Pittsburgh Pirates' minor-league affiliate Altoona Curve offers idyllic baseball setting

ALTOONA — A couple of hours before first pitch, it’s easy to see the appeal of PNG Field, home of the Altoona Curve.

On a gorgeous June afternoon under clear skies, the Allegheny Mountains rise south of the Blair County ballpark, which is bookended by wooded hillsides. Over the right-fielder’s shoulder sits the Skyliner rollercoaster, just past the outfield wall in nearby Lakemont Park.

It’s almost like the landscape was molded to fit this baseball field.

The Double-A affiliate of the Pittsburgh Pirates is celebrating its 25th anniversary at the red-brick facility, and for fans who adore the pastoral nature of baseball that makes it unique among sports, it’s just about perfect.

On this weeknight, a steady stream of delicious-smelling smoke wafts from behind the right-field grandstands. That’s courtesy of Brock Roudabush and Cohen Hemminger, who are filling serving trays with freshly grilled burgers for the fans who will be arriving soon.

“On a normal day, one of us will come in around 1 p.m., and a second person will get in around 2 p.m.,” said Roudabush, 17, of nearby Blue Knob. “We start getting everything ready for the night.”

Hemminger, 17, of Hollidaysburg, said he and Roudabush judge how many burgers to prep based on ticket sales.

“Tonight’s presale is around 3,000 right now, so we’ll do 300 or 400 burgers to make sure we’re ready to go,” he said.

Two floors up, Preston Shoemaker is going over rosters, statistics and more as he prepares to announce the night’s game against the Bowie Baysox, a Maryland-based affiliate of the Baltimore Orioles.

Shoemaker, 23, the team’s assistant director of communication and broadcasting, is the first Blair County native to announce games on the two-stations-plus-online Curve radio network. WRTA in Altoona is the flagship station, with select games broadcast on WCRO in Johnstown.

“My dad and I had season tickets to the Curve growing up — first row along the third-base line — and I really fell in love with baseball here at the ballpark,” said Shoemaker, who grew up in Hollidaysburg about 10 minutes away. “Before I could even read, I was trying to score the game-day program.”

Shoemaker said he loves looking down from the press box at families enjoying a night in the stadium.

“When I see kids with their dads, running around to get autographs, I can remember doing that,” he said. “I grew up watching the Pirates, and you’d turn on the game looking for the guys you knew from Altoona. There’s a generation of Pirates fans from this area who’ve really helped grow that fandom.”

Tom Spessard and his wife, Fiona, are part of that growth. They’ve been attending Curve games the past three years, and now they are season ticket-holders.

“I was with the PGA Senior Tour as a tour rep for Arnold Palmer Golf, and we got to go to baseball games all over the U.S.,” said Spessard, 85, of Johnstown. “This is the closest thing I’ve seen to a major league ballpark.”

In the next section over, Jim Smilnak of Hollidaysburg was in his first season — his first day, actually — as an usher at PNG Field.

“I just retired after 33 years teaching in the Penn Cambria School District, and my ‘honey-do’ list was starting to get pretty long,” Smilnak said with a laugh.

While visiting with his son in Greensboro, N.C., Smilnak attended a Greensboro Grasshoppers minor-league game and got to talking with one of the ushers.

“It sounded like a pretty great job,” he said. “I love baseball, and they’re going to pay me to watch it? That’s pretty tough to beat.”

An evening at the ballpark

As a weeknight game gets underway with the first pitch at 6:05 p.m. — officially recorded by one of several statisticians in the press box — things settle into an easy rhythm.

Fans amble around the concourse to see what they might want to eat or drink, including a $5 price tag — almost impossibly low in any ballpark — for a 24-ounce “man can” of beer. Children run up the steep hill behind the left-field bleachers, chase one another and tumble down toward the bottom. The crisp crack of bat on ball gives way to a flurry of chatter as fans wait to see where that ball is headed.

And between the fifth and sixth innings, an unmistakable floomp sound could only mean the Curve’s mascot is hard at work with the T-shirt gun.

In the early innings, shortstop Liover Peguero blasted a double into the left-field corner. That bumped his stats to 64 hits and eight home runs in the 2023 season.

For Shoemaker, the ability to help tell stories like Peguero’s is a big part of what drew him to a job with the Curve.

