Know your history

July 29, 200422 yr

New stadium would put Marlins on turf of a humble legend

In the neighborhood the Florida Marlins will call home, a forgotten stadium played host to baseball's greats decades ago.

BY DANIEL de VISE

ddevise@herald.com

Beneath parking lot S-2 at the Orange Bowl lies dirt that once touched the cleats of The Bambino.

Few people in Miami know it, but the neighborhood that awaits a new Marlins baseball stadium has seen baseball before.

Tatum Field opened in 1916 at Northwest Third Street and 16th Avenue as the spring training home of the Boston Braves, South Florida's first exhibition team. Renamed Miami Field, the diamond survived the construction of a football behemoth next door and carried on in its shadow until 1964.

Now, 57 years after the last big-league game at forgotten Miami Field, South Florida's Major League Baseball team plans a $367 million stadium on land southwest of the Orange Bowl, just beyond the bleachers of the old ballpark.

It's hard to picture a park so humble as Miami Field, capacity 3,400, hosting the likes of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Mel Ott, Jackie Robinson and Ty Cobb. But they all played there. From the teens until the late 1940s, Miami Field fueled the same sort of civic excitement now stirred by the Marlins.

''Roy Campanella broke his bat, gave it to me,'' recalled Lenny Booth, who was a batboy when the hometown St. Louis Browns (later to relocate and become the Baltimore Orioles) hosted the Brooklyn Dodgers at Miami Field in 1947. ``And not knowing what the value of bats were in those days, I put nails in it to play three-man ball.''

Oh, the indignities suffered by the little ballpark in its final years. There was a steady decline in the caliber of teams, from the Reds and Browns to the Miami Sun Sox, the Wahoos, the Tourists. Toward the end, it was high schools, little leagues and Boys Clubs.

''Home Runs Cheap,'' the Herald headline read in June 1947, when center field was shortened to a shameful 308 feet to accommodate a double deck at the Orange Bowl. In 1955, amid further expansion, ballplayers tripped over steel girders in left field; a ball that landed in the rubble was judged a ground-rule single.

In the end, Miami Field gave way to ''that backbone of modern living, the parking lot,'' in the words of a Herald account from summer 1964. The wrecking ball brought down the old grandstands in December 1965.

Almost no one remembers. And why should they?

''You're talking about a park that was shut down in 1964. That was 40 years ago,'' said Howard Kleinberg, the former Miami News editor, who covered the Sun Sox at Miami Field. ``Miami has no memory.''

But Miami Field deserves at least a footnote in Miami's history, if only for the events of March 15 and 16, 1920.

Babe Ruth came to town for a pair of exhibition games against the Cincinnati Reds. He batted one for six in front of a crowd of 2,500, some of whom had paid a dollar apiece to watch the game from inside cars parked around the perimeter of the unfenced outfield.

Babe stayed at the McAllister Hotel, watched a movie at the Hippodrome, and drank.

''And he got drunk,'' said Kevin McCarthy of Gainesville, author of the book Baseball in Florida. ``And on the way back they stopped in Palm Beach to play an exhibition game, and he collided with a tree in the outfield, and the manager said he'd never take the team to Miami again.''

Tatum Field was named for Bethel ''B.B.'' Tatum and his brothers, developers of the Grove Park subdivision that sits near the Orange Bowl.

It was built for the Braves, a squad led by future Hall-of-Famers Rabbit Maranville and Johnny Evers, South Florida's first foray into exhibition baseball.

The Braves played their first game there on March 9, 1916, against a team called the Seminoles. A Herald headline read, ''Losing Team Will Buy Panama Hats for Those Who Win.'' The Seminoles bought the hats.

The Braves left in 1918, but other exhibition teams would follow: the Cincinnati Reds in 1920, the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1933, the New York Giants in 1941, 1942 and 1946, and the St. Louis Browns in 1947.

There was competition from Miami Beach, whose Flamingo Park hosted exhibition teams from the mid 1930s to late 1940s.

But the big teams eventually moved to big parks.

Miami Stadium opened in 1950 with twice the seats as Miami Field. The park, later renamed Bobby Maduro Stadium, would be the spring home to the Brooklyn Dodgers and Orioles in decades to come.

The minor-league Sun Sox, part of the old Florida International League, played at Miami Field in the late 1940s before leaving for Miami Stadium.

The Orange Bowl's expansion went hand-in-hand with Miami Field's decline. A 1955 photo shows a Boys Club outfielder standing among the litter of steel girders for construction of additional football seats.

''When you were up at the plate, you'd see the three tiers of the Orange Bowl,'' said Booth, who played on and later coached the Miami High team at Miami Field. ``There were no fences there at all. There was just an asphalt walkway in center field. If you went out that far, you hit that asphalt. You had to be very careful, because you'd fall on your butt if you weren't careful.''

Booth remembers the day the Brooklyn Dodgers came to town. Blacks weren't allowed in the ballpark at that time, Booth said, so black fans lined up along the left- and right-field foul lines to see Jackie Robinson play. Burt Shotton, the bow-tied manager, reportedly didn't have the heart to tell the assembled that Robinson was sitting it out.

''Jackie Robinson had to go out along the left- and right-field lines, shake hands with those people and tell them he wasn't playing,'' Booth said.

The Dodgers won the pennant that year. No team of their caliber would play at Miami Field again.

Booth remembers when, on Aug. 16, 1948, announcer Holmes Braddock (later of the county School Board) silenced the Miami Field crowd with the news that the Babe was dead. The legend, it seems, died with him.

''Squatting in the shadow of the smartly manicured Orange Bowl, ancient, rickety Miami Field lives out its final days with just enough excitement to keep its tired heart pumping,'' read a 1964 Herald photo caption, one of the last taken at the old ballpark. The headline: ``Victim of Progress.''

Four decades later, ''rickety'' is a term more commonly associated with the Orange Bowl.

Kleinberg, the old newsman, still goes there, and he parks out at the southwest corner of the property.

''Every time I pull up into that lot,'' Kleinberg said, 'I tell my kids, `Babe Ruth once played here, Lou Gehrig once played here, Mel Ott once played here.' And my kids look at me like I'm crazy.''

I never knew thats where Miami Field once stood! Some great memories in that area and hopefully the Marlins can continue it once they get their stadium built!

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