50*: My Baseball Odyssey

By Xlibris US

50* My Baseball Odyssey is one fans perspective on Major League Baseball stadiums, beginning with Shibe Park in Philadelphia and ending with Marlins Park in Miami. It offers a limited history of selected venues and relates some of the accomplishments of the men who played the game during the last one hundred years. It moves the readers attention from the games to the total experience of interacting with fans and observing their responses to plays on the field or people sitting beside them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499060171

Book preview

Copyright © 2014 by Arlene Pullen.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

All photos were taken by the author except the author’s picture on the back cover. This was taken by a kind usher in Marlins Park.

Xlibris LLC

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Introduction

#1. Philadelphia – Shibe Park

#2. New York – Yankee Stadium

#3. Baltimore – Memorial Stadium

#4. Washington, D.C. – Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium

#5. New York – Shea Stadium

#6. Milwaukee – County Stadium

#7. San Francisco – Candlestick Park

#8. Los Angeles – Dodger Stadium

#9. Anaheim – Angels Stadium

#10. St. Louis – Busch Stadium

#11. Chicago – White Sox Park

#12. Cincinnati – Riverfront Stadium

#13. Philadelphia – Veterans Stadium

#14. Arlington – Texas Stadium, or Arlington Stadium

#15. Houston – The Astrodome

#16. Atlanta – Atlanta Fulton County Stadium

#17. Pittsburgh – Three Rivers Stadium

#18. Baltimore – Oriole Park at Camden Yards

#19. Miami – Joe Robbie Stadium

#20. Detroit – Tiger Stadium

#21. Chicago – Comisky Park (later US Cellular Field)

#22. Chicago – Wrigley Field

#23. Toronto – Sky Dome (later the Rogers Center)

#24. Montreal – Olympic Stadium (Le Stade Olympique)

#25. Boston – Fenway Park

#26. Seattle – The Kingdome

#27. Atlanta – Turner Field

#28. Kansas City – Kaufman Stadium

#29. Denver – Coors Field

#30. Houston – Enron Field (later Minute Maid Park)

#31. Arlington – The Ballpark at Arlington

#32. Philadelphia – Citizens Bank Park

#33. Pittsburgh – PNC Park

#34. Cincinnati – Great American Ball Park

#35. Cleveland – Jacobs Field

#36. San Francisco – AT&T Park

#37. San Diego – Petco Park

#38. Washington, D.C. – Nationals Park

#39. Tampa Bay – Tropicana Field

#40. Detroit – Comerica Park

#41. Minneapolis – Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome

#42. New York – Citi Field

#43. Seattle – Safeco Field

#44. Oakland – Oakland Coliseum

#45. New York – Yankee Stadium

#46. Milwaukee – Miller Park

#47. Phoenix – Chase Field

#48. St. Louis – Busch Stadium

#49. Minneapolis – Target Field

#50. Miami – Marlins Park

Milestones – A Measure of Man’s Accomplishments

Final Thoughts

Dedication

This book is for everyone who ever shared a

baseball game with me.

Baseball has sent me to towns and cities with fields of sand and pebbles; city parks in the middle of the busiest section of the metropolis; to high school, college and minor league complexes. I have sat on wooden bleachers, folding chairs, berms, upturned barrels and automobile fenders. When there was nowhere to sit, I stood, leaning on a fence or propped against a building or a tree – whatever would sustain me for about two hours or seven to nine innings.

1.JPG

Inside Yankee Stadium

Acknowledgments

No book is ever created without some valuable assistance from people with specific skills. I thank my sister, Lynn Cooper, for researching some game details and dates but, more importantly, for her support as I undertook the challenge of writing this book. I thank my sister-in-law, Beverly Campbell-Pullen, for sending me newspaper articles dealing with dates and events in baseball history. I am grateful to Brenda Emmons for her computer skills; she transferred my small pieces into a comprehensive whole. I thank Cheryl Fenske for editing, proofreading, and helping me narrow my extensive collection of pictures to 31 photos to enhance my story. I especially thank my mother, Ruth G. Pullen, who listened to all my stories and interesting material before I included them on these pages and then reminded me that Babe Ruth was the best!

Introduction

An Odyssey from Shibe Park to Marlins Park

I have three enduring loves: a well-crafted book which encourages thought and daydreams, a travel experience which provides something new and the multiple facets of baseball that entertain the mind and edify the soul.

Baseball is a lazy game, composed of long moments of inaction that build to a few key moments of great drama. Fans sit in hopeful anticipation of that dramatic incident: a leaping catch against the center-field wall that saves a game, a base hit in the tenth inning by a utility player in an 0 for 30 slump or a mammoth home run that ends a game and increases the attendance each time it is recalled as years pass.

Baseball is meant to be played on summer afternoons. Men are supposed to play hooky from work to see the games just as school children play hooky from school or convince their teachers to permit a few stolen moments by the radio to hear some play-by-play.

