What is Innings Festival?
Every February the Cactus League opens and the Valley fills with people who have organized a vacation around afternoon baseball. In 2018 Major League Baseball and C3 Presents, the Austin promoter behind Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits, decided those people needed something to do at night, and put a rock festival on the south shore of Tempe Town Lake. The first Innings Festival ran March 23–25 with Queens of the Stone Age, The Avett Brothers and Chris Stapleton on three stages, batting cages on the lawn and retired big-leaguers signing baseballs between sets.
It has been there every year since but one. The 2026 edition, February 20–22, was the first three-day festival since the debut: Mumford & Sons Friday, Twenty One Pilots Saturday, blink-182 Sunday, with Cage the Elephant, Lord Huron, The Fray, Sublime, Public Enemy and Big Boi beneath them and three-day general admission starting at $320. One week later the same stages hosted Extra Innings, the country sister weekend added in 2024, with Luke Bryan and Kane Brown headlining over Dierks Bentley, HARDY and Shaboozey.
The baseball is not just a name. Former Cubs pitcher Ryan Dempster hosts Off the Mound, a live talk show with ex-players (Mark Grace, Jake Peavy and Torii Hunter were on the 2026 roster), and the grounds have a speed-pitch booth and a home-run derby game. Attendance was about 25,000 in 2019 and has been reported at roughly 40,000 across the two weekends in recent years. For 2027 the main festival is set for February 26–28; the lineup and the Extra Innings dates were not announced as of October 2026. It is twenty minutes from Old Town down the Loop 101 and the 202, and the best reason to stay in the Valley the last weekend of February once the ballgame ends.
How to do it
Get on the presale list. C3 announces the lineup in September, opens a password presale a few days later and sells the cheapest GA tiers in that window. Three-day GA was $320 in 2026 and GA+ $440; GA+ buys a shaded lounge, dedicated bathrooms and bars, and is the tier worth paying for if you are over thirty. Single-day tickets show up later and sell out for the Saturday headliner. Extra Innings is a separate ticket.
Pick the day by the lineup, not the weather. All three days run noon to 10:30. Friday draws the smallest afternoon crowd because people are at work; by 5 p.m. it is full. The undercard matters here more than at most festivals, because C3 books the 3-to-6 p.m. slots with bands that headlined ten years ago (OK Go, Marcy Playground, Vertical Horizon, Bowling for Soup and Switchfoot in 2026) and the sing-alongs on the lawn are the best part of the day.
Parking is a Mill Avenue problem. The site sits where Mill Avenue meets the lake, so the festival crowd competes with Tempe’s bar crowd for the downtown garages. From Scottsdale take the 101 to the 202 west and exit at Rural Road for the ASU garages east of the park, or come in on Scottsdale Road, which becomes Rural at the lake. The light rail stops at Third Street and Mill, a five-minute walk, and at Veterans Way; park at a Tempe park-and-ride and ride in if you plan to drink.
Do the baseball. Off the Mound runs in the afternoon on a side stage and is the one thing here you cannot get at another C3 festival: ex-players telling stories to a crowd that knows the box scores. Hit the batting cages early, when the lines are short. Then see our spring training guide for the games; the Angels play at Tempe Diablo Stadium, three miles south, and a 1 p.m. game there followed by the festival is the full Tempe day.
Weather. Late February afternoons are in the 70s and the lake wind drops it to the 50s by the headliner. Layers, a hat, sunscreen, closed shoes for the dirt-and-grass field.
A spring-training product
Innings was designed as a piece of spring-training tourism before it was a music festival. Major League Baseball’s interest in 2018 was in the Cactus League’s visitors; C3’s was in a February date on a national festival calendar that is otherwise empty until Coachella. Tempe Beach Park, a city park reborn in 1999 as the lake’s front lawn, had already hosted big outdoor shows and sat a short walk from a light-rail line and twenty thousand parking spaces. The 2018 festival was a three-day, 36-act event. It was cut to two days in 2019, lost 2021 to the pandemic, and spent 2022 and 2023 running a Florida twin at Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium for the Grapefruit League, which C3 dropped after two years.
The format C3 settled on in 2024 was two weekends rather than one longer one: Innings for rock and alternative, Extra Innings for country and folk, each a two-day event a week apart on the same grounds. The headliners tell you who it is for: The Killers in 2025 and Twenty One Pilots in 2026 on the first weekend; Luke Bryan and Kane Brown on the second. The 2026 move back to three days for the main festival, with a blink-182 Sunday, was the first expansion since the debut, and the 2027 dates, February 26–28, hold the slot.
Why it matters to Scottsdale
Scottsdale has the Cactus League’s richest stadium and no music festival of this scale; the city’s venues are a ballpark, a civic center lawn and an equestrian ground, and the one big-promoter festival it has, the Dreamy Draw Music Festival, is a November event on the Civic Center. Innings is the festival Scottsdale visitors actually attend in spring, and it exists because Tempe had a lakefront park next to a university, a train line and a downtown that can absorb twenty thousand people at midnight. Twenty minutes is nothing. Buy the Saturday, see a ballgame first, and ride the train home.