Ebbets Field

The Shape of the Block

Charles Ebbets began buying lots in 1908, piecing together the full block bounded by Bedford Avenue, Sullivan Place, Cedar Street (later McKeever Place), and Montgomery Street in Brooklyn's Flatbush section. The lot was trapezoidal and the ground sloped, and that geometry produced a right-field foul line of just 301 feet while center field stretched past 500. Left field sat at 419. The place never played fair; it was built on a piece of ground that had its own ideas about distance.

The Front Door

Ebbets Field opened on April 9, 1913, with Brooklyn losing to the Philadelphia Phillies 1-0. The steel-and-concrete stadium cost $750,000, and its entrance was an 80-foot rotunda with an Italian marble floor, a chandelier, and coat-check rooms — designed to give fans a theater-like experience before they reached their seats. Over the right-field wall, which came to carry a scoreboard and nearly 300 different angles, a Schaefer Beer advertisement lit up the letter "h" or the letter "e" to signal whether the official scorer had ruled a hit or an error.

Two Afternoons

On June 15, 1938, in the first night game at Ebbets Field, Cincinnati's Johnny Vander Meer threw his second consecutive no-hitter before 38,748 fans — a feat that has not been duplicated. Nine years later, on April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson ran out to first base and broke the color line that had kept Black players out of the National and American Leagues since the 1880s. Arthur Daley of the New York Times called Robinson's debut quite uneventful, and the crowd fell short of a sellout. The moment was a watershed in American history.

Gone

The Dodgers played their final game there on September 24, 1957, before Walter O'Malley moved the club to California. Demolition began in February 1960, using the same wrecking ball that would later take down the Polo Grounds.

Reporting: Society for American Baseball Research, MLB.com, Baseball Reference, Wikipedia. Park data: MLB StatsAPI and Retrosheet, via the Fever engine.