Baseball is for baseball fans, the man and woman, the old person and the young person, who want to watch the game from its first pitch to the last. Baseball is for families, for fathers to teach to their sons and mothers to share with their daughters. It is for the little boys and girls, who collect cards from bubble gum packages. It is for dinner conversation when no one in the family agrees about who is the best player because everyone in the family has a different favorite team. It’s friendly family competition.

Baseball is not like football or basketball or hockey, whose playoffs stretch endlessly from the front part of the calendar to the end. Baseball is different. Its season is the opening act for the players – the teams with the best records – to strut their moves upon the athletic stage. Its championship is meant to be won over a long schedule of games by the team which employs skillful players throughout that time.

Baseball is the World Series, one series of games played each October between the two best teams from rival leagues, between the best teams that have been consistently superior to all the others in their leagues. It is a showcase for individuals seeking a team result. Well, that’s the way it was.

During my lifetime the management of games has changed. The season has grown longer, the players have grown wealthier because of their skills or the negotiations of their agents (and sometimes because of a combination of those two) and the fans have become participants in the outcome of the games (and not just by reaching their hands over the fences to interfere with baseballs that would have been caught by players but by disruptive noise levels). Specialization has slowed the games, especially in the later innings. No pitcher needs to throw more than 100 pitches if that is his or the pitching coach’s or the manager’s wish because the team has a left-handed reliever who can get the opponent’s best left-handed batter out, and he will be followed by the eighth-inning specialist, who, evidently, cannot pitch in any other inning. There is a set-up man and there is a closer. Most closers pitch one inning, and it must be in a close situation; otherwise, their minds are not in the game, and they probably will blow a save. The most forgotten pitcher on the team is the long man, the pitcher who is able to pitch several innings in a row, but who enters a game only when the starting pitcher becomes ill, is ineffective in the first or second inning or sustains an injury which will not permit him to continue to pitch.

Television executives determine which games will be available to different markets. Unless a baseball fan is willing to spend an inordinate amount of money on special packages with his cable company or purchase some other arranged package, he will watch only the local team(s) on television. Sponsors pay large amounts of money to advertise their products during baseball games, lengthening the time between innings and, thus, lengthening the games. During post-season games, the advertising intervals are longer. Additionally, post-season games begin later in the day or evening, and many children never see an entire World Series game because it begins and ends long after they have gone to bed in preparation for school in the morning or because they are on parent-imposed curfews. The season has been expanded, and my goal of seeing a baseball game on my November birthday is becoming closer to reality.

Sports memorabilia collectors have changed the relationship of fans and players. In the old days, players rarely autographed a card or baseball for a young person, but, when they did, the autograph was legible. Years later, that autograph can still be read and the player identified by his signature. Today, fans need the Rosetta stone to translate the scratch of ink on an autographed item. Fans often stand in long lines and pay a large amount of money to acquire a desired autograph only to realize it is an illegible scribble of some amorphous shape. Memorabilia collectors gather numerous balls or cards to be autographed, and those items show up on eBay almost before the ink is dry.

Sports commentators have analyzed the game to death. Anyone who ever played the game or held a position in baseball can become an analyst. Video replays interrupt the current at bats of players to show what happened in an earlier inning or in a game played earlier in the week or even an earlier year. At times, it is difficult to determine what is the present situation and what is past history. The expert analyst talks so much during telecasts that the game can get lost. Pitches are thrown before the announcer identifies the batter; celebrities in the stands are featured while the hitter launches a triple into an alley or an inning-ending double play occurs. No baseball fan needs three people to tell him about the baseball action occurring on the field, but a camera does need to show that action as it happens.

Despite all these modern changes to Abner Doubleday’s innovation, baseball remains a great game. Despite the habits of the fans who block my view of the action, who start a wave in a close game, who discuss business or themselves on their cell phones, I still enjoy going to a baseball game.

This book is about the elite in spectator comfort, the Major League Baseball parks. With a scorebook under one arm and a camera slung around my shoulder, I have traveled to 50 of them. I never intended to see so many, but, whenever I had an opportunity to watch a baseball game, I grasped it. When I was vacationing or attending professional conferences in a major league city, I checked the schedule for game time. After a while, people asked, How many have you seen? or Have you seen them all? So one day in 2000, I counted. I had attended games in 29 major league parks.

The established franchises continued to replace their obsolete stadiums with state-of-the-art facilities ready for the players and fans of the 21st century. It seems as though I were being challenged to keep up with the movement. So, here is what I did.

On a trip to Texas, I visited Houston and Arlington, seeing one game in each city. I drove to Philadelphia and liked the new ballpark so well that I returned to see more games there. In 2006, I drove to Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Cleveland, for one game in each park. In 2007, after a trip to Cambodia and Vietnam, I returned to the United States through California and visited San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego, three cities and seven games. In 2008, I drove to Washington, D. C. for a game and to Tampa for another game. I flew to Detroit and Minneapolis for three games. In 2009, I saw the new stadiums in New York, Seattle, Milwaukee and St. Louis and the older ones in Oakland and Phoenix. By the end of 2009, I had visited 48 stadiums in 31 cities. I added Target Field in 2010, spending a weekend in Minnesota. Finally, in May 2014, I flew to Miami and the last existing stadium – Marlins Park. That makes 50!

