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CHAPTER 1
PHILADELPHIA
One of America's first cities, Philadelphia is also one of America's first baseball cities. In 1871, the Philadelphia Athletics won major league baseball's first pennant, which they proudly flew from a flagpole outside Jefferson Street Grounds, their small wooden ballpark. Opened in 1864 and renovated in 1871 and 1883, the grounds featured the major leagues' first swimming pool, which was situated behind the right field fence.
The Philadelphia Phillies, meanwhile, were founded in 1883 and played at Recreation Park, which they left after three seasons because they were hitting too many of their valuable baseballs into the Corinthian Reservoir next door. They moved to Baker Bowl on Huntingdon Avenue, where they would play for the next fifty-two years. A renowned hitters' paradise, Baker Bowl was also used by the powerful Hilldale Club during its victory in the 1925 Negro League World Series. (Ordinarily the Hilldales played at their own 8,000-seat ballpark, Hilldale Field, which they built in 1910 in the suburb of Darby.)
A new Philadelphia A's franchise was born in 1901, playing its games at Columbia Park in the Brewerytown neighborhood, where the smell of hops and yeast wafted through the air during games. The A's changed the course of baseball history in 1909 when they opened Shibe Park, the first steel and concrete stadium ever built. They played in that legendary facility until leaving town for Kansas City in 1955.
The Phillies, longtime co-tenants with the A's at Shibe Park, continued to play there until 1970, when they moved to a new multipurpose facility, Veterans Stadium. The Vet was a disaster from the start, but the Phils enjoyed much on-field success there, including their first-ever World Series title in 1980. The team moved into a new retro ballpark, Citizens Bank Park, in 2004.
BAKER BOWL
PHILADELPHIA PHILLIES 1887–1938
For half a century Baker Bowl hosted the most hapless franchise in baseball, and fittingly enough, it was built on the site of a former dump in North Philadelphia. A bandbox whose cozy dimensions made it the era's most notorious hitter's park, Baker Bowl was the only ballpark built in the 1800s that was still being used well into the twentieth century. During the fifty-two years the Phillies played there, they posted only twenty winning seasons, most of them before 1900. During the park's final two decades, the home team stumbled to 90 or more losses fifteen times. In the first of its many calamities, the wooden park burned to the ground in 1894. It was rebuilt in just twelve days using concrete, steel, and wood, but the stands would catastrophically collapse twice in ensuing years. The left field bleachers fell down during a game in 1903 and the right field bleachers did the same in 1927; the two incidents killed a total of thirteen fans and injured hundreds more.
Baker Bowl's most notable feature was its 60-foot-tall right field wall, which featured a massive ad for Lifebuoy soap. At just 272 feet away, the wall was an inviting target for hitters, particularly Gavvy Cravath, a right-handed slugger who knocked opposite-field fly balls over it so frequently that he briefly became baseball's modern career home run leader. In 1915, with Cravath leading MLB in homers for a third consecutive season, Baker Bowl hosted its only World Series. Alas, Cravath went homerless and Boston trounced Philadelphia four games to one. The Phillies wouldn't win their first title until sixty-five years later, by which time Baker Bowl had long since become a parking lot
SHIBE PARK
PHILADELPHIA ATHLETICS 1909–1954 PHILADELPHIA PHILLIES 1927, 1938–1970
When classic ballparks are discussed, the first names mentioned are usually Ebbets Field, Fenway Park, and Wrigley Field. Shibe Park may lack the name recognition of those beloved stadiums, but it was markedly more important than its famous cousins. By building the first steel and concrete stadium in baseball, Philadelphia A's executives Ben Shibe and Connie Mack essentially invented the concept of the modern ballpark. Before Shibe Park, even the most lavish ballparks had been temporary and ephemeral. After Shibe Park, ballparks often lasted for decades and became touchstones for multiple generations of fans.
Before 1909, baseball parks were made of wood. The stands were wooden, the seats were wooden, the stairs were wooden, and the fences were wooden. This meant that every time someone lit a cigarette or a lantern, the entire structure was at risk. Ballparks of the 1800s tended to be hastily built and used for only a few years before an accidental fire burned them to the ground. Then they were rebuilt and used for a few more years until fire struck again. The cycle repeated itself in almost every major league city. In 1894 alone, four major league parks burned. But in 1904, the world of construction changed dramatically. That year, an engineer named Henry Hooper designed the Ingalls Building, a 16-story skyscraper in Cincinnati that was built using the brand new concept of reinforced concrete. Regular concrete, being crumbly and brittle, was unsuitable for use in buildings. But concrete reinforced with embedded steel beams offered nearly limitless possibilities, enabling buildings to be built much bigger and taller than ever before. In 1908 Shibe, the Athletics' majority owner, and Mack, the team's manager, decided to try using reinforced concrete to build a baseball park. The sport would never be the same again.
