NEW ULM — Most often when you attend a baseball game at your local park and take a trip to the concession stand, you bring back some of the stapes of baseball park food.

A hot dog, a bag of popcorn, or a sack of peanuts.

That is unless you are attending games at either Johnson or Mueller Parks here in New Ulm.

There you can view a menu that makes you feel like a kid in a candy store.

The normal five or six items that most parks have have to take a bow to what is offered at both of New Ulm’s baseball parks.

If you take time to count them, there are 12 food items listed on the menu boards at the parks.

They do have the hot dogs and the popcorn (no peanuts).

But they also have a variety of foods — and very good foods — that have people coming back.

Some of them are non-baseball fans who when they know there is a game at one of the parks, come down for a take-out order and head back home.

But most of the sales go to fans who enjoy food that is normally not found at a baseball facility.

And it all started when the Klossner House closed.

“Rick Traulich and Al (Flor) went over there and we bought some of the equipment including a griddle,” LeRoy Flor, a board member of the New Ulm Baseball Association said. “That is how it got started.”

And when it got started, it grew.

Cheeseburgers, brats, onion rings, cheese curds and chicken strips.

This year they added mozzarella sticks and mini doughnuts.

It grew so well that a second griddle was purchased with the first griddle moved to Mueller Park and the second griddle establishing a home at Johnson Park.

And it continues to grow.

“We have heard it about three times in the last week that people come here from other towns to our concession stand just for the food,” Flor said. “There are no parks around that have food like this.”

One of the most popular foods that is served quite often at the parks is home-made sauerkraut, made by Linda Flor.

“I did not think that in my wildest dreams that it would as big as this,” Flor said. “We never expected to cook at 95% of baseball games.”

But it takes a lot of people to man the grills for almost every game from high school to amateur to legion games at both parks.

“We have a lot of great people like Rick Traulich, Curt Forbrook, Clubby Hoffmann, Todd Pfaff, Paul Berg, Mike Peterson, Mike French, Adam Slander, Al (Flor), Jim Rewitzer, and now we are getting some (Brewers) players to help like Brody Peterson, Andrew Peters, J.T. Hoffmann. We have quite a long list,” Flor said. “But with all of these guys helping, there are times when we do not have enough help to grill.”

Flor, who spends countless of his off-hours from work at both parks, added that it is not unusual for visiting teams to place take-out orders before the game to be ready for when the game ends.

“We have a plan in place for that,” he said.