The purpose of this book is to share the accomplishments of some people involved with baseball: the dreamers who saw a tract of land and pictured a stadium on it; the architects, engineers and construction workers who transfigured those dreams into reality; the players, who played the game with energy, passion and integrity; and fans, like me, who traveled to the stadiums and created memories with their children, parents or special friends.

This book is not a comprehensive history of baseball stadiums; it is one fan’s personal history with those parks. I cannot tell you all you may want to know about a specific stadium or game or play, but I can share what I saw and felt during my lifelong odyssey. I hope something on the following pages awakens your baseball memories. The asterisk in the title indicates that, while my journey may be over, my experiences will continue. My memories will linger.

And I thank you for reading!

#1. Philadelphia – Shibe Park

First game played: April 12, 1909 – Philadelphia Athletics 8, Boston Red Sox 1

My first game: May 1951 – New York Yankees vs. Philadelphia Athletics

Baseball began as an outdoor sport played on vacant lots, empty fields and city parks. Whoever wanted to watch a game stood along a fence or sat in a chair he provided for himself. Like the players, the spectators were affected by changes in the weather, with no place to find shelter from heavy winds, rain or blistering sun.

When Shibe Park opened in North Philadelphia in 1909, a new era of baseball began. A concrete and steel edifice surrounded the playing field, and the term stadium was used to name the arena. Shibe Park was symmetrical, 360 feet from home plate to the left- and right-field walls and around 515 feet to center field. The wall in right field was 12 feet high; in center field it was 20 feet high, just low enough for a good outfielder to leap for a fly ball and possibly compete with a fan for the catch. A loud speaker hung on the right-center field wall.

Connie Mack, who managed the Athletics from 1900 to 1950, borrowed $113,000 from Benjamin Shibe, a Philadelphia businessman, to buy out the other minority owners. Shibe and Mack became co-owners of the team and financed the construction for this stadium. On opening day, Shibe Park hosted 30,000 fans.

Because of the Athletics’ success between 1910 and the late 1920s, Mr. Shibe added a second deck to this ballpark. Now 33,608 fans could watch pitcher Lefty Grove, catcher Mickey Cochrane, first baseman Jimmie Foxx and outfielder Al Simmons – all future Hall of Famers. In 1929, Shibe added a mezzanine seating 2,500 fans; in 1930, the grandstand roof was raised to accommodate 3,000 more seats. Because of the short wall in right field, fans sat on the golden rooftops of the buildings across Twentieth Street (a forerunner to the more modern Wrigley Field practice). Fans paid $6 for those seats to watch the 1929 World Series. On June 3, 1932, Lou Gehrig of the New York Yankees hit four home runs, and the Yankees won, 20-13. In 1935, hit hard financially by the Depression, Connie Mack raised the wall to 50 feet.

Meanwhile, the Phillies had been playing in Huntington Grounds, but in 1894 a fire destroyed the park. In 1903, the park was rebuilt and a balcony was added, but 12 people died when that addition collapsed. The Phillies then moved to Baker Bowl and, finally, on July 4, 1938, to Shibe Park. They lost their first holiday game, 10-8, to the Boston Braves.

The first night game in the American League was played at Shibe Park in 1939. On July 13, 1943, Shibe Park hosted the first night time All-Star Game. This was also the first All-Star Game played in Philadelphia. The American League won, 5-3, on Red Sox second baseman Bobby Doerr’s three-run homer in the second inning. Stan Musial of the Cardinals, playing in the first of his record 24 All-Star Games, hit a sacrifice fly in his first at bat. Johnny Vander Meer of the National League struck out six batters in his two and a third innings, tying the Giants’ Carl Hubbard, who had fanned six hitters in 1934. The time to play the game was two hours and seven minutes.

Mr. Mack retired in 1950, the year the Phillies Whiz Kids won the National League pennant. The second All-Star Game in Shibe Park was played on July 14, 1952. Curt Simmons, a left-handed pitcher from the Phillies, started the game for the National League against Vic Raschi of the Yankees. Bobby Shantz of the Athletics struck out the three batters he faced in the fifth inning: Giants’ first baseman, Whitey Lockhart; Dodgers’ second baseman, Jackie Robinson; and Cardinals’ outfielder, Stan Musial. Robinson had homered in the first inning, and Hank Sauer, the Cubs’ left fielder, hit a 430-foot two-run home run to dead center field in the fourth inning. The National League won a rain-shortened, five-inning game, 3-2, in one hour and 29 minutes. In 1953, Shibe Park was renamed Connie Mack Stadium.

After the