The Night They Set the World Series on Fire
Before Game 7 of the 1925 World Series, the grounds crew at Forbes Field burned gasoline on the infield so the game could be played.
On October 15, 1925, the grounds crew at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh poured gasoline on the infield and lit it on fire. This was not an act of vandalism. It was the official pregame preparation for Game 7 of the World Series.
The 1925 Series between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Washington Senators had already been postponed twice because of rain. Game 7 could not be delayed again. Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis wanted it played. The problem was the field. Pittsburgh had been soaked for days, and the infield at Forbes Field was a swamp. The grounds crew needed to dry it out fast.
Their solution was gasoline and sawdust. They soaked the dirt, struck a match, and watched the field burn. Smoke clouds rose into the stands. The dirt blackened and dried. They spread sawdust over the scorched earth, and Game 7 was declared playable.
It barely was. A mist hung over the stadium at game time, and by the middle innings, that mist had become a steady downpour. Washington outfielder Goose Goslin later said the fog got so thick in the final innings that he could barely see the infield from right field. The basepaths turned to mud. The pitching mound was a mess.
Nine future Hall of Famers played or managed that afternoon. Walter Johnson, the aging Washington ace nicknamed "The Big Train," started for the Senators and carried a 6-4 lead into the bottom of the seventh inning. The Pirates had already come back from a three-games-to-one deficit in the series, the first team ever to do so. Now they needed to come back in the game itself.
Washington shortstop Roger Peckinpaugh, the 1925 American League MVP, committed errors in both the seventh and eighth innings. He finished the series with eight errors, a record that still stands. In the eighth, with the bases loaded and two outs, Kiki Cuyler drove a ball down the right field line. In the mud and the fog and the rain, the ball skidded past the fielder. Runners scored. The play was controversial. Goslin swore the ball was foul by two feet. Sportswriter Ring Lardner, who was there, wrote that the game was played "in semi-darkness and on a field that resembled nothing so much as chicken a la king."
The Pirates won 9-7. They celebrated on a field that had been on fire a few hours earlier.
Commissioner Landis called them "the gamest club that ever won a World Championship." In the century since, no grounds crew has attempted to dry a field with gasoline.