Square Pegs, Round Holes, and Concrete Doughnuts

Eighteen-year veteran Richie Hebner once opined “I can stand at the plate at the Vet in Philadelphia, and I don’t honestly know whether I’m in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, St. Louis or Philly.”  Having spent his 1969 rookie year at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field, he couldn’t help but notice the difference between that storied structure and its successor, Three Rivers Stadium, his home turf for the next seven seasons.

Well, Richie, your slash line of .276/.352/.438 isn’t bad, but if you’d paid more attention to the pitcher and less attention to the surroundings, maybe you’d be in Cooperstown.   Hebner, however, was not the only architecture critic in the baseball world.  The pejorative descriptive “cookie-cutter” was often heard.  Yet another baking-oriented phrase, “concrete doughnut,” was offered.  This is not to say those concrete doughnuts were identical. Go into a Dunkin shop and you will see a wide assortment of baked goods – all of them doughnuts…well, except for the muffins which, come to think of it, are sort of like domed concrete doughnuts: the Astrodome, the Kingdome, or Rogers Centre.

There were a number of reasons why the concrete doughnut was all the rage in so many American cities.  During August and September when the schedules overlapped, it was easy enough to schedule football games on days when the baseball team was out of town.  True, it was a tedious task to get out the lime spreader and overlay a gridiron on the baseball field (or erase it afterwards), and patching up the field after football players had mangled it was a bit of a bother, but most ground crews were up to the task.  The pitcher’s mound had to be repeatedly torn down and rebuilt but sodding the skinned portion of the diamond for football was optional.

Playing baseball and football in the same venue was nothing new, but before the concrete doughnut era, it meant playing in a baseball park, not a multi-purpose facility.  In fact, this was true for the majority of NFL teams, but as pro football grew in popularity, thanks largely to the spread of TV in the 1950s, the inadequacies of the baseball parks for football became more and more apparent.  When Bob Dylan sang “The Times They Are a-Changin’” in 1964, he could have been talking about all the concrete doughnuts opening for business or in the planning stages.

At the same time, the classic baseball parks, which seem so quaint in retrospect, were adequate so far as the playing of the game, but they were deficient in what has come to be known as “the fan experience.”  Amenities were minimal, most of the ballparks were in decaying neighborhoods, and parking was in short supply – not a problem when the parks were built and most people rode buses or streetcars to the park, but given the postwar growth of suburbia and the increasing popularity of the automobile, it was a major drawback.

Seeing that indoor arenas could accommodate both basketball and ice hockey, architects and city fathers figured that it was possible to design stadiums that could do justice to both football and baseball.  In one sense, they were right (a playing field is a playing field is a playing field; grandstands are grandstands are grandstands; a locker room is a locker room is a locker room), but in another sense they were not.  If the baseball field had very little foul territory, it might be difficult to shoehorn a gridiron into the available space.  Even if adequate seating was available for football fans, the sightlines would likely leave something to be desired.  And a locker room that was adequate for a squad of 25 baseball players would be hard-pressed to accommodate 40 or more football players.

Football gridirons are all the same size; the stadiums that envelop them are usually similar, typically ovoid, U-shaped, or horseshoe-shaped.  Baseball diamonds are all the same size but foul territory and outfield acreage are variables.  The structure that surrounds the playing field is unique, inspiring any number of books and articles on baseball parks old and new.  The available literature on football stadiums is much less because there is less to discuss.  Hebner-like sentiments regarding football stadiums would merely be stating the obvious.

The nostalgia for “classic” ballparks shows no sign of abating but it is often forgotten how many pro football games they hosted.  So let’s go back to 1959 and see how important those long-gone parks were to pro football teams.  In other words, let’s deconstruct those razed ballparks!

Why 1959?  Because baseball was still king in 1959 but pro football was catching up fast.  Though there were several transfers in the 50s (St. Louis Browns to Baltimore, Philadelphia A’s to Kansas City, Boston Braves to Milwaukee, Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles, and New York Giants to San Francisco), major league baseball was still comprised of 16 teams, which had been the case since 1901.  Expansion did not occur till 1961 when the American League added the Los Angeles Angels and the rebooted Washington Senators.

