GOLDEN—The Trump administration has scouted sites inside Grand Teton National Park for a Major League Baseball ballpark, the Washington Post reported Saturday, after MLB asked about staging a regular-season game in a national park. National Park Service Deputy Director Frank Lands toured three potential locations, including one the Post described as “already disturbed land.” WyoFile, reporting from the park Sunday, noted that while a baseball field can cover about four acres, a stadium can take 25 and a full complex with parking hundreds more, and that the park’s recently disturbed sagebrush amounts to roughly 10 acres bulldozed for a trailhead parking expansion. Visitors WyoFile spoke with greeted the news with disbelief, and neither Interior nor MLB responded to requests for comment.
The Center for Western Priorities released the following statement from Executive Director Aaron Weiss:
“Doug Burgum’s field of nightmares would drop a 20,000-seat stadium into one of America’s most-visited national parks while his department blocks hundreds of grants to the partner organizations that keep parks running. It’s another swing and a miss from the Interior secretary, who has already diverted millions of dollars from park entrance fees to the president’s botched vanity projects. We can’t afford to let Grand Teton become his single-use sandlot. A ballpark there would be bad news for the park’s bears… and every other animal.”
“America’s national parks are already in a league of their own. We have a responsibility to care for them, not turn them into a TV spectacle.”