by J. Brooks Terry
Staff Writer
It may not be surprising to anyone who has already been, but attendance at Jacksonville Suns home games is up. In fact, according to team owner Peter Bragan Jr., almost twice as many fans are showing up at the new “fan friendly” Baseball Grounds of Jacksonville if only out of curiosity.
“We’re about double what we were doing before because people really want to see it,” said Bragan. “We’re averaging 5,000 a game and on opening night, we had about 12,000. It’s been wonderful. We’ve even had people who had never even been to Wolfson Park buying ticket packages because they like it so much. It’s a nice, relaxing place to watch a ball game and just about everyone who sees it, loves it.”
And though having their fair share of opening glitches, Bragan said they’re working through most of them.
“It would have been nice if we had had about 30 more days to prepare, but we’re straightening things out as we go,” he said. “We had problems with the concessions when we opened because we really weren’t ready. The park was ready. The field was almost ready. The food needed about two weeks. Now I think we’re doing OK.”
Following more reliable food service, fans can also expect a menu expansion once two new fryers arrive.
“We haven’t served the first French fry yet,” said Bragan. “We have some fryers now, but they just aren’t enough. When the new fryers get here, we’ll be able to serve corn dogs and chicken nuggets and things like that. If we tried to serve that kind food with what we have now, we wouldn’t be able to keep up and people would get mad. We’ve had to stagger the food, but there was no other way. Soon, we’ll be full bore.”
And there’s more.
“We’ll be serving pizza, too,” said Bragan.
Another issue for the Suns: parking.
“Parking was a big problem on opening night and on the first Thursday,” said Bragan. “Every time I hear about plans for a parking garage down here, it gets eliminated. We desperately need one.”
Bragan said he expects parking to only get worse once construction on the new arena across the street from the ball park is completed.
“It’s coming up there, but we need to be careful. In a perfect world, they’d be away while we were home and they would be home while we were away every time, but that probably won’t happen,” said Bragan. “One night I’m sure they’ll have an arena football game at the same time that we’re playing and it will be a cluster, a mess. That’s my only concern about them being so close. Other than that, I look forward to this area being great when we’re all done.”