The NFL had been around since the 1920s but by and large it had played second fiddle to college football.  There was quite a bit of franchise-shifting in the old days but by the late 1950s things had pretty well settled down, at least until the American Football League opened for business in 1960 with eight teams, all of which were absorbed by the NFL a decade later.

So 1959 was the last year of “old style” pro football.  Each NFL team played just 12 games and there were just 12 teams.  They were:

NFL WEST	NFL EAST
Baltimore Colts	Chicago Cardinals
Chicago Bears	Cleveland Browns
Detroit Lions	New York Giants
Green Bay Packers	Philadelphia Eagles
Los Angeles Rams	Pittsburgh Steelers
San Francisco 49ers	Washington Redskins

Well, at first glance it becomes apparent that sports league geography was as suspect in 1959 as it is today.  One Chicago team in the West, one in the East?  Baltimore in the West but Washington in the East?  For the purposes of this essay, however, what is of import is that most of these teams were playing in parks designed for baseball.

In the NFL East, the only team playing in a football-designed stadium was the Philadelphia Eagles, who were nesting in Franklin Field, a 60,000+ seat facility on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania.  The oldest (1895) college football stadium in America, it is still in use today.  And there the Eagles remained till they moved to Veterans Stadium in 1971.  Richie Hebner notwithstanding, the Vet was not a concrete doughnut but an octorad, “incorporating four arcs of a large circle and four arcs of a smaller circle.”  And if you can visualize that without looking up a diagram of same on Google, you should go to architecture school.

In 1959 the Eagles were only two years removed from Shibe Park/Connie Mack Stadium, where they had played since 1940.  The end zones were in left field and along the first base line.  Temporary stands were installed in right field to bump up the capacity to more than 39,000 but that was hardly necessary in 1957, the team’s last year there, as the team drew just 129,754 total (a mere 21,626 per game), last in the league.  Blame it on Connie Mack Stadium or the team’s poor record (4-8); for either reason or both, the Eagles flew the coop.  FUN FACT:Though the Eagles were even worse in 1958 (2-9-1), two years later they won the NFL championship.

Another team that played in a bona fide football stadium was the San Francisco 49ers, who played in Kezar Stadium at the periphery of Golden Gate Park.  Kezar opened in 1925 but the 49ers did not take up residence there till 1946.  They remained there through the 1970 season.  They went against the trend, as they moved not out of but into a baseball park, namely, Candlestick Park, home of the Giants.  Arguably, it was no longer a baseball park as it had been enclosed to add more seating capacity for NFL-size crowds.  FUN FACT:The Oakland Raiders played at “the Stick” long before the 49ers arrived.  In fact, they played there in 1960, the year it opened.

350 or so miles to the south, the Los Angeles Rams played at the venerable L.A. Coliseum, which had been the home of Southern Cal football since 1923 (UCLA also called it home from 1933 to 1981).  The Coliseum also hosted the Oakland Raiders during their 1982-1994 Los Angeles sojourn, then welcomed the Rams back from their St. Louis exile (1995-2015).  The 100,000+ seating capacity allowed the Rams to lead the league in attendance in 1959 with 444,376 in six home games (74,063 average).  The balmiest weather in the NFL probably helped also.

Obviously, the Coliseum has worked – and continues to work – very well for football (not to mention the 1932, 1984 and 2028 Olympics,) but in 1958 Angelenos were likely surprised when they found out that it was going to be the Dodgers home park for four seasons while Dodger Stadium was being built in Chavez Ravine.  Ironically, baseball-only Dodger Stadium opened on April 10, 1962, just one day after the Washington Senators played their first game in D.C. (n/k/a RFK) Stadium, the first concrete doughnut.

So in 1959 the 49ers and the Eagles were the only teams not sharing a facility with a baseball team.  Admittedly, the situation with the Rams and the Dodgers in the Coliseum was an anomaly.  Another anomaly, at least according to some sports fans, was the Mistake on the Lake in Cleveland.

