Falcon Park (II)

Falcon Park (II)
Location	{{{location}}}
Tenants
Auburn Doubledays

Falcon Park (II) in Auburn, NY, was the home of Auburn affiliated baseball from 1995 through 2019. After that and the Coronavirus pandemic-canceled 2020 season, MLB's 2021 Minor League Reorganization eliminated the Auburn Doubledays and most other New York-Pennsylvania League teams.

They then joined the new amateur MLB Draft League.

The facility had just undergone a $3 million renovation to make Cayuga Community College a Doubledays co-tenant. Winter weather interruptions kept Spartans' baseball team out of its new home nearly the entire 2019 season - playing there May 2nd, just two days before their last scheduled home game. The 2020 baseball Spartans got in only four home spring games before the pandemic ended that season, and they did not resume playing before spectators until April of 2021. Cayuga softball, soccer and lacrosse also now use the field.

In 1959, the then-new professional team that was affiliated with and playing as the Yankees bought its same-site, same-name predecessor. The club operated successfully for decades, finally folding in 1980. The city of Auburn then assumed its debt, replacing the team in 1982 and the ballpark in 1995.

The playing field is, and an NYPL division was, named for long-time Auburn Citizen Sports Editor Leo Pinckney, who was also the NYPL's third president. Auburn put Pinckney's name on the field in 2004. He is celebrated by a plaque, but his name does not appear on the stadium's main signage.

The team nickname plays on the phonetic similarity between Auburn and Abner - Abner Doubleday being an historical icon who spent much of his childhood in Auburn. Born in Ballston Spa, NY, Doubleday did not invent baseball - not even he made that claim - but he did fire the first Union shot of the Civil War at Fort Sumter, serve heroically for the Union at Gettysburg, rise to the rank of general, and later help create San Francisco's cable-car system.

The organization that became Minor League Baseball, founded in 1901, was originally headquartered in Auburn.