MLB | The Biggest Ballpark in the World, Built Just Before Ruth (Braves Field, Boston)

Boston built the biggest ballpark in the world in 1915, and then the game changed underneath it. The Braves had spent 45 years in a small wooden park called the South End Grounds. James Gaffney, a New York contractor who bought the club in 1912, wanted something that would answer Fenway Park, which had opened in 1912 a mile east. He bought the old Allston Golf Club on Commonwealth Avenue, set the ballpark back at the rear of the lot near the railway so he could sell the street frontage at a profit, broke ground on 20 March 1915, and had Osborn Engineering finish it in five months. Braves Field opened on 18 August 1915. Roughly 46,000 people got in to watch the Braves beat St Louis 3-1, and about 6,000 more were turned away. Reported capacity runs from 40,000 to 45,000 depending on the source, and either figure made it the largest in baseball, a record it held until Yankee Stadium in 1923. Inside were a covered grandstand for 18,000, an uncovered pavilion down each line holding 10,000 apiece, and a small bleacher in right field for 2,000. That last one was called the Jury Box; the story attached to the name is that a sportswriter once counted twelve people sitting in it. The playing field was enormous, and in its first years almost every home run hit here was an inside-the-park one. Then Babe Ruth, who pitched the fourteen-inning second game of the 1916 World Series on this field, stopped pitching and started hitting, and a ballpark built for triples became a ballpark nobody could clear. The fences were pulled in repeatedly. Ruth also finished here, playing his final season for the Braves in 1935. Two World Series were played on this field for the wrong team. The Red Sox had lent the Braves Fenway for the 1914 Series; the Braves returned it, and Boston's American League club played its home World Series games at Braves Field in 1915 and 1916 because it seated thousands more. They came back on Sundays from 1929 to 1932, when a city ordinance banned Sunday ball within a thousand feet of a church and made Fenway unusable. The Braves left for Milwaukee after the 1952 season. Boston University bought the ground. Most of it came down, but not all. The right-field pavilion still stands and holds spectators at Nickerson Field, and the ticket and administration building at the entrance is now the university's police headquarters. People attending a lacrosse match or a graduation there are sitting in a structure that held three World Series. Coordinates are Nickerson Field, from OpenStreetMap. It is a working university facility. Cover: the Boston bleachers at Braves Field during the second game of the World Series, 9 October 1916. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Public domain. Second image: the surviving stands at Nickerson Field, photographed by Pjorg, 2006, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.