The Cleveland Browns had played at Municipal Stadium since the beginning of the franchise in 1946.  At the time, however, they were a member of the All-America Conference.  After the league folded, the Browns, who had won championships in each of the league’s four seasons, moved to the NFL.  FUN FACTS:The Browns succeeded the Cleveland Rams.  No sooner had the Rams won the NFL championship game at Municipal Stadium in 1945 than they vacated the premises in favor of the L.A. Coliseum.  Five years later they returned to Municipal Stadium for the NFL championship game against the new tenants.  The Browns emerged victorious, 30-28, continuing their streak of championships, this time in another league.

During 1946 the Indians also called Municipal Stadium home…sometimes.  They continued to play most games at League Park on the east side but became full-time tenants at Municipal Stadium in 1947.  In 1959 the Indians were contenders.  They finished second (five games behind the White Sox) in the league, both in the standings and in attendance (1,497,976).  This was more than double the attendance in their also-ran 1958 season when they had a total attendance of 663,805.  The 1959 season was encouraging but the Indians reverted to mediocrity in 1960 and didn’t surpass the 1,000,000 mark again till 1974.  Consequently, there were far more empty seats for the Indians than for the Browns.

Municipal Stadium, which opened in 1932, was not strictly a baseball park. It wasn’t strictly a football field either, as it hosted boxing, track and field, midget auto races, balloon races, Shriners conventions, and religious revivals, among other get-togethers.  It was about as multi-purpose as an outdoor stadium can be.

The 49ers, the Eagles, the Rams, and the Browns aside, all the other teams in the NFL played at venues that were specifically designed for baseball.  Consider the Chicago Bears, who were playing at Wrigley Field before there was ivy on the outfield walls.  The scant foul territory made for higher-scoring baseball games and more intimate fan perspectives, but the friendly confines were a little too confining for football.

Nevertheless, the gridiron was squeezed into the space available with end zones in left field and along the first base line.  The lack of open space beyond the end zone proved hazardous for the Bears’ legendary fullback Bronco Nagurski.  After hitting his head against Wrigley’s brick wall, he remarked “That last guy really gave me a good lick.”  Supposedly, if you know where to look, there is a crack in the brick wall to this day.

Chicago-born George Halas, a University of Illinois star who was the father of the franchise (hence his nickname of Papa Bear), took up residence at Wrigley Field in 1922, and there the Bears remained through the 1970 season.  When the Bears left, Wrigley held the record for most seasons hosting NFL games.  FUN FACT:The Bears’ longtime nickname, the Monsters of the Midway, is a geographical impossibility.  The phrase originally applied to the football team at the University of Chicago, which abandoned the sport in 1939.  The Midway was an east-west boulevard that was adjacent to the campus on the South Side of the city.  Wrigley Field is on the North Side, nowhere near the Midway, yet the Bears somehow inherited the nickname.

The Bears’ current home, Soldier Field, was built in 1924, so why Halas chose to remain at Wrigley is a bit of a puzzler.  Since the Chicago Park District controls Soldier Field, my guess is that some sort of city politics was the stumbling block.  Or maybe Halas was a Cubs fan, as the nickname Bears implies.  Halas actually had a cup of coffee with the New York Yankees in 1919 before a hip injury ended his baseball career.  Had he remained healthy, Chicago pro football history might have been very different.

Another longtime NFL town, Green Bay, Wisconsin, is virtually synonymous with its team, the Packers, who have been around since 1921.  Green Bay has never been a major league city (though they had minor league teams as early as 1891 and as late as 1960 and currently host the Green Bay Blue Ribbons of the semi-pro Wisconsin State League), but the Packers began playing some of their home games in Milwaukee’s County Stadium, which housed the erstwhile Boston Braves in 1953.  The Packers had typically played two or three games each year in Milwaukee every season but this was their first opportunity to play at a major league baseball park.

