Griggs Park: Alamogordo Pupfish

There are several things I like about independent league baseball. I love sitting at an obscure park in the middle of nowhere with about 35 other fans (tops) watching hungry ballplayers scrape through nine innings. I also like that it usually costs well below ten bucks for any seat in the stadium. Baseball on a budget, that's me.

I am a big fan of the Pecos League, a photo of me in the most circulated newspaper in New York City shows me eating a hot dog in front of Yankee Stadium wearing a Pecos League tee-shirt. One of my roadtrip plans is to eat a dog at each of the Pecos Leage ballparks; but there's a problem: they keep moving. The cities that host a team changes dramatically each season, and it's hard to hit a moving target. One of the towns that is relativley Pecos League stable is Alamogordo, New Mexico. Their team, the Pupfish, play at Griggs Park, or as the Pupfish have taken to calling it; The Aquarium. Catchy no?

Concessions in The Aquarium consists of two food carts. The Humming Bird Cafe cart dishes out, among other things, the hot dogs, while another cart called Swamp Donkey (really) sells shaved ice.

The dogs are pretty standard in The Aquarium. I had the $3 hot dog that comes equipped with a generous plump Nathan's Famous frank. Nathan's is a good choice, and my second personal favorite, right behind Hebrew National. It's pretty basic condiments as well. I opted for the traditional mustard and relish. You can never go wrong with that combo. All in all it was pretty tasty, and way better than what I expected for such a small park and fanbase. They would do well to offer up a specialty dog that is somehow linked to the team or region, but when you are serving less than 50 fans per game, no one can blame them for sticking to the basics.

Worth getting a dog there? You betcha! And before the game you can stop by the beautiful White Sands National Monument just a few miles away. And see my personal favorite regional tourist attraction: the final resting place of Ham the space chimp, America's first primate in space.