If you spend any time with Fort Wayne TinCaps Team President Mike Nutter, you’ll understand the mission goes beyond baseball.

Dating back to their days as the Wizards at Memorial Stadium and later with their move downtown, they’ve been part of four decades of summer fun and memories in the Summit City.

On Thursday, Nov. 14, they’ll launch their inaugural walk-through event, Holiday Lights at Parkview Field, which will run through Jan. 4.

Tickets are $10 then increase to $12 on Dec. 1.  

And like games in the summer, this could be one of those signature events of the winter.

Unique holiday experience

Nutter says the 50-night event is as breath-taking as it is family-friendly. 

Like Santa & His Reindeer on the PNC Bank Building and Downtown Fort Wayne’s Night of Lights, it will make a statement.

“We had no idea we could do that many lights. Every square foot of this place is covered,” Nutter said, adding it took about five weeks to set it up. 

Holiday Lights take over the entire stadium, blanketing it in lights. It’s a winter wonderland of more than 1 million lights dancing in perfect rhythm to classic holiday tunes. 

Visitors will be entertained by “Johnny Claus” as they stroll along the stadium concourse and around the perimeter of the playing surface. Along the way, they’ll have stations for crafts, s’mores, and writing letters to Santa. There are also fire pits, snacks, and a smartphone-based scavenger hunt. 

Nutter takes special care to mention there are 34 Christmas trees in center field alone. Then, there is a Christmas-themed train that rumbles around the main concourse. 

“You can do a 360 (loop) of the stadium,” he said. “The train will be on the concourse, with cut-outs and places for photos and lifetime memories.” 

Seeing is believing

Nutter explained the organization is more than a baseball team. They are an entertainment company driven to create lifetime moments.

“We’re making memories,” he said. “People have grown up on TinCaps baseball. And now families will not have any clue as to the scope of what this event is. No one realizes what this will be until they see it.” 

And it’s nearly two months of holiday fun. 

“It’s not a one-night thing; it’s not a one-day thing,” Nutter said. “We are just starting, and we’ll see what it becomes. We are going to have lights all around the deck; when I say deck, I mean the lower seating bowl. It’s just a sea of lights.”

In a lot of ways the event is built like a TinCaps season since there will be 50 events.

They’ll have their familiar nightly specials, such as Tuesday Family Feast with discounts on select concession items, Wednesday Paws & Claws where your favorite four-legged friend can tag alone while you enjoy a hard seltzer, and Thirsty Thursday with drink specials. 

Test run in South Carolina

The TinCaps are following the lead of the Columbia (South Carolina) Fireflies, which launched their version of the event last year. They are another franchise owned by Hardball Capital, which owns and operates the TinCaps. 

It’s unique, attention-capturing, and unlike any other event in northeast Indiana. 

“When we first started talking about it, that was the motivation,” Nutter said. “That’s how we wanted to do it. We feel like it’s a real opportunity to do some family memory-making and bonding.”

The idea of a one-of-a-kind holiday light show was perfect. The ballpark would be the center of a family-friendly attraction that would deliver crowds for nearly two months. 

Everything was perfect to kick it off in 2023. Well, except for one thing — maintenance.

“We wanted to do it last year, but we were replacing the field,” Nutter said. “We had to wait because we couldn’t do everything they were doing (in South Carolina).”

Nutter said he wanted to push the envelope and make it even better in Fort Wayne.

“We are going to start with all this in Year One,” he said. “We want to come out flying the very first year. It sounds cliché, but we want to blow it out of the water.”

With the bugs worked out after last year’s experience in Columbia, he said the show has expanded to northern cities, including the Lehigh Valley IronPigs in Allentown, Pennsylvania. 

U.S. Capitol Tree makes visit

As if Holiday Lights was not enough, Parkview Field will also host a visit from the U.S. Capitol Christmas Tree on Saturday, Nov. 16, from 4-7 p.m.

Every year, the U.S. National Forest Service selects a tree to adorn the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington. D.C.

This year’s tree — a Sitka spruce — comes from Alaska. It will trek across the U.S. first by sea from Ketchikan, Alaska, then by semi-truck on a 100-foot flatbed to the lower U.S., through Oregon, Idaho, Utah, and Colorado. Then it swings through Nebraska, then Fort Wayne. 

After Parkview Field, it goes on to Columbus, Ohio, before going through Maryland on its way to finding its place on the west lawn of the halls of Congress. The tour is highlighted online at 
uscapitolchristmastree.com.

“It’s the only night it is in town,” Nutter said. “We are going to put it out front. We’ll close a couple of streets and we’ll have some really cool stuff.”