MLB | Turkey Stearnes Field, Saved by Volunteers (Hamtramck Stadium, Detroit)

In July 1929 a fire broke out at Mack Park on Detroit's east side during a Detroit Stars game and injured 103 people. The club needed a ground. Within about a year it had one, two miles away in Hamtramck, an incorporated city sitting entirely inside Detroit.

The grandstand and field date to 1930, built for the Stars by John Roesink, a Detroit clothier who owned the club and had sponsored semi-pro teams for years. Detroit was a charter franchise of the Negro National League, one of the eight clubs whose owners had signed Rube Foster's constitution in Kansas City ten years earlier. Here, in the new ballpark's first season, the league's deciding games were played.

At least sixteen future Hall of Famers appeared on this field, among them Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Oscar Charleston and Judy Johnson. The one who belonged to Detroit was Norman "Turkey" Stearnes, an outfielder from Nashville who played for the Stars from 1923 to 1931 and won seven home run titles across the 1920s and 1930s. He stayed in Detroit after baseball and worked at Ford's River Rouge plant for 27 years. He died in 1979 and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2000, twenty-one years too late to know about it. When Major League Baseball folded Negro Leagues statistics into its official records in May 2024, Stearnes entered the game's record book for the first time.

The city bought the stadium in 1940 and used it intermittently. It went on the National Register of Historic Places on 31 July 2012, and Michigan put up a historical marker in 2014.

What happened next was volunteer work rather than a redevelopment scheme. The Friends of Historic Hamtramck Stadium restored the infield, then petitioned the city council, which in 2020 named the diamond Norman "Turkey" Stearnes Field. Stearnes's daughters sang at the groundbreaking. Wayne County put in $850,000 and the wider grandstand project drew money from the Detroit Tigers Foundation, the Kresge and Ralph C. Wilson Jr. foundations, and a National Park Service African American Civil Rights grant. The ballpark was rededicated on 20 June 2022, timed to Juneteenth, with high school teams from Detroit and Chicago playing in Detroit Stars and Chicago American Giants uniforms.

Around 150 games a year are played here now.

The stadium is in Veterans Memorial Park on Dan Avenue, Hamtramck, Michigan, and is free to walk into. It is regularly confused with Keyworth Stadium a few blocks away, which is a different building. Coordinates from OpenStreetMap.

Cover: the grandstand at Hamtramck Stadium, photographed by Andrew Jameson, 2012, before restoration, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: the stadium and field, also by Andrew Jameson, 2012, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.