Baseball: BaseBall Trivia..

TOEJAM and all,

I looked through both of my illustrated books on American ballparks. NEITHER has a panoramic picture of Braves Field during the 402-550-402 years, nor does any of the websites my Google search just now turned up. I have one which shows the left field line, without the bleachers, presumably when it was 402, but that wasn't original. Griffith Stadium in Washington was about that length down the LF line... until they got Roy Sievers and Harmon Killebrew in the 50's, and decided HR crowns might be a nice thing.

Anyway, I find all of this amazing. This was not an ephemeral residency. They played in that park with the huge dimensions for a long time, when you add up the different periods during which the park had those dimensions.

One of my ballpark books reports that in a single game there, the visiting NY Giants hit FOUR inside-the-park HR's, including two by George Kelly, whom Bill James and perhaps I regard as the worst player in the Hall of Fame. (There are a lot of worthy candidates, several of whom played with Kelly, like Fred Lindstrom and Travis Jackson.)

A little more on this absurd park:

(1) During all of the years they had the 402-550-402 dimensions, there were a total of SEVEN balls hit over a fence for a normal home run, the first of which was hit in 1925 by Pancho Snyder off of Larry Benton. Meanwhile, there were TWO HUNDRED AND NINE balls hit for inside-the-park HR's.

(2) The fences were moved in in 1928, but I believe they were moved back out for a time after that.

(3) The reason for this nonsense was simple: The Braves' owner, like legendary Giants manager John McGraw and arguably the best Dead Ball player, Ty Cobb (the other two rational candidates are Speaker and Wagner), hated the Babe Ruth style game and wanted to continue the "pure baseball" of the Dead Ball Era. THIS park ensured there would be no HR fests. The fans, however, longed for the massive HR's that other NL stars, like Ott and Hornsby, were making news with.

(4) In fairness, none of us saw the early Cobb & Speaker style of offensive baseball, at which those two were just plain awesome. Perhaps I should say we didn't see the Lajoie/Wagner style, since those two played/wasted their entired careers in Dead Ball play, despite playing well into their 40's. Runs were at a premium, and as with the Dodgers of the early 60's, so were bases. All the best players stole bases, and Cobb and Wagner stole tons. COBB AND SPEAKER HAD OVER 1,000 EXTRA BASE HITS, NOT EVEN COUNTING HR'S!!!

But the Braves didn't have pitchers to make it all thrilling. For me, I think one visit to this park might have been interesting, but that would have been it.

TOEJAM: Would you like to know what my two "ballparks books" say about these two places? Would you like me to post it here? Is anyone sufficiently fascinated to want to know? I could at least print some of the highlights, if anyone wants to know what these two ballpark experts say about this place.

This park was what we lawyers call sui generis. Or--get ready to laugh at me--it was what normal people not drowning in their own arrogance, narcissism, cliqueishness, bombast, etc., etc., call "in a league of its own."

B.H.N.

i sure would be interested in that info, in my brief research on Braves field i saw that there was a 26 inning game that was called because of darkness, what makes this game so special is that BOTH starting pitchers went the distance !!!!!

I apologize for going berserk with all these posts tonight, but ancient ballparks are a pet subject of mine. There's a sports art dealer in New England named Bill Goff, and he put out dozens of lithographs of paintings of ballparks, mostly old ones. He had at least half a dozen apiece for parks like Ebbetts Field, Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium, and close to that many for places like the Polo Grounds.

Needless to say, I went nuts. I bought about 15 of them, and still have about 13 of them. Some of them, including Camden Yards, Fenway Park (pricey), Ebbetts Field (pricey) and a panoramic view of old Yankee Stadium, are for sale, incidentally. The only two I'm for sures keeping are the Polo Grounds and the recreation of Maz's moment of eternal glory at Forbes Field in 1960, a moment frozen into my mind because I was a 7-year-old who lived for baseball... and when I saw that happen, I understood full well the enormity of what Maz had just done. Those two lithos I die with.

I'm also pretty fond of the Griffith Stadium litho, which looks dead-on at the ridiculous and lethal corner in the center of center field (no clue how that never killed anyone), but I could be induced to part with it, and it costs a HELL OF A LOT less than the four mentioned above. Essentially, I would sell a litho for Goff's listed price, or perhaps a LITTLE less, and would throw in the pro framing and matting I had put on for free, along with shipping costs. That's a substantial savings, but the for-sales lithos I named, other than Griffith, are quite pricey. The Ebbetts Field one is terrific. The panorama of Old Yankee Stadium is terrific with one huge negative: While it's taken from above home plate, and you can see all the distance markers, the artist failed terribly to convey the depth perspective of that gloriously misshapen old park. That may be no prob for some Yankee fans--the thing sold out in a hurry. It's a HUGE problem for me. Camden Yards looks real good, and this copy of it sold out in a hurry.

