MLB | Three World Series Firsts in One Afternoon (League Park, Cleveland)

Three things happened at this corner of Cleveland on the afternoon of 10 October 1920 that had never happened in a World Series before, and one of them has not happened since.

In the first inning of Game Five, Elmer Smith of Cleveland hit a grand slam off Brooklyn's Burleigh Grimes, the first in Series history. In the fourth, pitcher Jim Bagby hit a home run, also a first. Then in the fifth, with runners moving on the pitch, second baseman Bill Wambsganss caught a line drive, stepped on second base to double off one runner, and turned to tag the other coming up from first. An unassisted triple play. More than a century later it remains the only one in World Series history. Cleveland won the championship two days later.

League Park had opened on 1 May 1891 as a wooden ballpark, with Cy Young pitching for the Spiders. The site was chosen because a streetcar line the team's owner controlled ran past it. Osborn Engineering rebuilt it in concrete and steel for the 1910 season, reopening on 21 April with room for about 24,400 according to research published by SABR. The right-field line was hemmed in tight by East 66th Street, which is why the wall there was so short and so tall.

Babe Ruth cleared it on 11 August 1929, off Cleveland's Willis Hudlin, for his 500th home run. Nobody had reached that number before. Joe DiMaggio played the final game of his 56-game hitting streak here on 16 July 1941; it ended the following night across town at Municipal Stadium. The Cleveland Buckeyes of the Negro American League won the 1945 Negro World Series on this field.

Then the long decline. The major-league club left after 1946, the neighbourhood was written off in print for forty years, and in 2002 the last of the grandstand came down.

What exists now is better than nothing and more honest than a replica. Cleveland restored the site and finished the work in 2014: a stretch of the original brick wall along the first-base side, the 1909 ticket house rebuilt to hold the Baseball Heritage Museum, and a new playing field laid out on the old orientation. Local school and youth teams use it.

League Park is at East 66th Street and Lexington Avenue in the Hough neighbourhood. Coordinates from OpenStreetMap. The museum keeps limited seasonal hours; check before travelling.

Cover: League Park, then known as Dunn Field, photographed by Louis Baus around 1920. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons and the Digital Public Library of America. Second image: the surviving League Park wall and ticket house, photographed by Christopher Busta-Peck, 2009, CC BY-SA 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.