Search Results

  Erected in 1890 to furnish a home field for Brooklyn’s entry in the upstart Players League, Eastern Park served the ensuing seven seasons (1891-1897) as the base of operations of Brooklyn’s National League club. Handsome, spacious, and well-maintained, the two-tier ballpark was also a versatile venue, accommodating high school, college, and semipro football, soccer, […]

The record books will tell you that Thurman Munson played his first game at Yankee Stadium—and his first in the major leagues—on August 8, 1969, in the second game of a doubleheader between the New York Yankees and Oakland Athletics. But that wasn’t the sparkplug catcher’s first appearance at the “House that Ruth Built.” On […]

Fans come from miles around—families in wheezing Model Ts, farmers by horse-drawn wagons, folks of all ages on bicycles and on foot. Down flat, dusty roads past fertile fields of potatoes, melons, and corn ripening fast in the late summer sun. Their destination—the sleepy little town of Parksley, Virginia, hard by the Maryland state line […]

The turbulence in the business of baseball reached its height in 1890. The players, through their Brotherhood association and chafing under the owners’ efforts to exert more control over them, assembled the financial backing to form their own league, the aptly-named Players’ League. The magnates of the National League and the American Association — particularly […]

In 1922, the New York Yankees played the New York Giants in the World Series; the majors produced three .400 hitters; Rogers Hornsby won the Triple Crown; and Organized Baseball reached the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Baseball had long been a popular pastime on the Shore. Almost every town supported a team, and competition among […]

The result of the prior year’s conflict between the two major circuits ended with the demise of the American Association.1 It was also the death of a favorable two-league balance for all concerned. Specifically, that meant the interleague rivalry both on the diamond and through the turnstiles that previously produced the ballplayers’ edge in the […]

This article was originally published in “Above the Fruited Plain,” the 2003 SABR convention journal.   Since opening in April of 1995, Denver’s Coors Field has received accolades for its architectural design and downtown location. The ball park echoes the scale and materials of adjacent brick warehouses and replicates the urban accessibility found in early […]

The city of Chicago, already a hub of growth, became more important in the mid-nineteenth century once the Erie Canal linked it with the east coast and rail lines extended their reach throughout the emerging nation. Still, by the definition of the time, Chicago was still a “western city.” Serious development of the area was […]