The first football game played at County Stadium was a 27-0 loss to the Cleveland Browns on September 27, 1953, just one week after the Braves concluded their first home season in Milwaukee.  The crowd of 22,604 sounds small by today’s standards but it was in keeping with the crowds at Green Bay in those days.  It was not the first time the Packers played at a baseball park, as they had also played at Borchert Field, home of the minor league Milwaukee Brewers, in 1933.  In 1959 the Packers played one pre-season and two regular season games at County Stadium.  The crowd of 36,194 for the October 18 ^th game against the Rams was the Packers’ largest home crowd of the season.

The Packers’ games at County Stadium were not just a means of accommodating fans in the largest metro area in Wisconsin, but also a way to convince the powers that be in Green Bay to build a new stadium for the Packers, who had been playing at a high school field.  The result was a 32,500-seat stadium in 1957 (n/k/a Lambeau Field with a capacity of 81,441).  It was the first stadium built specifically for an NFL team.  Nevertheless, the Packers continued to play some games at County Stadium.  The last game they played there was a 21-17 victory over the Atlanta Falcons on December 18, 1994.

Memorial Stadium in Baltimore also hosted football and baseball, and you could argue that in 1959 it appeared to be as accommodating for baseball as it was for football, even though it started as a single-deck football stadium in 1922.  Over the next two decades the horseshoe-shaped facility served well as a home for football, mostly high school and college.  In 1944, it was pressed into service for baseball when Oriole Park, the minor league Orioles home, burned down.

The enormous crowds that showed up at Memorial Stadium for the Junior World Series (matching the International League champion Orioles and the American Association champion Louisville Colonels) that year surpassed the attendance at the all-St. Louis major league World Series.  This put Baltimore on the map as a possible site for a future major league team.

The Baltimore Colts arrived at Memorial Stadium in 1947 but went bankrupt after the 1950 season.  The Colts nickname was resurrected when Baltimore was granted an expansion franchise in 1953.  A year later the St. Louis Browns came to town and the major league Orioles were fledged, prompting the double-decking of the stadium.  In 1959 Memorial Stadium was the site of the NFL Championship Game with the Colts defeating the New York Giants, 31-16, in front of 57,545.

Memorial Stadium worked reasonably well for both sports, yet after the 1983 season the Colts packed up and left – literally sneaking out of town – for Indianapolis, where the Hoosier Dome was waiting for them.  The Orioles had Memorial Stadium to themselves through 1991, after which they decamped to Camden Yards.

That was not the end of football and baseball at Memorial Stadium, however.  The Bowie Baysox, a nearby Orioles’ affiliate in the Eastern League, played the 1993 season there due to construction delays at their ballpark.  The Baltimore Stallions of the Canadian Football League played at Memorial Stadium in 1994 and 1995.  The Baltimore Ravens, actually the transplanted Cleveland Browns, played in Memorial Stadium in 1996 and 1997 while a football-only stadium was being built.  The lesson is clear: Don’t tear down those old stadiums too quickly.  They might prove useful.  Memorial Stadium was not torn down till 2002.  Today the property is occupied by a youth baseball field and a seniors apartment complex.

Another venue that served both sports fairly well was Tiger Stadium.  The large seating capacity (52,416) was a plus for the Detroit Lions, who started playing there in 1938.  Empty seats were few in 1959, as the Lions’ six home games drew 308,090 (51,348 per game average).  Square and double-decked all the way around, Briggs Stadium, as it was known till 1961, was reasonably accommodating for football.  The Lions remained there till 1975 when they headed north to Pontiac where an indoor football-only stadium, the Silverdome, was erected for them.

The weak sister in the NFL West in 1959 was the Chicago Cardinals, who had once enjoyed a robust rivalry with the Bears (in fact, the Cardinals shared Wrigley Field with the Bears in the 1930s).  They also had three stints at Comiskey Park, the first starting in 1922, and the third ending in 1958.  In 1959 they played four games at Soldier Field as well as two “home” games at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, Minnesota, which would seem to indicate an interest in relocating the franchise.

