Power Outage Hits Palm Springs Stadium, Disrupts Power Baseball Games

The NBC Palm Springs Sports Desk with Tim O’Brien, brought to you by Agua Caliente Casinos.

A power outage at Sunrise Park in Palm Springs left businesses and public facilities in the dark for over three days—affecting everyone from city departments to small businesses like the Palm Springs Power Baseball team.

The electrical issue began on Saturday, July 5, leaving the entire park without power. The city brought in generators from as far as Los Angeles to keep facilities like the Palm Springs Public Library and Aquatic Center running. Power was officially restored Tuesday morning, but the city noted that reopening the pool requires a multi-step process, pushing its public availability to Wednesday.

For Palm Springs Power, the impact goes far beyond inconvenience.

“As a small business, when we lose power, obviously we can’t have games,” said Andrew Starkey, owner of the Power Baseball team. “We can’t open the ticket box, we can’t process credit cards, we can’t sell concessions. We only have 30 dates in the summertime, so losing one or two nights is 3 to 6 percent of our revenue.”

Refrigerated concessions also had to be relocated or discarded. Sponsors—many of whom pay for advertising seen by fans in the stadium—are affected too.

Despite the setback, the team remains hopeful. “Once we have the power back on, we would love the community to come out and support us. We’re in a playoff push right now,” Starkey added.

The team confirmed that tonight’s game is canceled, but it’s all systems go for tomorrow night, with first pitch set for 7 p.m.

And don’t forget—this Friday, July 11, is NBC Palm Springs Night at the Ballpark. The NBC crew will be broadcasting live at 5 and 6 p.m. and cheering on the Power.

Explore: NBCPalmSprings.com, where we are connecting the Valley.