MLB | The Worst Day in American Spectator Sport (Baker Bowl site, Philadelphia)

On Saturday 8 August 1903, a commotion broke out on Fifteenth Street outside the Philadelphia ballpark then called National League Park. Spectators in the left-field stands got up and moved toward the top of the section to see what was happening. The balcony they were standing on gave way and dropped them into the street. Twelve people were killed and 232 injured. It remains the worst disaster in the history of American spectator sport.

The park had been rebuilt only eight years earlier, and rebuilt specifically to be safer. The original 1887 grandstand burned in 1894, so the Phillies put up a replacement in brick and steel with a cantilevered roof, one of the first ballparks anywhere built that way, and it was praised as state of the art. What the design could not survive was an owner who did not maintain it. The Phillies finished the 1903 season at Columbia Park, home of the Athletics, while repairs were made.

It happened again on a smaller scale in May 1927, when rotted shoring timbers under two sections of the lower deck along the right-field line let go as people crowded in out of the rain. Nobody was crushed, but one man died of heart failure in the stampede and about fifty were hurt.

The ballpark is better remembered for its shape. The block was tiny, and right field sat only about 280 feet from home plate, so the wall there was raised and raised again until it stood 60 feet, twenty-three feet taller than the Green Monster and the highest outfield wall the major leagues have had. For years it carried a single enormous advertisement for Lifebuoy soap, which gave Philadelphia crowds a joke about the Phillies using Lifebuoy and still stinking.

By then the place was known as the Baker Bowl, after owner William Baker, who at one point grazed sheep on the outfield to save on mowing. Others called it the cigar box.

The Hilldale club of the Negro Leagues played here, and the park hosted Black championship baseball in the 1920s. The Philadelphia Eagles used it for their first three NFL seasons from 1933. Babe Ruth played the last major-league game of his career here on 30 May 1935, five days after hitting the last three home runs of his life at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh.

The Phillies left for Shibe Park in 1938 and the building came down in 1950. The block at Broad and Lehigh is commercial now, with a historical marker.

Coordinates are the corner of Fifteenth and Lehigh, on the block the ballpark occupied, from OpenStreetMap.

Cover: crowds entering the Baker Bowl for a game, 1915. Bain News Service, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LCCN 2014700027. No known restrictions on publication. Second image: the Baker Bowl bleachers, 1915, Bain News Service, Library of Congress, LCCN 2014700022.