Sahlen Field, Buffalo (A 4A ballpark)
When you’re on the quest we are, trying to see all 30 MLB baseball stadiums plus all 30 AAA stadiums, all within a five-year period, you find things that you do and don’t like about various stadium styles, and you can become a connoisseur of the history of stadiums.
Saturday night, we were in Buffalo, at the field in the minor leagues with the highest seating capacity, by a substantial margin. Sahlen Field has a capacity of 16,600, although that’s 5000 fewer than in the early days of the stadium, when Buffalo was setting minor league attendance records (which still stand) while trying to lure a major league team. Sometimes, all the minor-league stadiums feel alike, more similar than the major league stadiums. Sahlen Field is a bit that way, but also feels a lot like some beautiful modern stadiums. That's because Sahlen Field is really the stadium that set a new standard for stadiums, and like any groundbreaking success, it was copied, and improved upon.
Buffalo has a long and complex history with major league baseball (discussed yesterday), having had teams more than a century ago, and having come close several times over the last 70 years, and even having had a major league team play home games in Buffalo for more than a season during COVID-19. That long history is wrapped up with the history of major league stadiums, in part because of the leagues Buffalo has been in, and in part because Buffalo, despite not having had a major league team for a century, has been at the cutting edge of stadium architecture not once, but twice, in the last 50 years.
How do you keep the grandstands from burning down?
In the 19th Century, baseball stadiums had wooden grandstands, but they had a bad habit of catching fire, among other problems. At the dawn of the 20th Century, teams and cities began building structures based around steel, often with brick facades. Philadelphia’s Shibe Park was the first steel-based stadium, built in 1909, and used until 1970. There were at least four other parks in use in the early 1960s that were on the same site where the team had been playing in the 19th Century, New York’s Polo Grounds, St. Louis’ Sportsman’s Park, Cincinnati’s Crosley Field, and Washington’s Griffith Stadium. In each case, a “modern” ballpark had been erected to replace a wooden grandstand (Polo Grounds and the predecessor to Griffith Stadium had both been destroyed by fire) in the 1910s.
The Polo Grounds hosted three different Major League teams. It was built for the New York entry in the Players League, an effort for greater player control that only lasted one season, 1890. When the PL folded, the National League Giants, who had been playing in an adjacent ballfield (it was said that from top of the grandstands of either park, you could watch a game in the other), moved into the newer ballpark, and played there until they moved to San Francisco in the 1950s.
New leagues mean new stadiums
The Polo Grounds is just one example of a new stadium being built for a new league. The Federal League, starting in 1914, lasted only two seasons, but just as the Polo Grounds are often described as the most notable legacy of the Players League, the most notable legacy of the Federal League was also a stadium.
The owner of the Chicago Whales, Charles Weeghman, built a park and named it after himself. Part of the deal to get the Federal League to close was to offer him ownership of the Chicago National League team, which then started playing in Weeghman Park. He sold the team in 1921, and in 1927, that owner, William Wrigley Jr., renamed it after himself. The Cubs still play there.
In between the two short-lived leagues, the Players League and the Federal League, a more successful league started up – the American League, in 1902. A decade after the league started, the steel stadium phase began, and several American League stadiums built between 1909 and 1912 survived into the 1960s. Besides Shibe Park (built by the Philadelphia Athletics) and Griffith Park, Chicago’s Comiskey Park and Detroit’s Tiger Stadium also lasted more than a half-century. The longest-lived early American League stadium, though, is still going, at age 113, Boston’s Fenway Park.
There was an attempt to start a new league around 1960, the Continental League, which incidentally would have had a team in Buffalo. The Continental League was spurred in large part because the move of the Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers to the West Coast left the city of New York with only one major league team. But the established leagues forestalled that league by promising eight expansion teams in the next decade, and awarding one of them to the leader of the group pushing the new league, New York attorney William Shea.
Shea’s new team, the Mets, started life playing in the aging Polo Grounds for two seasons before moving to their new home, named Shea Stadium.
Concrete multi-purpose ovals
Starting in the 1950s, the new parks being built were no longer built in neighborhoods. They tended to be concrete ovals, with parking lots or parking garages built alongside. The Dodgers and Angels play in stadiums built in that era, although the Big A has been renovated extensively. Many of the mid-century stadiums were symmetrical multi-purpose ovals, designed to be suitable for football games as well. St. Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia also had examples of these, although those have all been replaced.
There was an attempt to start a new league around 1960, the Continental League (which incidentally would have had a team in Buffalo). Indirectly, the Continental League led to the building of yet another concrete multi-purpose stadium. The Continental League was spurred in large part because the move of the Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers to the West Coast left the city of New York with only one major league team. But the established leagues forestalled that league by promising eight expansion teams in the next decade, and awarding one of them to the leader of the group pushing the new league, New York attorney William Shea.
