MLB | The 258-Foot Home Run and the 420-Foot Out (Polo Grounds site, Manhattan)

Two batted balls on the afternoon of 29 September 1954 explain this ballpark better than any diagram.

In the eighth inning of Game One of the World Series, tied 2-2 with two on, Cleveland's Vic Wertz hit a ball to dead centre field. Willie Mays turned his back to the plate, ran, and caught it over his shoulder around 420 feet from home. In almost any other park in America that is a triple or a home run. Here it was an out. Two innings later Dusty Rhodes came off the bench and lofted a fly down the right-field line that cleared the wall 258 feet away. Home run. The Giants won 5-2 and swept the Series.

Neither result was a fluke. The Polo Grounds was shaped like a bathtub: 279 feet down the left-field line, 258 down the right, and 483 feet to the clubhouse wall in dead centre. Pop flies left the yard and screaming line drives died in the gaps.

The shape was an accident of a fire. In the early hours of 14 April 1911, flames went through the wooden grandstand and left the steel uprights standing. Owner John T. Brush rented Hilltop Park from the Highlanders, rebuilt in concrete and steel, and reopened on 28 June, roughly eleven weeks after the fire, with the seating still unfinished and games going on around the work. He tried to call it Brush Stadium. Nobody did.

This is also where Bobby Thomson hit the pennant-winning home run off Ralph Branca on 3 October 1951, and where the Yankees played as tenants from 1913 to 1922 before Ruth's crowds got them evicted.

The Giants left for San Francisco after 1957. The Mets used the park for 1962 and 1963 while Shea was built, and the last game was played on 18 September 1963. Demolition started on 10 April 1964.

Nothing of the ballpark stands. Four thirty-storey public housing towers, finished in 1968, cover the site, and a plaque marks the approximate location of home plate.

One piece survives, on the hillside above. The John T. Brush Stairway was built in 1913 and presented to the city that July; for fifty years its steps carried people down Coogan's Bluff from Edgecombe Avenue to the ticket windows. It fell into ruin after the park went, then Major League Baseball and all three New York clubs paid for its restoration, and the city cut the ribbon in July 2015 on the 102nd anniversary of its construction.

This memory is pinned to the Polo Grounds Towers site in Harlem. The stairway is a short walk uphill, in Highbridge Park off Edgecombe Avenue near West 158th Street. Coordinates from OpenStreetMap.

Cover: the Polo Grounds outfield, 26 April 1923. Bain News Service, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ggbain-35828. No known restrictions on publication. Second image: the restored John T. Brush Stairway, photographed by Delaywaves, 2010, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.