Historic Ballparks of the Twin Cities

By Stew Thornley

From the rickety to the palatial, ballparks have grown up with and defined baseball in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Some old-timers have vivid memories of cheering for Willie Mays and Roy Campanella at Nicollet and Lexington. Others marveled at a majestic Killebrew home run at the Met. Many a lucky resident celebrated two world championships in the Metrodome and witnessed one of the greatest pitching performances in World Series history. More recently, fans have enjoyed the return of sunshine and even raindrops at Target Field. Described by City Pages as "the most respected local baseball historian," Stew Thornley leads a tour of where we--as well as our grandparents and now our children--discovered baseball.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781439672013

Stew Thornley

Stew Thornley has been researching Minnesota baseball history for more than forty years. He is an official scorer for Minnesota Twins home games and is a member of the Major League Baseball Official Scoring Advisory Committee.

Book preview

ballparks.

INTRODUCTION

Baseball creates connections in life, and ballparks create connections in baseball.

More than with any other sport, the setting and backdrop matter to baseball fans. Ballparks vary in shape and size, look and feel, because of a lack of uniform requirements for the playing field.

For many years, ballparks were built solely for baseball. Names like Columbia Park, Robison Field, Palace of the Fans, Iron Pier and Congress Street Grounds adorned them until the New York Yankees moved into an edifice so grand that it demanded the designation stadium.

In the 1960s, functional structures in which baseball and football were equal partners produced the cookie-cutter model that, unlike their predecessors, made them hard to tell one from another. Efficiency gained meant atmosphere lost.

Minnesota experienced these transitions, going from minor-league ballparks in the heart of the city to a suburban stadium designed to lure major-league baseball. Eventually, the game returned to the city, on the edge of downtown Minneapolis, in a climate-controlled dome that could do it all—except provide the ambiance so familiar and prized by previous generations of baseball fans.

The escape from this cocoon rode the wave of new structures that were part of civic transformations. The 2010 move from one end of downtown to the other into a baseball-first structure (with the designation of Target Field, not Stadium) recaptured the charm and atmosphere of the rich heritage of the sport that goes back 150 years in the Twin Cities.

The Minneapolis skyline behind Parade Stadium. Augsburg University.

Lexington Park was home of the St. Paul Saints from 1897 to 1956. Minnesota Historical Society.

Fans watch the Minnesota Gophers from a left-field berm at Siebert Field. University of Minnesota.

Metropolitan Stadium, surrounded by cars for a Minnesota Twins game, with the Metropolitan Sports Center to the right. Author’s collection.

Baseball, more than any other sport, is emotionally connected to its architecture, wrote Steve Berg in his book on Target Field.¹

The Twin Cities have had emotional connections to many ballparks, which are the subjects in the pages that follow.

1

BASE BALL ROOTS IN ST. PAUL AND MINNEAPOLIS

ST. PAUL

St. Paul’s first organized team didn’t have a ballpark; it played on an open field, true to the sport’s pastoral roots, when bases were laid out in expansive areas. The home of the 1859 Olympic, at Ninth Street and Olive Avenue, was such a spot.

The first Minneapolis club to engage in intercity games, the Unions in 1867, likewise played on open space, in this case, within the fairgrounds south of Franklin Avenue near the Mississippi River.

With the inevitable creep toward professionalism came the corresponding trend toward fences and barriers to contain the fields—if nothing else, as a means to ensure that patrons had to pay to watch.

St. Paul teams eventually graduated from vacant lots to formal facilities. Red Cap Park opened on June 21, 1876, on the city’s West Side, so-named for being on the west bank of the Mississippi River, although it is south of downtown. The St. Paul Dispatch reported, One of the principal drawbacks that St. Paul clubs have heretofore been subjected to has been the fact that their grounds have been totally unfit to play on, but owing to the personal efforts of some of our leading citizens, we now have in our city one of the finest ball grounds in the United States.…The management assures their friends that the strictest order will be preserved. No liquor or pool selling will be permitted upon the ground, and no improper character will be admitted.²

The Saint Paul and Minneapolis Pioneer Press and Tribune covered the first game—a 16–15 St. Paul win over the St. Croix team of Stillwater—and noted the easy access of the park near the end of the bridge [at Wabasha Street] in plain view of the city.…The grounds were 300 x 500 feet, enclosed by a tight board fence 10 feet high. The diamond is nearest to the end of the grounds farthest from the field with the spectators looking toward St. Paul as they faced the field.³

In a suitable home, the team was popular enough that management expanded the capacity with another grandstand in 1877, when the Red Caps had their first salaried club in a confederation of teams called the League Alliance.

MINNEAPOLIS

Minneapolis also played in the League Alliance after a decade of purely amateur teams drifting through various spots in south Minneapolis. Most were within walking distance of the main business district, shortly beyond the change of the downtown street grid from being parallel with and perpendicular to the Mississippi River to a north–south orientation.

One used in 1876 by an amateur team on Mary Place (now LaSalle Avenue) was between Thirteenth and Fourteenth Streets. A new site, Blue Stockings Grounds, was dedicated that summer at Eighth Street and Twentieth Avenue on a lot 500 feet long by 475 feet wide with a high wooden fence surrounding the property. The Saint Paul and Minneapolis Pioneer Press and Tribune reported:

The commodious amphitheatre, roofed in thus warding off the sun, will accommodate comfortably 900 people, to all of whom an enterprising restauranteur is perfectly willing to dispense those stimulating liquids, lemon pop, ginger ale, lemonade and buttermilk, from a stand in one corner of the structure. A covered pavilion accommodates the press and scorers. (The umpire prespires [sic] sympathetically under a gyrating umbrella.) The field is a fine one, and as level as a billiard table. The diamond is laid out and lies in a cue line along north and south. Commodious dressing rooms and the like have been prepared for the use of the club. Mr. [Frank W.] Chase has leased the grounds for three years and hopes to make a good thing of it, but desires a crowd every time, as he has expended nearly $800 upon the work.⁴

Amateur and semiprofessional teams migrated throughout south Minneapolis, in 1883 reaching a spot on the southwest corner of Lake Street and Nicollet Avenue, where a team called the Brown Stockings played.

