Take a seat! RubberDucks fans can own a piece of history as Canal Park sells stadium seats

There's nary an empty seat at Canal Park.

Actually, there's not a single seat left and it has nothing to do with the fact that the minor league team is off for the winter.

All of the 7,630 seats inside of the ballpark are gone.

It is all part of a $2.95 million renovation project by the city of Akron to upgrade the ballpark before the team's 25th anniversary of calling Canal Park home.

More: Akron council OKs Canal Park repairs to replace seating, patch concrete, fix roof and more

As part of the project to replace all the seats, workers are now resealing the seating area to eliminate any cracks and crevices that allowed water to leak in below the seating area and concourse.

RubberDucks General Manager and COO Jim Pfander said it was time to replace the ballpark's original seats that actually only had a projected lifespan of 20 years.

Some of the seats were showing signs of disrepair after innings of sitting out in the hot sun and more rain delays than anyone cares to remember.

And then there's the not-so-mild Akron winters.

The new seats will be similar in color and size to the old ones.

"We wanted to keep the same look and feel," he said. "And we didn't want to lose any seats."

The biggest change will to the chairs in the suite level, where they will have the look and creature comforts of theater seating.

"These will be a nice amenity for the fans," he said.

The iconic old seats around the field have already been dismantled and shipped off to either be scrapped or sold off as souvenirs by Indiana-based Stadium Seat Depot.

Pfander said the seats in Canal Park were designed to be bolted to the concourse so you need some expertise to retro fit them to go into a residential home. That's why the city and the team turned to an outside vendor.

"We know what we are good at and what we are not good at," he said. "We wanted to work with an outside company that specializes in this."

Of the 7,630 original seats in the ballpark, Pfander said, about 600 were salvageable to be restored and resold.

There's a variety of reasons for this.

Some simply were in too bad of shape to repair.

And most fans want the iconic Canal Park logo and row number on a seat and those were only found on the aisles.

Another factor most fans don't know is because the seating area in the ballpark is curved, the seat orientation also is curved, making many of those seats not suitable for resale, Pfander said.

The old seats are now for sale at http://www.stadiumseatdepot.com/canalpark.aspx and the prices vary from $100 to $235, depending on the type of base used on the bottom to keep it upright.

The seats weigh a lot, so shipping is not cheap and can cost upwards of $100. There are no seats available for sale at the ballpark.

Pfander said everything is on schedule for the new seats to be installed in time for the Double-A affiliate champs of the Cleveland Guardians home opener April 12 against the Reading Fightin Phils.

"We will be ready for opening day," he said.

Craig Webb can be reached at cwebb@thebeaconjournal.com.

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Akron's Canal Park gets new seats as old ballpark seats are for sale