The NFL preempted any such notions by granting an expansion franchise to Minneapolis-St. Paul.  The Vikings (and Twins) began play there in 1961.  So the Cardinals moved to St. Louis in 1960 and shared Busch Stadium (f/k/a Sportsman’s Park) with the baseball Cardinals through 1965.  Both teams moved to the new Busch Stadium in 1966 when the concrete doughnut era began in St. Louis.

The acreage at Washington’s Griffith Stadium, home of the Senators, was sufficient for football but the seating capacity (28,669) was small, even by MLB standards at the time.  This was not a problem for the 1959 Senators, whose 63-91 record was good for another “First in war, first in peace, last in the American League” season, not just in the standings but in attendance (615,372).  The Redskins, however, averaged 31,546 per game (189,381 total for the season).  Griffith Stadium had been their home since they moved to Washington from Boston in 1937, their first year in the nation’s capital.  D.C. Stadium was ready for football in 1961 but not baseball.  That year the expansion Senators played in Griffith Stadium before moving to D.C. Stadium in 1962.

The 1961 Redskins opened D.C. Stadium with a buzz-killing 1-12-1 record.  They were more competitive in subsequent seasons but moved to a football-only stadium in suburban Maryland in 1997.  As with Memorial Stadium, D.C./RFK Stadium proved useful after its primary tenant had moved on.  The oldest concrete doughnut in the land served as a temporary home (2005-2007) for the Washington Nationals (f/k/a the Montreal Expos).

It has had no tenants since D.C. United of the NASL moved out after the 2017 season.  It remains standing since the cost to demolish it is estimated at $20,000,000.  Nevertheless, there is a push in Congress to redevelop the area.  A domed football stadium for the Commanders f/k/a the Redskins is part of the package.  FUN FACT:The Redskins were originally (1932) known as the Braves, as they shared Braves Field with the baseball Braves in Boston.  The Redskins nickname was adopted the following season.

In addition to baseball and football Cardinals and baseball and football Braves, there were once baseball and football Giants.  From 1925 to 1955 both teams shared the Polo Grounds, an odd duck of a ballpark that was built for baseball but looked as though it had been designed for football.  The football Giants were the first to vacate the premises, moving across the Harlem River to another baseball park, Yankee Stadium.  The move seemed to pay off as the Giants won the 1956 NFL championship and attendance vaulted from 163,787 to 282,382.

Fans likely figured that some of that Yankee mojo had carried over to football.  Then frustration set in.  As mentioned above, they lost the 1959 NFL championship game to the Baltimore Colts.  It was the second of five trips (1958-1963) they made to the NFL championship game….and lost.  A consolation prize of sorts was the Giants’ participation in the 1958 game, also won by the Colts.  The first overtime contest in NFL championship history, the nationally televised contest, at the time called “the Greatest Game Ever Played,” played a key role in the growing popularity of pro football which continued into the 1960s with some sportswriters averring it had surpassed baseball as the national pastime.

The Giants remained at Yankee Stadium through 1972 but never won another title there.  After Yankee Stadium was closed for remodeling, they played two seasons at the Yale Bowl in New Haven, Connecticut, but then had a one-year fling (1975) with the concrete doughnut experience at Shea Stadium before settling into a  football-only stadium in Rutherford, New Jersey.

As for the Polo Grounds, it might have appeared to be a white elephant when the baseball Giants moved out after the 1957 season, but it was not yet ready for demolition.  The expansion Mets played there, albeit poorly, in 1962 and 1963, but so did the New York Titans (n/k/a Jets and not to be confused with the Tennessee Titans), one of the franchises in the new American Football League.  Both teams remained there till moving to Shea Stadium in 1964.  The new facility in Queens was round but not entirely enclosed so it resembled a concrete doughnut with a bite taken out of it.

Like Yankee Stadium, Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field was spacious so there was no problem fitting a gridiron into the available space.  The Steelers arrived in 1933 but they were not the first football team to play there, as the University of Pittsburgh Panthers called Forbes Field home from 1909 to 1924.  The success of the team inspired the construction of Pitt Stadium with a capacity of 69,400.  While this would seem to be a better venue for pro football, the Steelers remained at Forbes Field through 1962.

