Former ballpark · 1901 – 1911
Huntington Avenue Baseball Grounds
Boston, MA
- Opened
- 1901
- Closed
- 1911
- League
- AL
The lore
Huntington Avenue Baseball Grounds
A wooden park on a circus lot, one turnstile, 635 feet to center — and the first World Series game ever played.
The Circus Lot
Ground was broken on a former circus site on March 9, 1901, in a poor Irish district of Boston. The lot was hemmed by factories, breweries, warehouses, and stables, and it sat across the railroad tracks from the South End Grounds. The wood-framed park that rose there cost $35,000, seated 9,000, and opened on May 8, 1901. It had a single entrance — one turnstile for the whole place — and 90 feet of foul territory between the stands and the diamond. Down the left-field line it was 350 feet, down the right just 280. Center field measured 530 feet when the park opened and was pushed to 635 feet by 1908.
The Boston Americans, the new American League franchise, charged 25 cents for a grandstand seat, half what the established Nationals asked, and the price drew working-class fans to the new club. Between 289,000 and 322,000 people came through that one gate in the inaugural season, roughly twice the attendance of the older team across the tracks.
What Happened There
On October 1, 1903, the Grounds hosted the first game of what the press called the "world's series," the American League champion Boston Americans against the National League champion Pittsburgh Pirates. The heavily favored Pirates won Game 1, 7-3, over Cy Young, and took a three-games-to-one lead before Boston swept four consecutive wins to claim the championship five games to three.
The next spring, on May 5, 1904, Young threw the first perfect game of the 20th century at the Grounds, a 3-0 victory over the Philadelphia Athletics.
The park's final game was played on October 7, 1911, the Red Sox defeating Washington 8-1. Northeastern University occupies the site now.
Reporting: bostonspastime.com, BR Bullpen, Baseball Almanac, RetroSeasons.com. Park data: MLB StatsAPI and Retrosheet, via the Fever engine.
By the Desk · filed 2026-07-24 — the piece reads as of its filing; the park record around it is live · every fact in this piece comes from a filed, sourced research pack and clears an independent fact-check, and nothing is edited after filing.
Where it stood
Boston, MA. We don’t have exact coordinates for this park in the historical record — we’d rather say so than pin the wrong spot.
Sources
- Retrosheet · as of 2026-07-23
The information used here was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet. Interested parties may contact Retrosheet at 20 Sunset Rd., Newark, DE 19711.