Boston’s other baseball treasure
At Nickerson Field, there’s a metaphorical line that stretches from Babe Ruth to Tom Brady
BOSTON — Tobacco juice and sunflower seeds are no longer strewn along the right-field line, and the trolley tracks that guided legions of fans directly into Braves Field have long since been paved over.
But the history of championship baseball lingers in the cracks and cement walls of the old right-field pavilion of Braves Field, where Boston professional baseball was integrated, where the Cleveland Indians last won the World Series and where Babe Ruth pitched one of the greatest games in Series history for the Boston Red Sox.
That gem by Ruth helped the Red Sox win the championship at Braves Field in 1916, the only previous World Series meeting between the Red Sox and the Brooklyn Robins — the forebears of the Los Angeles Dodgers — until this year.
Today, the remnants of that long-ago stadium can be seen in the little clues around what is now Nickerson Field, a soccer and lacrosse stadium at Boston University. The passageway under the stands remains virtually intact from the Boston Braves’ days, and the team’s old administration building is now a police station.
Nickerson Field is a historical marker that connects a sportscrazy region’s bountiful present to a glorious past. The line from Babe Ruth to Tom Brady, two of the greatest to ever play here, goes right through the field.
Millions of fans attended the Boston Braves’ National League games from 1915, when Braves Field opened, until 1952, when the team moved to Milwaukee. Among them was a boy named Robert K. Kraft, who would become the owner of the New England Patriots.
“I’ll never forget when they moved,” Kraft, 77, said in a telephone interview about his beloved Braves. “It completely rocked my world. I was 12 years old, and I actually remember crying over it.”
Kraft used to sit along the third-base line, where he discovered he could catch more foul balls, and he still reels off the names of his old heroes as if they were members of his current football team: Bob Elliott, Alvin Dark, Del Crandall, Sid Gordon.
“Spahn, Sain and a day of rain,” he said, reciting the old saying about the team’s two best pitchers, Warren Spahn and Johnny Sain. If not for a child’s painful memory of that betrayal, the Patriots might not exist today as winners of five Super Bowl titles. They could have been the St. Louis Stallions or the Jacksonville Sand Crabs.
Before James Busch Orthwein, former owner of the Patriots, could execute his plan to move the team to St. Louis and rename them the Stallions, Kraft stepped in and bought the Patriots in 1994 with the intention of keeping them in New England.
“No amount of money could make up for what I felt and what all the dedicated fans in the region felt at that time,” Kraft said.
Braves Field opened in 1915 as a grand, concrete-and-steel edifice that claimed to be the biggest of its kind. The size attracted the Red Sox, who asked the Braves if they could play the 1915 World Series there, less than two miles from Fenway Park, to accommodate more fans.
The Red Sox beat the Philadelphia Phillies in five games, and Braves Field hosted the World Series again the next year when Boston played the Robins. In Game 2, before more than 47,000, Ruth pitched a 14-inning complete game in a 2-1 victory, and the Red Sox won that series in five games, too.
The only noticeable drawback at Braves Field was the old locomotives steaming in and out of the old Boston & Albany rail yard, spewing cinders on the fans and players. Some of the stands were covered, but the right-field pavilion was open then, as it is now, as Nickerson Field’s main seating area.
“People can go there today and sit in the same seats that people sat in for the 1916 World Series,” said Bob Brady, the president of the Boston Braves Historical Association.
Perhaps the most significant event at Braves Field came April 21, 1950, when Sam Jethroe, an African-American outfielder, broke Boston baseball’s colour barrier. That was nine years before Pumpsie Green played for the Red Sox.
hover over the field behind the area where home plate was. Most of the students are oblivious to the rich history that once played out below.
“I don’t know much about baseball,” said Ayush Suri, a freshman from New Delhi, “but I’ve heard of Babe Ruth.
“He played down there? That’s crazy.”