As Minnesota made it to fully professional ranks the following year, the grounds at Nicollet and Lake were abandoned, in part because of their distant proximity to downtown. However, baseball would return to this spot.

PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL

The Northwestern League of 1883 is recognized as the first true minor league. The League Alliance of the 1870s had ties to the National League, baseball’s sole major league at the time. Alliance teams paid a fee in return for certain promises, including that the National League would not compete with them by playing games in their cities.

The Northwestern League had a more formal relationship with the National League and the American Association, which operated as a major league from 1882 to 1891. The establishment of the Tripartite Agreement (the first pact among professional leagues) allowed the Northwestern League to operate peacefully with the two major leagues. The agreement included protection against having their rosters raided by others.

In 1883, the Northwestern League had eight teams, in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. The league expanded the next year and included teams in Minnesota: Minneapolis, St. Paul, Stillwater and Winona (the latter joining the league during the season).

Thus, 1884 began a long rivalry in professional baseball between St. Paul and Minneapolis.

St. Paul benefited right away by the attitudes of the Minneapolis owner, an out-of-stater named Ben Tuthill, who thought a team of such status should not rely on local talent. Among the players he let get away were Elmer Foster and Charley Ganzel, who had played on the Minneapolis Brown Stockings in 1883. Foster, from Minneapolis, and Ganzel, though a transplant from Michigan, became lifelong friends. (Ganzel named one of his sons Foster Babe Ganzel, after his friend; Babe Ganzel became a star on the Minneapolis Millers in the 1930s and managed the St. Paul Saints after that.)

The shortsightedness of Tuthill paid off for St. Paul. Manager Andrew M. A.M. Thompson, an Illinois native and a former drummer boy for the Union army during the Civil War,⁵ was happy to sign Foster and Ganzel, along with another top Minneapolis player, Billy O’Brien.

Not until May 1884 did the St. Paul team settle on a site for its ballpark, just off Fort Street (also known as West Seventh Street) on the north side of the Short Line Railroad tracks. The park was bounded by St. Clair Avenue on the north, Duke Street on the east, Oneida Street on the west and the railroad tracks on the south. (Fire insurance maps indicate that home plate was in the southeast corner of the lot, meaning that the right-field fence was parallel to St. Clair, with the left-field fence running along Oneida Street.)

Newspaper ads for the games identified the new park as the Seventh Street Grounds. It was also known as the West Seventh Street Grounds and the Fort Street Grounds, even though it wasn’t on Fort/West Seventh Street. The park took barely three weeks to build and had a capacity of around 2,400, with approximately half the seats in a covered grandstand along with hitching posts for horses. The first game on the grounds was June 9, the opponent a team from Quincy, Illinois.

The St. Paul Globe found the occasion momentous enough to merit a 127-word sentence:

Almost before the sun was up the great national game was under discussion all about the city, and as the day wore on the infection spread apace and at noon time everybody, real estate agents, clerks, lawyers, reporters, car drivers, draymen, small boys, drummers, bummers and gentlemen, were all engaged in the all-important topic, and those who had money to risk on the coming game had no trouble in placing it, for although the home team had been punished with overwhelming regularity on its trip around such part of the United States as is included with the borders of Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan, there were scores of men to be found who were ready and willing to wager a few dollars that Quincy would be beaten.⁶

The locals—clad in white caps, red belts, and cream-white uniforms with St. Paul stitched in red across the front—took the field at 4:00 p.m. and played a competitive game until Quincy broke it open with four runs in the eighth inning to win, 6–1.

The excitement increased two weeks later, when St. Paul hosted its first game against Minneapolis, on Monday, June 23. Another large crowd included fans from both cities, many with money and an eagerness to wager. With Ganzel behind the plate, Foster pitched a three-hitter as St. Paul won, 4–0. The other Minneapolis exile, O’Brien, had a run-scoring double in the eighth and was part of a two-run rally two innings earlier.

The West Seventh Street Grounds in St. Paul weren’t on Seventh Street (also known as Fort Street) but a few blocks to the west, as shaded near the top in this 1880s map. Author’s collection.

Although eventually the Minneapolis teams were known as the Millers and the St. Paul teams as the Apostles and then the Saints, newspapers in 1884 normally referred to them only by their cities and without nicknames. In its game story, however, the St. Paul Globe called the visitors the Dudes. Although unclear if the newspaper intended disrespect with this appellation, the Globe was more direct in its scolding of the visitors: Just here we could read a lecture to the Minneapolis management if we were in the humor to do so. It is an open secret that Foster, Ganzel and O’Brien, three of the best players on our team, offered their services to Minneapolis before engaging with St. Paul, but they were not then wanted at the Falls. The point of the lecture is so obvious that it is no necessary to enlarge upon it.⁷

The Minneapolis Tribune fired its own missives:

The St. Paul grounds are beyond all question supremely the worst in the Northwestern League, and after Sunday evening’s shower were in a condition wholly unfit for any kind of showing by a team not used to scrambling through the mud and over such uneven country as that of St. Paul. To the umpire, in addition to this, St. Paul has reason to tender her warmest thanks for valuable assistance received. The gentleman who acted as that important functionary, and who is known as Mr. Keenan, left no room for doubt as to his magnificent capabilities for one-sided judgment. His decisions were placarded at the outset with his manifest determination to give the victory to St. Paul, and give it he did as far as lay in his power.⁸