Offerman Stadium in Buffalo: Hitters Welcome, Pitchers Beware

In the much praised SABR publication Minor League Baseball Stars, mention is made of the relationship between ballparks and hitting records. Nicollet Park in Minneapolis and Sulphur Dell in Nashville were cited, along with the Sacramento Park of more recent vintage.

There are other parks which could have been mentioned. The one I know best and where many International League records were set, was Offerman Stadium (nee Bison Stadium) located at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Ferry Street on Buffalo’s near east side. The original park on this site was built in 1889. It was first called Olympic Park and then became Buffalo Baseball Park. The birth pangs of the original stadium were hardly auspicious. First of all, it was built with second-had lumber hauled from an earlier Olympic Park in another part of the city. Secondly, the contractor who did the hauling was not happy when his $800 bill was not paid. On Opening Day of 1889, the planted himself at the gate on Michigan Avenue and made it perfectly clear he was not going to move until he was paid. Few doubted he meant business after seeing the shotgun he held at the ready. This novel method of enforcing payment proved highly effective and the disgruntled contractor was paid in full, permitting the Bisons to open their 1889 season on schedule.

Although the marriage of Buffalo baseball with the Michigan Avenue diamond was a shotgun affair, it developed into a long and fruitful union of 72 seasons. The old structure, rebuilt, patched up and added to many times, was finally torn down between the 1923 and 1924 seasons and replaced with a steel and concrete stadium with 14,000 seats and a new name — Bison Stadium, which it was called until 1935 when it became Offerman Stadium, following the death of the long-time club president, Frank J. Offerman.

The Buffalo park was located in a densely populated part of the city and had no parking facilities whatsoever. Immediately beyond the right field wall on Woodlawn Avenue was a row of two-family houses whose upper porches provided ideal vantage points for watching the games, provided you stayed alert with left-handed pull hitters at the plate. The story is told of one Woodlawn Avenue resident whose attachment to baseball (he had watched it for free for many years) continued to the very end when a long home run off the bat of Buzz Arlett of the Baltimore Orioles crashed through the front window of his house and came to rest a few feet from the casket in which he laid.

The left field fence, 12-feet high at the beginning and increased to 32 feet in later years, was bounded by the backyards and garages of houses that fronted on Masten Avenue to the east. Many of these residents erected bootleg bleachers on the garage roofs attracting those fans who could not afford to pay the full price at the box office. In deep center field, 400 feet from home plate, the scene was dominated by a huge scoreboard that towered 40 feet above the fence and provided a challenging, but elusive target for International League sluggers during the years. There would be only one to conquer it.

Immediately behind the home plate portion of the stands was a church. If you were a Presbyterian, and so inclined, you could attend church on a Sunday morning and watch the Bisons play in the afternoon without even crossing the street. It was in this church in 1911 that Ed Barrow, then president of the International League, came to be married. The church building, which still stands, bears the scares of many foul balls that bounced off its wall during the years.

Offerman Stadium was always known as a hitters’ park. Its foul line dimensions (291 to right and 321 to left) were not nearly so absurd as those at Nashville, Minneapolis, Sacramento or Baltimore, but what made the park a hitters’ paradise, particularly for righthanders, was the short distance to left-center (346 feet) and the prevailing wind (the ballplayers called it the jet stream) which gave wings to any fly ball hit in that direction.

Records, Records, and More Records

The individual and team batting feats performed in the Buffalo park were numerous. Ollie Carnegie, 12 years a Bison, holds the International League record for career home runs (258) and runs batted in (1,044). While many of his home runs were, of course, hit on the toad, it was at the home field with its friendly left field wall where he was most dangerous. The same applied to Billy Webb, not noted as a slugger, who hit two home runs in one inning against Newark in 1925. George Fisher, a lefty, did the same against Jersey City in 1929. On Aug. 4, 1957, shortstop Mike Baxes of the Bisons hit two home runs with the bases full against the Havana Sugar Kings — a feat accomplished only four times in the ling history of the International League.