This might have been because the Steelers at the time were not a big draw, having been an also-ran franchise since their inception.  They had just one post-season appearance, a divisional playoff loss to the Eagles in 1947, to their credit.  In our benchmark season of 1959, for example, the 6-5-1 Steelers were last in the league in attendance (160,006 total, 26,668 average).

By 1963, the Steelers were splitting their home games between Forbes and Pitt (4 games at the former, 3 at the latter; the NFL had gone to a 14-game schedule in 1961).  The difference in attendance was dramatic: 47,517 average at Pitt versus 24,865 at Forbes.  The Steelers moved to Pitt full-time in 1964, and finally in 1970 into the concrete doughnut known as Three Rivers Stadium, where they became a powerhouse, winning four Super Bowls in the 1970s.  Since the Pirates won six NL East titles that decade, along with two NL pennants and World Series championships, the hometown fans were probably delighted with their concrete doughnut.  FUN FACT:Yet another dual nickname for football/baseball tenants!  Before 1940 the Steelers were nicknamed the Pirates.

Of the classic ballparks, it could be said first came baseball, then football, then the wrecking ball.  Of all the ballparks in use in 1959, only Fenway and Wrigley remain.  Over a 10-year span baseball teams adapted to concrete doughnuts as home parks.  After DC Stadium (1962) came Shea Stadium (1964), the Astrodome (1965), Atlanta Stadium (1966), the Oakland Coliseum (1968), San Diego Stadium (1969, probably the most distinctive of the bunch, architecturally speaking), Three Rivers Stadium (1970), Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium (1970), and Veterans Stadium (1971).

Bucking the trend was Kansas City, which opened baseball-only and football-only facilities in 1973.  The only thing Royals Stadium and Arrowhead Stadium shared was a parking lot.  One wonders if any of the concrete doughnut cities had regrets that they had not gone in that direction.

As of this writing, only one of the aforementioned concrete doughnuts is still in use.  The Oakland Coliseum opened for football in 1966 and baseball in 1968.  Like Shea Stadium, it had a “bite” taken out of it.  The gap was plugged in 1996 when the Oakland Raiders, who had spent 1982 through 1994 in Los Angeles, returned to the East Bay, and a 20,000-seat eyesore (popularly called Mt. Davis, a “tribute” to Raiders’ owner Al Davis) spanning left-center field to right-center field was erected.

Never notable for being inviting (it was jokingly referred to as the Oakland Mausoleum), the stadium no longer afforded visitors a view of the Oakland Hills. That was arguably the only aesthetic feature of the structure.  Nevertheless, it is the last stadium in use that was designed for both sports. But Oakland lost football for good after the 2019 season and the A’s will be gone at the close of the 2024 season.  That will be the end of an era, not just for the City of Oakland but also for concrete doughnuts.

Notably, the mixed baseball-football design craze was not limited to major league sports.  In Honolulu, 50,000-seat Aloha Stadium, located near Pearl Harbor, hosted University of Hawaii football games as well as the Triple-A Hawaiian Islanders.  But big-league sports were played there on occasion.  The NFL played its Pro Bowl there every year from 1980 through 2016 (save for 2010 and 2015).  In April 1997 Aloha Stadium hosted three regular-season contests between the Padres and the Cardinals.

Another unusual minor league baseball/football structure was Bears Field in Denver.  Originally built to host the minor league Bears of the Single-A Western League, it was expanded to 34,667 seats to accommodate the Denver Broncos of the AFL in 1960.  Eight years later it was upped to 50,000 and renamed Mile High Stadium.  The park was expanded again to 63,532 in 1976 and 75,000+ in 1977.

This was far more capacity than any major league team would need, yet at the time it was the home of the Triple-A Denver Zephyrs (American Association).  There was plenty of elbow room for their minor league contests, but when the expansion Colorado Rockies took the field in 1993 and 1994, they set attendance records (4,483,350 total in 1993; 57,570 average per game in 1994) that remain unbroken.

