League Park IV

The Rectangle

League Park IV opened on April 21, 1910, replacing a wooden 1891 structure on the same Cleveland site with a concrete-and-steel design that seated some 21,000. The Osborn Engineering Company of Cleveland drew the plans — the same firm that would design or remodel Yankee Stadium, the Polo Grounds, and Tiger Stadium. But the field Osborn laid out was oddly rectangular. The left field foul pole stood 375 feet from home plate. The right field pole was 290 feet away. The short right field wall invited hitters to take aim, and the wall gave back baseballs in strange ways: a solid lower wall rose into a wire-mesh screen strung on steel stanchions, and a ball could come off any piece of it on an angle nobody could predict.

The dimensions moved with the crowd. The park never held more than 21,500 seats, but overflow crowds of over 25,000 put fans on the field in right, shrinking the playing area by as much as fifty feet in some areas.

What Happened There

In the fifth game of the 1920 World Series at League Park, Indians second baseman Bill Wambsganss completed the only unassisted triple play in Series history. Teammate Elmer Smith hit the first Series grand slam the same day. Cleveland went on to defeat the Brooklyn Dodgers five games to two.

Nine years later, on August 11, 1929, Babe Ruth clubbed his 500th career home run over that short right field wall. The boy who retrieved the ball received a twenty-dollar bill and an autographed ball. Joe DiMaggio collected the last three hits of his 56-game streak here, too, on July 16, 1941 — the streak died the next night across town, at Municipal Stadium.

The Split Years

The park was called Dunn Field from 1916 to 1927, after club owner Jim Dunn. After Cleveland Municipal Stadium opened in 1931, the Indians began shifting night, holiday, and weekend dates to the huge lakefront stadium while weekday afternoons stayed at League Park, an arrangement that lasted until 1946. The Cleveland Buckeyes of the Negro American League won the 1945 Negro World Series while playing there.

League Park closed the following year.

Reporting: SABR, Freshwater Cleveland. Park data: MLB StatsAPI and Retrosheet, via the Fever engine.