We were at the very end of the first base line…which still gave us a good view of the game itself, but we could barely see the scoreboard. Jacob, our statistics boy, was trying to track the speeds of the pitches.

Timmy is in some sort of "Look at me, I'm cute!" pose phase.

After the game, there was a great fireworks show. This is where our far-away seats really paid off — we had a great view of the fireworks, and the smoke flows AWAY from us towards those sitting on the third base line, ha ha!

Navy Federal sponsored the fireworks. They didn't let us forget that. Their name is all over the ball park, too 🙂

Like we did in Omaha, the Scouts had a chance to camp at the Blue Wahoos ballpark after the game and fireworks. We chose not to camp — we did it before and we are asked to leave VERY early the following morning. I recommend everyone experience the ballpark camping — even if just ONCE.

In both instances, the park played a movie on the scoreboard TV screen before bed, so bedtime for these boys would have been well after midnight. We left at 10pm and they still hadn’t started the movie. I took a picture of the tents on the field just before we left.

Tents on the field at Blue Wahoos park.

I found this picture from when we camped in 2010 at the (now closed) Rosenblatt Stadium in Omaha:

Cock-a-doodle-doo! This is what the sky looked like when an announcement came on for us to wake up, pack our stuff, and clear the field. This is from July 2010.

As we were leaving the park, we found Kazoo, the Blue Wahoo’s mascot. He was very patient as I fiddled with my camera to get a nice nighttime picture:

Kazoo is the Pensacola Blue Wahoos Mascot.

And Timmy took a nice picture of me. Thanks Timmy!