Shibe found a property in what was then the northern outskirts of Philadelphia, and was able to purchase it cheaply because it was next-door to the Philadelphia Hospital for Contagious Diseases. To build his new steel stadium he hired the aptly named firm William Steele and Sons, which was known for steel-frame buildings as well as for inventing the cement mixer. Shibe Park would be a lavish building, but not as lavish as some of its successors. Its budget was a then-unprecedented $500,000, although that figure would be surpassed within a few years by Forbes Field, the Polo Grounds, Ebbets Field, and others.
From the outside, Shibe Park resembled something from the Italian Renaissance, or perhaps Montmartre. Ionic columns, segmented arches, and elaborate brickwork were abundant. The grandstand was covered by a green slate mansard roof trimmed with copper, and a distinctive corner cupola housed Connie Mack's office. The team's script A logo was carved above the entrances. Baseball-themed gargoyles depicted bats, baseballs, and one of the game's newer inventions, catchers' masks. A restaurant and a team store, two developments that remain staples of stadiums today, were built in. As things turned out, the Athletics would be plagued by financial troubles throughout their tenure at Shibe Park, but they would be a poor man's team playing in a rich man's ballpark.
The shape of the field was determined by the rectangular city block that contained it. Rather than a semicircular outfield, the left and right field walls were straight lines that met in the middle in dead center field, 515 feet away from home plate. With such a spacious field, overflow crowds were often seated in fair territory on the deep outfield grass, where few hits traveled anyway. "The grounds are so large it is improbable that any batsman, even if he is a stalwart hitter like Cobb, Crawford, or Harry Davis, will be able to drive the ball over the fence," one journalist wrote.
The opening of Shibe Park on April 12, 1909, was an event of such magnitude that all sixteen major league team owners attended. So did 31,000 others, all of them squeezing into a 23,000-seat ballpark, the largest capacity ever seen in baseball at that time. "As a game of ball it was not much," one writer opined. But "as spectacle, it will linger long in the memory of those who were fortunate enough to gain admittance." The reaction to the ballpark itself was one of universal awe. "Shibe Park is the greatest place of its character in the world," one reporter gushed. George Wright, the retired shortstop who was then baseball's most revered figure, said, "It is the most remarkable sight I have ever witnessed." Shibe's success inspired a ballpark-building frenzy, as nearly every team scrambled to build its own steel and concrete structure. Shibe Park was easily the most spectacular ballpark in the world when it opened, but three months later it was no longer even the most spectacular in Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh's palatial Forbes Field debuted on June 30, 1909, followed in quick succession by the Polo Grounds, Comiskey Park, Fenway Park, and many others.
Ben Shibe had built Philadelphia's ballpark, as one local newspaper put it, "for the masses as well as the classes." Seats in the lower deck were a bit pricey at $1, but seats in the outfield bleachers could be had for a mere quarter. The majority of the seats — 13,000 out of 23,000 — were actually bleacher seats. "Those who live by the sweat of their brow should have as good a chance of seeing the game as the man who never rolled up his sleeves to earn a dollar," Shibe said.
Some fans avoided paying even the quarter for the bleachers. Almost immediately after Shibe Park opened, fans began watching games from the rooftops of two-story homes on 20th Street that loomed over the outfield wall. Such scenes later became commonplace at Wrigley Field, but Shibe Park was where rooftop, or wildcat, bleachers got their start. For big events like the 1913 World Series, wildcat bleachers were deliberately built, with homeowners charging admission fees and selling hot dogs and lemonade. By the time the 1929 and 1930 World Series were played here, rooftop tickets were selling for $7 to $25 apiece and the City of Philadelphia was even taking a $30 cut from each property owner for a permit. Of course, all this unofficial seating infuriated the Athletics, who understandably believed the rooftop seats deprived them of paid admissions. Eventually, Connie Mack and the Shibe family decided they'd had enough. They erected a "spite fence," 38 feet tall and made of green corrugated metal, on top of the existing 12-foot wall. The wildcat bleachers were instantly put out of business. The A's played a dozen more years at Shibe Park after putting up the spite fence, and in what some surely viewed as karma, they finished in last place during nine of those seasons.
By 1935, the year Connie Mack put up the spite fence, the nation was in the throes of the Great Depression and the A's had been forced to sell off all their great players. So in 1938 Mack found a rent-paying tenant: He invited the Philadelphia Phillies to move in. At the time, the Phillies were in the midst of a stretch in which they finished last place sixteen times in twenty-seven years. The A's, by contrast, were one of the sport's marquee franchises, with nine American League pennants to their credit. Almost as soon as the two teams started sharing a ballpark, however, their roles reversed. By the late 1940s it was the A's who were finishing last every year, while the Phillies were a promising young team. In 1950 the Phils drew 1.2 million fans to Shibe Park, while the Athletics barely cracked 300,000.
