Grand and Dodier: A Century of Baseball at Sportsman's Park
For ninety years, the northwest corner of Grand Boulevard and Dodier Street hosted professional baseball in St. Louis, and no other intersection in America held two major league tenants for as long or produced a World Series played entirely in one park.
Baseball showed up at Grand and Dodier before there was a professional league to organize it. In 1866, August Solari acquired a tract of land at the northwest corner of Grand Boulevard and Dodier Street on the north side of St. Louis and began hosting amateur games the following year. When the Brown Stockings joined the National Association as the city's first professional club in 1875, they inherited that same patch of ground and played in a rough wooden enclosure called the Grand Avenue Ball Grounds. A year later, as charter members of the new National League, they renamed it Sportsman's Park. Professional baseball would remain on the site for the next ninety years.
The park cycled through several wooden incarnations as teams came and went. The American Association's St. Louis Browns played there in the 1880s. When the American League's St. Louis Browns arrived in 1902, owner Robert Lee Hedges built a new 8,000-seat wooden grandstand. Seven years later, he tore it down and started over.
Steel, Concrete, and a New Century
During the winter of 1908-09, Hedges replaced the wooden structure with a double-decked, fireproof grandstand of concrete and steel. The rebuilt park opened on April 14, 1909, when the Browns lost to Cleveland, 4-2. With an initial capacity of roughly 24,000, it was the third steel-and-concrete ballpark in the majors, behind Shibe Park in Philadelphia, which had opened two days earlier. Forbes Field in Pittsburgh followed that June, making 1909 the year concrete and steel replaced wood across the sport. The diamond was relocated to the southwest corner of the lot, where it stayed for the next fifty-seven years.
Owner Phil Ball expanded the park in the mid-1920s, pushing capacity to roughly 34,000 with double-decked grandstands along both foul lines and concrete outfield bleachers. The final configuration measured 351 feet down the left field line, 426 feet to dead center, and a short 310 feet to right field. A 25-foot screen atop the right field wall, added in 1929, tried to keep cheap home runs honest.
Two Teams, One Address
The Cardinals arrived as tenants on July 1, 1920. Their own home, Robison Field, had decayed beyond reasonable repair, and owner Sam Breadon estimated it would cost over half a million dollars to restore. Browns owner Phil Ball agreed to take on the Cardinals as renters. Breadon sold Robison Field for $275,000, cleared the franchise's debts, and moved in at Grand and Dodier.
For the next thirty-three seasons, two major league clubs shared one ballpark. Both dugouts, both clubhouses, both sets of fans entered through the same gates at 2911 North Grand Boulevard. The arrangement was common enough in early baseball, but no other city sustained it as long. The Giants and Yankees had met in the 1921 and 1922 World Series while sharing the Polo Grounds, but no shared-stadium pairing had produced a Fall Classic since.
The Streetcar Series
The 1944 World Series was the last Fall Classic played entirely in a single ballpark as the home field for both clubs, the third such occurrence after the 1921 and 1922 Series at the Polo Grounds. The Browns, who had won their lone American League pennant, faced the Cardinals, who had won 105 games and their third straight National League pennant. With so many players away in World War II, the rosters were thin. But the games were real, and the fans who rode the streetcar to Grand and Dodier saw all six of them without changing seats.
The Cardinals won the series four games to two, clinching with a 3-1 victory in Game 6 on October 9. It was the Browns' only pennant, and the closest they came to a championship. Nine years later, the franchise moved to Baltimore and became the Orioles, leaving the Cardinals as the sole tenants of a park that had belonged to the Browns for half a century.
Veeck, Gaedel, and the Showman's Touch
Bill Veeck bought the Browns in 1951, inheriting a last-place team that could barely draw flies. His response was spectacle. On August 19, 1951, between games of a doubleheader against the Detroit Tigers, a seven-foot papier-mache birthday cake was wheeled to home plate to celebrate the fiftieth anniversaries of the American League and the Browns' sponsor, Falstaff Brewing Company. Out popped Eddie Gaedel, three feet seven inches tall, sixty-five pounds, wearing a Browns uniform with the fraction 1/8 on the back.
In the bottom of the first inning of the second game, Gaedel stepped to the plate as a pinch hitter against Tigers pitcher Bob Cain. Veeck had ordered him not to swing under any circumstances. Cain, laughing and struggling to locate the minuscule strike zone, threw four balls. Gaedel trotted to first base and was replaced by pinch runner Jim Delsing. The 18,369 fans in attendance, the largest American League crowd at Sportsman's Park that season, gave him a standing ovation. The next day, American League president Will Harridge voided Gaedel's contract and barred him from further play. It did not undo what had already happened.
From Sportsman's Park to Busch Stadium
In 1953, Anheuser-Busch purchased the Cardinals, and brewery president August "Gussie" Busch Jr. became the club's owner. The plan was to rename the ballpark Budweiser Stadium, but Commissioner Ford Frick blocked the use of a beer brand. Busch named the park after himself instead. In 1955, Anheuser-Busch introduced a new lager called Busch Bavarian Beer, completing the workaround. The park that fans had called Sportsman's Park for seventy-seven years was now officially Busch Stadium, though plenty of St. Louisans kept using the old name.
Stan Musial played twenty-two seasons on that field, from his debut on September 17, 1941, through his retirement after the 1963 season. He finished with 3,630 hits, split with freakish symmetry: 1,815 at home and 1,815 on the road. On October 6, 1926, Babe Ruth had hit three home runs in Game 4 of the World Series at Sportsman's Park, the first player to accomplish that feat in a Series game. On October 15, 1946, Enos Slaughter tore around the bases from first on Harry Walker's hit in the eighth inning of Game 7, scoring the run that beat the Red Sox and gave the Cardinals the championship. The play lives in the record books as "Slaughter's Mad Dash." The last World Series at the park came in 1964, when the Cardinals beat the Yankees in seven games in the final October the old yard would see.
The End at Grand and Dodier
The Cardinals played their last game at Sportsman's Park on May 8, 1966, losing to the San Francisco Giants 10-5 before 17,503 spectators. Pregame ceremonies honored George Sisler, the Browns' greatest player, and Stan Musial. After the final out, a helicopter lifted home plate from the infield and carried it across town to the new Busch Memorial Stadium downtown, where the Cardinals had already begun playing.
Within six months, the wrecking ball arrived. Owner August Busch donated the land to the Herbert Hoover Boys Club, now part of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater St. Louis. A youth baseball diamond sits roughly where the major league one used to be. A small historical marker at the site notes what once stood there.
More than 7,000 major league games were played at Grand and Dodier across six decades. Two franchises, ten World Series, and one three-foot-seven pinch hitter all passed through the same set of gates. The neighborhood on the north side of St. Louis has changed. The park is gone. The baseball diamond is still there, smaller and quieter, waiting for someone to step up to the plate.