First: the name.
Prairie dogs were called sod poodles by Panhandle settlers in the nineteenth century. The same flat, wind-scoured grassland that made this place brutal to homestead produced so many of them — ten, twenty billion animals at peak, tunneling the entire region into an underground city of their own — that the settlers invented a name for them that tells you exactly what the settlers thought of them: small, loud, and everywhere, like a dog that was made of dirt.
The Amarillo Sod Poodles. Double-A affiliate of the Arizona Diamondbacks. Texas League champions in their inaugural 2019 season. Playing downtown in a stadium that cost sixty million dollars and nearly broke the city before the first pitch was thrown.
The stadium is beautiful. This is not a dispute. Walk the perimeter on a summer evening, with the lights on and the smell of the field coming through the gates, and it is genuinely, straightforwardly beautiful in the way that baseball parks are beautiful — which is to say, it is beautiful in a way that has nothing to do with the money.
In November of 2015, the people of Amarillo voted on whether to build it.
Fifty-two percent said yes. Forty-eight percent said no. Eight hundred and twenty votes separated them. That is a close vote. That is, functionally, a tied vote. Half of Amarillo looked at the proposal and said no.
The ballot said it would cost $32 million.
It cost $45.5 million to build. All-in, with infrastructure and land and everything that doesn't show up in the ballot language: approximately sixty million dollars.
The 2015 vote, the city later argued when challenged in court, was non-binding. By design. The city council had zero legal obligation to follow it. The vote existed to gauge public sentiment, not to determine public policy. The court agreed.
Amarillo paid for a stadium that half of Amarillo said it didn't want, and then the city named it after the man who pushed hardest to make it happen.
Jerry Hodge. Former mayor. His name is on the building.
The deal that runs the stadium — who keeps the money from the concessions, the parking, the naming rights, the suites — is not posted on the outfield fence. It is in a lease agreement with a sports management company called the Elmore Sports Group.
The lease is worth reading.
What the Elmore lease actually says. The developer who took a million dollars in expense reimbursements and was later found to have defrauded another tornado-damaged city. The man who helped negotiate the deal — and then sued the city for doing the exact same thing to a different building. And what MLB made Amarillo pay for in 2024, without the Elmore Sports Group contributing a dollar — Act Two.
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Next: The same flat land that made this city valuable for cattle made it valuable for speed. The oldest dirt oval in the Panhandle has been dark since 2014. Look for the mark on the fence at E. Hastings.