Thirteen nights this year, if you live on the east side of the Museum District, fireworks went off close enough to rattle a porch swing. You didn't buy a ticket. You didn't drive anywhere. You just happened to be home on a Thursday or Saturday when Arthur Ashe Boulevard turned into the loudest street in the city for about four minutes at a stretch.
That's the small, quiet fact CarMax Park's first season leaves behind now that the Flying Squirrels have closed out their regular schedule. The ballpark that opened April 7 wasn't really "near" the Museum District the way the address on the scoreboard suggests. For a lot of the neighborhood's blocks, it behaved like an extension of it.
The Walk That Beat the Map
CarMax Park's address is 2929 N. Arthur Ashe Boulevard, which puts it on the same street that has always marked the Museum District's eastern edge. Some ballpark write-ups file the stadium under the Scott's Addition Historic District, and geographically that's fair. But the Boulevard runs both directions, and Museum District residents have been quietly proving that for longer than this ballpark has existed.
The team's own staff noticed it before CarMax Park was even finished. In a Richmond magazine piece previewing the new stadium, chief operating officer Ben Rothrock said the Squirrels had watched more fans walking across the bridge on the Boulevard to games in recent years, a pattern he tied to the growth on the other side of the tracks in Scott's Addition. What that observation misses, from a Museum District porch, is that the walk works just as well coming from the west.
Compare that to the alternative. Parking at CarMax Park runs $10 per car, credit or debit only, spread across six lots (Blue, Black & Gold, Red, Yellow, Green and Pink) with entrances off Arthur Ashe Boulevard, Hermitage Road and Robin Hood Road. On a sold-out fireworks night, that's a real search, not a formality. Riders taking the GRTC Pulse to the Science Museum or Scott's Addition stations already walk roughly a mile to reach the gates. If a mile on foot from a bus stop counts as a reasonable way to get to a ballgame, the shorter version of that walk from Museum District's own streets stops looking like a workaround and starts looking like the obvious plan.
The Squirrels built the 2026 schedule with some of that foot traffic in mind. General manager Anthony Oppermann's staff pushed every game time back half an hour for the season, landing weekday first pitch at 7:05 p.m. and Sunday games at 2:05 and 5:05 p.m., a change the team framed around making parking and entry easier on fans. A later start also happens to be a friendlier one for anyone walking over after dinner instead of rushing straight from work.
"This is a passion piece for all of us, especially the ones that have been here for so long." — Ben Rothrock, Flying Squirrels chief operating officer, who has been with the team since it arrived in Richmond in 2010
A Season Built Around Wednesdays
Once you strip away the ribbon-cutting coverage, this year's calendar had a rhythm to it, and it's one worth knowing now that it's paused until spring.
| CarMax Park's First Season, By the Numbers | |
|---|---|
| Home games played | Nearly 70, from April 7 through mid-September |
| Total capacity | 9,585 fans, including 8,000 seats |
| Cheapest ticket | $10 |
| Share of tickets priced $24 or under | About 90 percent |
| Fireworks nights | 13, on select Thursdays and Saturdays |
| Free dog admission | Every Wednesday home game |
| Parking | $10 per car, credit or debit only |
The Wednesday detail matters more than it looks. CarMax Park's Best in Show Dog Days, presented by Tito's Handmade Vodka, let dogs into the ballpark free at every Wednesday home game this season. For a neighborhood where an evening dog walk is already baked into the daily routine, that turned one weeknight into an easy detour rather than a special trip. You didn't need season tickets to build a habit around it. You needed a dog and a Wednesday.
The fireworks nights work on the neighborhood differently. Thirteen scheduled dates isn't a constant disruption, but it's frequent enough that most Museum District residents experienced at least a few this year without planning to. That's the version of "living next to a ballpark" that doesn't show up in a stadium guide: not the traffic, but the sound finding your street whether or not you had a ticket.
What's Actually Within That Walk
Once you're across the Boulevard, the walk doesn't have to end at the gates. A handful of restaurants and breweries sit within a few blocks of CarMax Park, including ZZQ Texas Craft BBQ, Remedy Burger, and The Veil Brewing Company, all part of the food and drink cluster that's grown up around Scott's Addition over the past several years. A Museum District resident who crosses the bridge for a 7:05 first pitch has a real option to make an evening out of it on foot, start to finish, without ever getting in a car.
Inside the park, the design leans into that same idea. The Bon Secours Base Camp and Lawn, a right-center-field playground built with equipment from Austin-based manufacturer KOMPAN, gives families a reason to treat a weeknight game as something closer to a park visit than a formal outing. The left-field beer garden pulls its inventory from the breweries clustered in Scott's Addition, which means the ballpark isn't competing with that neighborhood's drinking culture so much as bottling a version of it and serving it from left field.
None of this required a car. That's the part worth sitting with now that the season has wrapped: the ballpark's most walkable version of itself, the one built around a $10 ticket, a Wednesday dog, and a short walk home past a beer garden, was also the cheapest and least complicated version to actually use.
What Comes Back in April
The Flying Squirrels' first season at CarMax Park closed out in mid-September, and the calendar goes quiet on the ballpark side of the Boulevard until next spring. What doesn't disappear is the pattern this year set. Museum District residents now have a fixed point in the yearly rhythm that didn't exist twelve months ago, one that runs from an April opener through a September close, with Wednesdays and a handful of Thursday and Saturday nights doing most of the work in between.
That's a different kind of neighborhood fact than a new restaurant or a repaved sidewalk. It's a full season's worth of evidence that the walk across the Boulevard is shorter, cheaper, and more useful than the parking-lot version of this story ever gave it credit for. Anyone who spent a Wednesday this year walking a dog toward the sound of a ballgame already knows that. Everyone else finds out next April.
If you're weighing what daily life actually feels like on this side of the Boulevard, whether that's the walk to CarMax Park or the fall exhibition calendar at VMFA a few blocks the other direction, it helps to talk to someone who watches these patterns as they build. You can see more of what makes this neighborhood tick on our Museum District guide, and whenever you're ready for the conversation, Gary Martin - VA is glad to have it. Let's talk about your Richmond home.