In 1953 Mack's children, who were by then running the Athletics, changed the ballpark's name from Shibe Park to Connie Mack Stadium. It was a fitting tribute to the man who had co-owned the A's for thirty-eight years and managed them for fifty. But by then the writing was already on the wall: There was room for only one team in Philadelphia, and that team was the Phillies. The Mack family sold the A's in 1954 to a new owner who promptly moved them to Kansas City. The Phillies were now Connie Mack Stadium's sole occupants, awkwardly stuck playing in an aging ballpark named after another team's manager. They continued to play there for sixteen more years, finally moving to Veterans Stadium in 1971. Later that year, two young arsonists set Connie Mack Stadium ablaze, burning the upper deck down and collapsing the roof. The stadium sat in a half-burned state for five years until it finally met the wrecking ball in 1976.
PENMAR PARK
PHILADELPHIA STARS 1933–1952
In 1892 the Pennsylvania Railroad, whose laborers were mostly African American, built a company-funded YMCA for its workers on Westminster Avenue in West Philadelphia. It quickly became an important neighborhood institution, but it lacked a place to play baseball and football, so in 1903 the company added a large grassy field a couple of blocks away, next to the roundhouse where its engines were serviced. This company field, named Penmar Park, would eventually become home to the city's powerful Negro League team, the Philadelphia Stars.
Located at 44th Street and Parkside Avenue — and often referred to simply by naming that intersection — the field became a true ballpark during the 1920s when a grandstand was built. Lights were added in 1933 when Eddie Gottlieb, the white owner of the Philadelphia Stars, began leasing the stadium from the Y. (Gottlieb, nicknamed "Mr. Basketball" thanks to his NBA career, would become better known during the 1950s as the Philadelphia Warriors coach who drafted Wilt Chamberlain.) Every morning, according to legend, a piece of Penmar Park's grandstand went missing when a woman named Hattie Williams used a hatchet to chop some pieces of wood from it, which she then used to heat the washtub behind home plate where she boiled hot dogs for that day's game.
Boasting charismatic players like the lanky fireballer Slim Jones, the Stars drew fans to Penmar Park from all over Philadelphia — including, frequently, a biracial youngster named Roy Campanella who dreamed of one day playing for the Stars. (Instead he would grow up to play for the Baltimore Elite Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers.) Baseball was popular enough in Philly that Penmar was chosen as a site for the 1945 Negro League World Series even though neither participating team (the Homestead Grays and Cleveland Buckeyes) was from Philadelphia. Undoubtedly its most memorable game, though, was a 1947 contest that showcased Satchel Paige's incomparable showmanship. After pitching a perfect game for eight innings, Paige intentionally walked the first three batters in the ninth — thereby ending his perfect game and loading the bases. Then, he ordered his outfielders to lie down on the grass. With his entire outfield horizontal, Paige proceeded to strike out the final three batters on nine pitches, finishing off his no-hitter in style.
VETERANS STADIUM
PHILADELPHIA PHILLIES 1971–2003
With the neglected Connie Mack Stadium falling apart in its final seasons, the Philadelphia Phillies were happy in 1971 to move into a $43 million government-funded stadium built to house them and the Philadelphia Eagles. Unfortunately, Veterans Stadium turned out to be even more of a disaster than most of its multipurpose brethren. Most seats were far removed from the action, creating a cold and impersonal environment, and the nosebleed section was even higher up than at most modern superstadiums.
The Vet was ill-suited for both sports it hosted, and its Astro-Turf playing surface was particularly reviled. With exposed seams, unsightly water stains, and dangerous dead spots, it was frequently voted the NFL's worst field and caused career-ending injuries to at least two football players. In 2001, a game was even cancelled when the Baltimore Ravens refused to allow their players onto the unsafe field. Meanwhile, the turf's football markings — which other parks removed during baseball season — proved unable to be erased, resulting in the spectacle of major league games being played on a field crisscrossed with unsightly yard lines and hash marks.
Fan misbehavior at Veterans Stadium was so rampant that the city was forced to open a police precinct and jail inside the stadium, a first for a pro sports facility. Wrote Jere Longman in the New York Times: "The Vet is a place of leaky pipes, unreliable heat, and glacial elevators, a dank arena where a mouse-chasing cat once fell through the ceiling onto the desk of an assistant coach; where visiting players looked through a peephole into the dressing room of the Eagles' cheerleaders; and where the upper deck has gained a reputation as a hostile tier of taunting, public urination, fighting, and general strangeness." Veterans Stadium was mercifully imploded in 2004, falling to the ground in a mere sixty-two seconds.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Ballparks"
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Copyright © 2018 Eric Enders.
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