Before I moved to my current town in 1994, I lived in a 625-sq.ft. apartment. I had one small bedroom, a small bathroom, and a pretty good-size living room. And I had 100% of those 15-or-so lithographs on my walls.

But I'm not obsessed with baseball history....

Now that I've paid an interior decorator a ton to redo my house, and spent I-don't-want-to-think-how-much on fine furniture, bathroom decor, lighting, etc., I can't justify plastering my walls with all of these lithos. I do have Griffith, Sportsman's, Polo Grounds and Forbes still up, because my decorator hasn't gotten her grubby hands on my dining room.

B.H.N.

Originally posted by toejam
i sure would be interested in that info, in my brief research on Braves field i saw that there was a 26 inning game that was called because of darkness, what makes this game so special is that BOTH starting pitchers went the distance !!!!!

I would like to know also.

AEGIS,

As my mind slowly turns....

There is at least one more answer to your question, and I think there are two.

The St. Louis Cardinals abandoned ancient Sportsman's Park--which was a paradise for left-handed hitters--in mid-1966, and at that time opened the hideous doughnut we came to know as Busch Stadium. I recall reading a brief account of how the bulldozer came plowing through the outfield wall while fans were still in the stadium, a heartless way to send off a park that was over 80 years old and had seen a lot of historic moments.

Also, I believe one of the Pennsylvania parks was abandoned in mid-season for its hideous-doughnut replacement in 1970, and I think it was Forbes Field (for Three Rivers), though I'm not sure on this one. The other one I'm 99% sure on.

B.H.N.

(Are you folks starting to realize how utterly I am going to drive you nuts once baseball season starts?)

OK. TOEJAM AND M.C. AUSTIN---

I will, within the next hour or two, be putting up two posts on Braves Field. The first will be from my first Ballpark book; the second....

B.H.N.

Originally posted by aegis fang
Here's some ball park trivia.

1. What is the only team in MLB history to play home games at two different stadiums during the same season?

2. Which Stadiums were they?

3. When did they play there and why did they do it that way?

1. Montreal Expos

2. Olympic Stadium in Montreal, Canada and at Hiram Bithorn Stadium in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

3. This occured in 1993. Attendace was so poor at Olympic Stadium that they decided to play in San Juan, where they sold out more games.

(sorry if this was already answered)

Kwyjibo:

There are MANY answers to #1:

Sportsman's Park (St. Louis, 1966), Forbes Field (Pitt, 1970) and I believe Shibe Park a.k.a. Connie Mack Stadium (Phil., 1970) were torn down in mid-season and replaced by concrete doughnuts, so there are 3 examples where a team played in 2 different parks in the same season. Also, for 15 or 16 years, the Cleveland Indians played in "The Mistake by the Lake" (Municipal Stadium) on weekends, but League Park on weekdays (1932-1947, I think, but maybe 1932-1946).

I have an article which provides a vivid/lurid and depressing account of the final game at Sportsman's Park, which opened in the 1870's or 1880's, and of how bulldozer's came smashing through the CF wall while the fans were still filing out. Talk about cold. And forget all about the intolerable Rogers Hornsby, that was the cathedral where Stan the Man had played, including as recently as 2.5 years before.

BHN

so it was a trick question. Too bad, I thought I had it spot on. I'm looking forward to more trivia in the future (although I'm too lazy and braindead to start any myself).

No, Kwy, it wasn't a trick question. The person who posted it was thinking of Cleveland, a team which alternated between stadiums on a weekly basis for 15 years or thereabouts. He was unaware of the incident I described at Sportsman's Park, or that Forbes and Shibe/Connie Mack went down in mid-season, in favor of godawful donut stadiums.

I'm a HUGE fanatic on the old parks, have two books on the subject, and know quite a bit about it... which is NOT true of a lot of other narrow areas of baseball. It's true of that one because I have those books and about $4500 worth of lithographs of the old parks.

Anybody interested in buying some of the ones I no longer want?

I got tired of them after living in one place where I had 15 (!!!) of them in my living room for about six years. I now have six in my dining room--Griffith, Forbes, Sportsman's, Yankee, Ebbetts and the Polo Grounds--with the others in my blacklight room's closet. Other than Camden Yards, they all depict ancient parks.

My panoramic litho of Yankee Stadium--the second most valuable one I own, and yes, it's for sale (only the Polo Grounds and Forbes Field are not)--is the PRE-renovation version, with the 461 sign, the monuments in play, etc.

BHN

[Edited on 4/24/06 by BaseballHistoryNut]

I'm confused; how am I ever going to get those bars below my name any higher? I have a massive inferiority complex.

Just keep on posting, they will grow.

There is no known equation used to compute the length of your bar, just a random decision made by the Sportz gods.

Who was on deck when Hank Aaron hit is record setting Home Run?

Hint: He is an NL Manager

Dusty Baker

edit to ask:
Was I suppose to keep this going?

In that case which name a position player who scored his first career run in the World Series (i.e., as opposed to the regular season)?

[Edited on 9/14/06 by Kwyjibo]