Cleveland Stadium

Four Hundred Seventy

Cleveland voters passed a $2.5 million levy in 1928 to build a fireproof stadium on landfill that stretched into Lake Erie along the lakefront. Osborn Engineering and a local partner designed it. On July 31, 1932, 80,184 people came for the Indians' first game, a 1-0 loss to the Philadelphia Athletics — a then-major-league-record crowd.

The original outfield was so vast that the club installed an inner fence in 1947. Even then, markers showed 470 feet from home plate to the straightaway center field bleachers, and no player homered into them. Indians owner Bill Veeck found something to do with all that room: he moved the center field fence in or out by as much as 15 feet to favor his team, until the American League legislated against moving fences mid-season. The space behind that fence accumulated its own history. In 1948, Cleveland won the World Series and set three attendance records, including 72,434 for Satchel Paige's first major league start. The next September, the day the club was eliminated from the 1949 race, owner Bill Veeck put on a top hat, led a horse-drawn hearse onto the field, and buried the 1948 pennant in a pine coffin beyond the outfield fence.

What Happened There

The park hosted four All-Star Games — 1935, 1954, 1963, and 1981 — a mark shared only with Yankee Stadium. The 1954 game featured six home runs, two by the Indians' Al Rosen, as the American League won 11-9 before 68,751. Len Barker threw a perfect game there on May 15, 1981, the second in franchise history.

The final Indians home game was October 3, 1993, a 4-0 loss to the Chicago White Sox before 72,390 fans, with Bob Hope leading the crowd in "Thanks for the Memory."

Reporting: Wikipedia, This Great Game. Park data: MLB StatsAPI and Retrosheet, via the Fever engine.