The final expansion of the stadium included an impressive feature: a moveable, triple-decked, 450-foot long bank of seats on the north side of the stadium.  For football, the stadium had a familiar U-shaped appearance with the east end zone open; when the north side seats were retracted 145 feet, space opened up for left and center field in the baseball configuration.  Mile High Stadium might have been a minor league baseball park, but it definitely exhibited major league engineering.  Nevertheless, the stadium was demolished in favor of a new Mile High, an adjacent football-only stadium that opened in 2001.  The Rockies, of course, had already moved to Coors Field in 1995.

Curiously, football is still played in baseball parks – but not pro football.  The college bowl season has several games played in parks designed for baseball.  Chase Field in Phoenix hosts the Guaranteed Rate Bowl, Petco Park hosts the DirecTV Holiday Bowl (though don’t be surprised if this doesn’t eventually end up at San Diego State’s new stadium one day).  And high school football playoff games take place not only at Globe Life Park but Globe Life Field, the old and new homes of the Texas Rangers.

Hearkening back to old Yankee Stadium, the new Yankee Stadium hosts the Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl.  Not to be outdone by its arch-rival, Fenway Park has gotten into the act, hosting the Wasabi Fenway Bowl.  Football at Fenway might be difficult to envision, but the Boston (New England since 1971) Patriots played home games at Fenway from 1963 to 1968, with occasional forays to Alumni Stadium (Boston College) due to scheduling conflicts.  The Patriots also played at Boston University’s Nickerson Field, the former site of Braves Field.

Not to be outdone by Fenway, its partner in antiquity, Wrigley Field, has also hosted college football in recent years.  Northwestern University, situated just north of the north side of Chicago, has played several games there.  The first was in 2010 against the University of Illinois, Halas’s alma mater, albeit with a different configuration than Halas was used to.  The field was rotated so the end zones were along the third base line and the right field wall.  The latter end zone was so close to the wall that it was adjudged dangerous because someone might run into it (as though this hazard hadn’t existed for countless right fielders).  So the rules were temporarily changed: The offensive team always went in the same direction, away from the right field bleachers.

When Northwestern returned in 2021 (versus Purdue) and 2023 (versus Iowa), padding was draped over the ivy on the right field wall so teams could go in both directions.  BTW, Northwestern is scheduled to play Ohio State at Wrigley on November 16, 2024.  Sounds like a bonanza for scalpers…or should I say ticket brokers, licensed or otherwise.  Whether or not a Wrigley Field game becomes an annual event on the Northwestern schedule remains to be seen, but the trend seems to be in that direction.

A little more than seven weeks before that Big 10 showdown in beloved Wrigley Field, namely on Thursday, September 26, 2024, the Oakland A’s will play an afternoon game against the Texas Rangers in a facility that is anything but beloved.  This will be the final game played in the Oakland Coliseum.

On that day the A’s are giving away replicas of the Coliseum (perhaps with a detachable Mount Davis?).  It will surely be a sad day in the East Bay even though the Coliseum has long been a whipping boy for ballpark mavens, who usually give it the edge over the Tampa Bay Rays’ Tropicana Field as the worst park in the majors.  The financially-strapped city of Oakland might not have the big bucks it will take to tear down the Coliseum.  They have plenty of urban blight to deal with as it is.

If the Coliseum is not torn down, one day in the distant future perhaps it will still exist but in ruins.  Maybe a couple of thousand years from now, humans will ponder it as we ponder the Roman Colosseum – the original concrete doughnut.  Just as tourists roam that ancient structure and try to imagine what it was like when gladiators and Christian-mauling lions entertained the Roman masses, perhaps future visitors to the East Bay will ponder what’s left of the Coliseum and try to imagine the sporting events that took place there.

Will people still be playing baseball then?

Will people still be playing football then?

Will people still be eating doughnuts then?

Richie who?