Luxury seating areas and upscale concessions have long been present in big-league, professional sports. In contrast, many minor-league ballparks, themselves aging concrete or brick edifices, offered uncomfortable bleachers and fare little better than your average high-school facility. However, that’s changing in today’s battle royal for the tightly stretched, family-entertainment dollar.
No longer able to profitably tout their product as a quaint bastion of bygone eras, minor-league team owners have revved up their marketing efforts, and signage has played a key role in developing stronger identities in new or retrofitted ballparks. The Lehigh Valley (PA) IronPigs, the Triple-A affiliate of the Philadelphia Phillies, embraced this trend and constructed Coca-Cola Park, a state-of-the-art, 8,100-seat facility.
L&H Co. (Reading, PA) fabricated and installed the package. Scott Long, the shop’s creative director, said it was important to reiterate the region’s hardhat heritage in the park’s environmental graphics. The shop took its architectural cues from HOK Sport (Kansas City, MO), but enjoyed complete freedom in developing the sign program.
Plan D, a San Diego-based company that has developed new logos for numerous minor-league teams, created the IronPigs’ updated logo. The Coca-Cola logo, which has stood proudly as an American cultural icon for more then a century, looms over the scoreboard, but L&H created all other sign and environmental-graphic designs.
“Manufacturing has historically played such a big role in the history and development of Allentown, Reading, Bethlehem and other cities in our region,” he explained.
With this in mind, L&H developed a rust-colored coating for its wayfinding and environmental graphics that nods to the area’s manufacturing history. The wayfinding program’s hardware accents, which emphasize buckles, rivets and steel beams, resonated with team ownership, Long said. The wayfinding system entailed coating CNC-routed aluminum with solvent-ink-printed vinyl graphics.
To recognize the Lehigh Valley’s athletic history, L&H designer Melissa Derick devised a timeline for the concourse stairwell that commemorates historic local baseball squads, such as championship high-school teams and club squads from the local steel mills. L&H produced the program using 3M’s Controltac IJ180C-10 film with Comply repositionable adhesive, which it output in numerous tiles on its Mutoh Spitfire mild-solvent printer.
To connect with 21st-Century audiences, L&H couldn’t solely stake the program on historical tributes and connotations. The program also features a vibrant complement of signs that pairs Coca-Cola and Budweiser logos with lively signage, as well as unique concession graphics.
L&H fabricated the 70 x 12-ft., point-of-entry signage with perforated-aluminum panels, onto which it installed ¼-in.-thick, CNC-routed, flat, cut-out, polycarbonate letters that were backmounted with threaded studs. The 82 x 95-ft. scoreboard incorporates a 50 x 19½-ft. Daktronics readerboard and five, formed cabinets covered with 3M’s Panaflex® flexible-face material lit with internal fluorescent bulbs.
The shop fabricated the 28-ft.-tall, Coca-Cola bottle, which can sway in unison with fireworks displays through directions from a Dynapac controller. L & H formed a Duna Board HDU mold, which it fashioned with a CNC router, enveloped with thermoformed acrylic, decorated with first- and second-surface digital prints and outfit it with exposed-neon accents.
To identify the Bud Light Trough, the park’s beer garden, lead fabricators Duane Day, Josh Walley and their team produced the 28 x 4-ft. sign with 15mm, Voltarc neon powered by France transformers, acrylic faces, and aluminum returns and hardware. The other concession signs comprise CNC-routed acrylic and Celtec® rigid-foam, PVC faces, aluminum fixtures, and Chemetal high-pressure, metallic coatings.
And, though the work was completed in time for this season’s home opener, Long doesn’t consider Coca-Cola Park’s environmental graphics finished: “We’re still browsing the stadium to see where opportunities for additional signage and wayfinding might exist. There are always plenty of opportunities for signage to help build a brand.”
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