The wooden stadium
Scottsdale’s first ballpark was built by volunteers. In 1955 the Scottsdale Baseball Club raised the money and put up a 3,000-seat wooden grandstand at Osborn and Civic Center, and in March 1956 the Baltimore Orioles opened camp there, Governor Ernest McFarland throwing the first pitch. The Red Sox followed (1959–65, Ted Williams’ last springs), then the Cubs (1967–78), the A’s (1979–83) and, from 1984, the San Francisco Giants. By then the old park held 4,721 and was falling down; the Giants wanted a modern facility, and other Cactus League cities were building them.
The city answered fast. Ground was broken in April 1991 on the same site; the design went to HOK Sport, the Kansas City firm whose Oriole Park at Camden Yards would open in Baltimore three weeks after Scottsdale’s park did; and on March 12, 1992, eleven months later, the new Scottsdale Stadium opened for the Giants: $7 million, 12,000 seats in brick and green steel, a grass berm in the outfield, a block from Old Town’s saloons.
A baseball town
The park did more than keep the Giants. That autumn it became home to the Scottsdale Scorpions of the new Arizona Fall League, the prospects’ league that brought Michael Jordan to Scottsdale in 1994. A $23.1 million renovation in 2006 added a clubhouse and hosted World Baseball Classic games; the Giants signed a lease through 2025 with options to 2035, and another renovation followed in 2019. The Cactus League that had begun with fifteen games in Tucson in 1947 consolidated in the Valley by 2012, and Scottsdale — with the Giants downtown and, from February 26, 2011, the Diamondbacks and Rockies at Salt River Fields on the community’s land next door — became its center.
The spring training guide covers how to go; the 1990s chapter covers the decade the city built the rest of its calendar.