Speaker details city’s time as baseball home

During their visit, the White Stockings were able to lease land on Ouachita Avenue at the present-day site of the Garland County Court House to build a ballpark.

HOT SPRINGS — Preseason baseball not only found a home in Hot Springs in the first half of the 20th century — it brought popularity and permanent change to the city, baseball historian Mike Dugan said recently.

Dugan of Hot Springs, a member of the Friends of Baseball Hall Of Fame and one of the original collaborators on the Hot Springs Historic Baseball Trail, gave a history lesson about America’s pastime in the Spa City to Hot Springs National Park Rotary recently.

His speech touched on how the city revolutionized the concept of spring training and how baseball drew fans from all over the country to Arkansas.

Dugan began his speech with the year 1886 — the first year that a baseball player set foot in Hot Springs. He said the first team to visit the city was the underachieving Chicago White Stockings (now the Chicago Cubs), which were owned by Albert Goodwill Spalding.

Spalding heard about Hot Springs from a Chicago newspaper article, which claimed the city’s spring water could boil out alcoholic microbes in the human body. He figured his team, with its rampant alcoholism, would benefit from a preseason visit.

During their visit, the White Stockings were able to lease land on Ouachita Avenue at the present-day site of the Garland County Court House to build a ballpark. Dugan said the White Stockings were pleased with their stay, and would go on to become the champion of Major League Baseball that year.

Due to their championship title, other MLB teams saw the White Stockings’ spring training in Hot Springs as a successful move. In 1887, the Cincinnati Reds followed suit, finding property on Whittington Avenue to construct its own ballpark.

Dugan said the ballpark on Whittington Avenue was an improvement over hilly terrain on Ouachita Avenue. However, while the teams then had a decent field on which to practice and compete, the popularity of that field led to overcrowding and the construction of other ball fields within the city.

Economically, Hot Springs’ preseason baseball drew fans in droves, who partook in the city’s food and hospitality when they weren’t attending the games. One of the more noteworthy instances of this was found with the Boston Red Sox, who took their home base with them to the Spa City.

“When the Boston Red Sox came to town, they brought with them train cars full of fans,” Dugan said.

Preseason baseball remained a fixture of Hot Springs through most of the 1910s. Dugan explained teams began to make their way to Florida near the end of that decade due to confidence in the pesticide DDT being able to fend off the state’s malaria-carrying mosquitoes and more consistent weather.

“You know what March and April today is like in Hot Springs,” Dugan told the crowd. “We have off-and-on weather.”

The Red Sox and Pirates, which kept using the Spa City for spring training through 1923, and Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics, who returned to the Spa City for training in 1929 and 1930, were the final teams to use Hot Springs for their respective preseasons. Eleven championships were won by major league teams that used the city as their training grounds.