“A lot of fans come to the ballpark just for the fun atmosphere, but a lot of people come here because someone like Henry Davis is catching, and before the end of the year, he’ll be in Pittsburgh,” Shoemaker said.

Davis was called up to the big league club and played his first game just a day before, on June 19.

“In 2021, we had a pitcher named Trey McGough who grew up nearby in Johnstown,” Shoemaker said. “Being part of the organization … it’s great to have the privilege to share these guys’ stories with the fans.”

For usher Rick Cicero, who lives 20 minutes away in Munster and played baseball in his youth, the games are a chance to talk about one of his favorite sports with fellow fans.

“There are probably about 20 or so regulars in my section that I’ve gotten to know,” he said.

The Curve lost to the Baysox, and they had a tough stretch in June, finishing the first half of the season with a .500 record, good for third place in the Eastern League’s Southwest division.

And while players are working to improve their record and earn a spot in The Show — that’s what they call the big leagues — employees work hard to ensure everyone who comes to PNG Field leaves with a smile on their face, regardless of the final score.

“We’re a small staff,” said Jon Mozes, communication director for the Curve. “When you drive by the ballpark, you’d think 75 or 80 people work here, but our main staff is about 25 people, so things don’t get done without a lot of us pulling together.”

‘We’re pretty close-knit’

The ballpark at standing-room-only can fit about 10,000 people and has seating for a little more than 7,000.

Average attendance through 32 home games this year has been 4,363, a small bump from 2022 (4,330) and 2021 (4,032).

“It appears we’re on a nice upswing coming out of the pandemic and getting closer to where we were in 2019, with 4,604 for average attendance,” Mozes said.

On a Friday or Saturday night, marketing, promotions and special events director Mike Kessling’s job is pretty straightforward: fireworks, giveaways and celebrity appearances.

But how does one go about marketing just under 70 home games of minor-league baseball in a county of about 120,000 people?

In Kessling’s world, you get fun. Sometimes you get weird.

“There’s a little more freedom, and you have the ability to be more creative in what you can do with sponsors and promotions,” Kessling said.

Case in point: A recent doubleheader was dubbed “Redd Up Night,” for which Curve staff cleaned out the ballpark and found some older items they gave to the first couple hundred fans through the gates. It might be a game-used glove. It might be an old Curve-branded trash can.

In late May, the ballpark held a “Salute to Famous Birds,” featuring avian luminaries such as the bald eagle, Big Bird and the Road Runner. In the locker room, it prompted pitcher Brad Case to tweet a photo of the PNG Field scoreboard showing the promotion with the caption “Minor league baseball isn’t real life.”

“We’re in a unique situation because we’re the smallest Double-A market around,” Curve general manager Nate Bowen said. “When we’re home two weeks in a row, it’s tougher than a place like Richmond where there’s so many more people to draw from.”

However, Bowen estimated that the ballpark would bring in about 40,000 people over the course of their five-game homestand against the Baysox — that’s more than the population of Altoona.

“The nice thing is, we draw from a 60-mile radius,” he said. It helped front-office staff develop a slogan marketing the Curve as “Everybody’s Hometown Team” in the early 2000s.

A smaller community also means a close-knit staff inside the ballpark.

“My wife and daughter both work here during the season,” Kessling said.

Until recently, the Curve was a family-owned team. Owner Bob Lozinak built up a sizable group of McDonald’s franchises before turning his efforts toward bringing a minor-league baseball team to his hometown of Altoona. After succeeding in that goal in 1999, Lozinak sold the team to an ownership group in 2001 before buying it back in 2008.

Last Wednesday , Lozinak announced the sale of the team to Diamond Baseball Holdings, an ownership group that operates several minor-league clubs.

Mozes said he doesn’t expect the ownership change to affect the Curve’s day-to-day operations.

Shortly before Wednesday’s doubleheader, Kessling was with his 11-year-old son Dylan, who was helping stack promotional items on a folding table that will get set up just inside the main gates at game time.

“See, I told you my family works here,” Kessling said with a laugh.

“Whoa, hey, I’m doing this for free!” Dylan quickly retorted.

When Bowen got married, he estimated about 70 people at his wedding either currently or previously worked with the Curve.

“I think it speaks volumes,” Kessling said, “that we’re such a close-knit staff.”