Shea’s new team, the Mets, started life playing in the aging Polo Grounds for two seasons before moving to their new home, named Shea Stadium, one of the multi-purpose ovals.
Domes
A new type of stadium came along in the 1960s, and here’s where Buffalo gets back into the story. Not all of the cities that wanted baseball teams had great baseball weather in the middle of the summer, or (for those building multi-purpose stadiums) great football weather in November or December. Houston’s Astrodome opened in 1965, the world’s first domed multi-purpose stadium.
Buffalo didn’t win an expansion team in the 1960s, but still wanted a major league baseball team. Plus, the Buffalo Bills were part of the upstart American Football League, which joined the National Football League in the late 1960s. The capacity of Buffalo’s War Memorial Stadium was less than the NFL required as a condition of letting the AFL teams join, so plans were drawn for a new domed stadium in Buffalo. In addition, the Washington Senators baseball team was struggling, and a Buffalo sports historian says that Buffalo was promised the team if a domed stadium then in the planning was built. But the stadium went over budget, local government backed out, and the Senators moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth area and became the Texas Rangers.
When I told this story to my friend Kevin McKeegan, who grew up in New York City, and went to college in upstate New York, he argued that the failure of Buffalo to build a stadium was a good thing for Buffalo, or at least for the Bills, since it meant the Bills remained an outdoor team, and like the Green Bay Packers, another outdoor team, developed a reputation for toughness, while the Minnesota Vikings, who moved indoors, became less successful. I applaud the sentiment, but I wouldn’t want to go to a game outside in the winter in Green Bay, Buffalo or Minnesota (or in the summer in Phoenix or Houston).
While Buffalo didn’t build a domed stadium, several other major league teams did move into domes, including Montreal, Minnesota, Seattle, and Tampa Bay (Minnesota and Seattle shared with football teams, Tampa Bay shared with many football games and briefly with an NHL team). The experience of an indoor baseball stadium is interesting, but I think it’s telling that in 2024, only Tampa Bay was still playing in a dome. The Rays probably will be again next year, once the hurricane damage from last fall is patched over. Cities with potential weather problems now are building stadiums with retractable roofs – Seattle, Phoenix, Arlington (Texas), Toronto, and Miami all have that, which seems like an eminently civilized way to do things.
“Retro-classic”
By the 1980s recent stadiums had all been the mid-century concrete ovals or domes. And Buffalo still didn’t have a major league team.
In the late 1980s, Robert Rich Jr., the owner of the minor league Buffalo Bisons, led an effort to build not just a new stadium, but a new kind of stadium, "retro-classic," designed to look more like the brick and steel neighborhood stadiums of the first half of the 20th Century than the concrete ovals built from the 1950s on. Part of the idea was to lure an existing MLB team, or win a bid for an expansion team. The city put on a public relations campaign as well, and Buffalo started drawing huge crowds, by minor league standards. From 1988 through 1993, Buffalo drew more than a million fans each season. The 1983 Louisville Redbirds are the only other minor league team in history to draw a million, and most minor league stadiums today are too small for that to even be possible. In 1991, Buffalo set an attendance record that still stands (nearly 1.2 million), but alas, Miami and Denver got the expansion teams in 1993, and Tampa Bay and Phoenix got teams in 1998. Denver and Phoenix have attendances in the middle of the pack of MLB, but neither Tampa Bay nor Miami averaged as many fans per game last year as Buffalo did in 1991.
Buffalo did get the stadium that we went to Saturday, which is beautiful, although it’s now nearly 40 years old (the second-oldest stadium in AAA), and beginning to feel a little long in the tooth. But with its wide concourses, and open areas beyond the outfield fences, it’s easy to imagine adding enough seating to be a major league stadium. As it is, it feels somehow in between MLB and minor league. Meanwhile, the architects, HOK, started a trend that they continued after the Buffalo stadium with stadiums in Baltimore (Camden Yards) and Cleveland (Jacobs Field), and others copied, so that “retro-classic” has been the standard for the last few decades of baseball stadiums.
Even though the string of 1 million spectators per year ended in 1993, Buffalo continued to draw at least 500,000 every year through 2019, the longest such streak in minor league history. Last year, the Bisons finished 7th in AAA in attendance, only 28,000 shy of the 500,000 mark, and had the largest single-game AAA crowd, 14,452 (larger than the capacity of any other AAA team).
There's a phrase for a player who can dominate at AAA, but can't quite perform at the major league level, perhaps because he's never had enough of a chance. He's called a "4A" player. Buffalo and Sahlen Field represent, I think, a 4A city and ballpark.
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