But it was a Newark Bear, Bob Seeds, who chose the Buffalo park to put on what could be the greatest two-day hitting performance in baseball history. On May 6 and 7, 1938, he hit seven home runs, four of them in successive innings, drove in 17 runs and rolled up an incredible 30 total bases. And in the ninth inning of the May 7 game, with a chance to add even more to an unbelievable record, he was called out on a 3-2 pitch delivered by a Bison rookie pitcher, Don Ferris.

The Longest Shot

Luke Easter who, next to Ollie Carnegie, is Buffalo’s best-remembered ballplayer, accomplished on June 14, 1957 what no other player, major or minor, semipro or Negro League, had been able to do. He hit a low outside pitch delivered by Bob Kuzava of the Columbus Jets 500-plus feet over the scoreboard in center field. Later in the season, he did it again, this time off Marty Kutyna of Richmond. While the two scoreboard shots are legendary in Buffalo baseball history, they were not the longest or hardest hit balls of Easter’s Buffalo career. That distinction, according to Easter, belongs to a blow he hit off Jerry Lane of the Havana Sugar Kings. On that occasion he flushed a high inside fastball and pulled it directly to right field (Easter was not a pull hitter), across Woodlawn Avenue, over a two and a half story house and into the alley of a house on Emerson Place, the next street south.

The Buffalo park was the scene of four noteworthy team batting exhibitions, all by the Bisons. The first came on July 13, 1929 when the Bisons set an International League record with 11 consecutive hits against the Baltimore Orioles. A single by Clayton Sheedy started the string. Then came singles by Johnny Barnes and Jim Cooney, a home run by Buck Elliott, singles by Ollie Sax and Herb Thomas, a double by Heorge Fisher, singles by Hack Miller, Al Moore and Sheedy, and a triple by Barnes.

On May 30, 1932, the Bisons put on a devastating hitting performance in a doubleheader against Toronto, defeating the Maple Leafs 18-1 in the first game and then completing the felony by annihilating them 26-2 in the seven-inning second game. The Bisons failed to score in the first two innings of the first game, but tallied every other time they came to bat in the two games. For the afternoon they were 41 for 81, and hit eight home runs, one triple and eight doubles. Third baseman George Detore was 6 for 6 in the second game, hitting three home runs and missing a fourth by inches.

On May 15, 1934, the Bisons set another league record with five home runs in one inning against the Albany Senators. Heinie Mueller led off the second inning against lefty John Milligan by drawing a walk. After Butch Meyers had hit a home run, Link Wasem and Johnny Wilson were retired. Greg Mulleavy and Les Malton then followed with home runs, bringing in right-hander Art Jones to the mound in relief. He was rudely greeted by home runs No. 4 and 5 off the bats of Jack Smith and Bill Regan. Then came a tragic footnote to this record hitting display. Irving (Jake) Plummer, a promising outfielder recently called up from the New York-Pennsylvania League, was the next batter. Plummer had been something of a sensation in the three games he had played for the Bisons, going 6 for 12 with two home runs and nine RBIs. Predictably, Jones’ first pitch to Plummer was a bean ball. It caught him flush on the skull and knocked him cold. Plummer tried to came back later in the year, but was never the same and soon drifted out of the game.

Ten home runs in one game! Just another International League record for the Bisons at Offerman Stadium. This time the victims were the Syracuse Chiefs, who were crushed in the first game of a June 20, 1948 Sunday double-header by the football score of 28-11 on the wings of home runs by Anse Moore (three), Johnny Groth (two), pitcher Sol Rogovin (two), John Bero, Chet Laabs and Larry Barton. The Bisons then let up somewhat and won the second game by the more modest score of 16-12. Oddly enough, they scored the same number of runs (44), had the same number of hits (41) and went to bat the same number of times (81) as in the Memorial Day massacre of the Toronto maple Leafs back in 1932.

Sunday, Aug. 4, 1946, was the date of another pitchers’ nightmare at the Michigan-Ferry grounds. After three hours and 30 minutes of wood against horsehides, the score stood Buffalo 20, Jersey City 19, with each team garnering exactly the same number of hits as runs.

After the 1960 season, Offerman Stadium fell to the wreckers’ ball and a junior high school was built on the site. This was a sad eventuality for the baseball fans of Buffalo and for generations of hitters, past and future. As for members of the pitching fraternity, as far as is known, not a single tear was shed.