Built in 1988 as the home of the Class AAA Buffalo Bisons of the International League, it was built with a cabability for addition, in case Buffalo got one of the 1993 expansion teams, raising seating capacity from 19,500 to 40,000. It didn't happen, and capacity is now officially listed as 16,600, still the largest in Triple-A ball.
It was known as Pilot Field until 1995, then North AmeriCare Park until 1999, then Dunn Tire Park until 2009, then Coca-Cola Field until 2019. Sahlen is a local meatpacking company.
The Blue Jays were founded in 1977. From then until midway through the 1989 season, they played at Exhibition Stadium. Since then, they played at the SkyDome, now named the Rogers Centre. Both stadiums were built for football, and had artificial turf. So this will be their 1st regular-season home game at a stadium designed for baseball, and their 1st home game on real grass.
More than that, it is the 1st Major League Baseball game played in Buffalo since...
Well, that depends on how you define "major league." Buffalo had a team in the Federal League, which only lasted 2 seasons. The Buffalo Blues finished 4th out of 8 teams in 1914, going 80-71; and 6th in 1915, going 74-78.
Players of note included former Yankees Russ Ford (a pitcher renowned for his curveball, and no relation to Whitey) and Hal Chase (often hailed as the best-fielding 1st baseman of all time, but known to throw games and later banned from baseball); Solly Hofman, an outfielder who had helped the Chicago Cubs win the 1907 and 1908 World Series; and Hugh Bedient, a pitcher who had helped the Boston Red Sox win the 1912 World Series.
Hal Chase in a Buffalo Blues uniform
They played at the International Fair Association Grounds, a few blocks away from Olympic Park, where the Triple-A Bisons then played. That ballpark would be replaced by Offermann Field in 1924. In 1960, the Bisons moved into War Memorial Stadium, which had been built for football in 1938, and was home to the AFL's/NFL's Buffalo Bills until 1972. The ballpark scenes from The Natural were filmed there in 1983. It was demolished after the Bisons moved to Pilot/Sahlen Field in 1988.
But if you don't count the Federal League as "major," then the last MLB game in Buffalo was played on October 7, 1885, at Olympic Park. The Bisons, then a National League team, got swept in a doubleheader, 4-0 and 6-1, by the Providence Grays. Despite winning the Pennant the year before, this was also the last day of competition for the Grays. Rhode Island has not returned to the major leagues since, and, except for the Federal League, Western New York hasn't, either -- until now.
Although Buffalo has an NFL team and an NBA team, and it has an in-city population of 261,000 that isn't that much less than those of St. Louis, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, its metropolitan area population of 1,135,000 ranks it 51st among American metro areas. The current smallest area with an MLB team, Milwaukee, has over half a million more: 1,671,000. If you count Canadian cities, Buffalo drops to 56th.
It makes more sense to use the FL Blues, rather than the NL Bisons, as the basis for this post. By that measure, the last MLB game played in Buffalo, or anywhere in Western New York, was on September 8, 1915, before the Blues went on a season-ending 17-game roadtrip: It was a doubleheader, and the Blues swept it, beating the FL version of the Baltimore Orioles, 4-0 and 5-4. Attendance was listed at 5,000, but even that may have been exaggerated.
So that's a little less than 105 years. How long has that been?
*
Had you been around back then, you would have had to be in the ballpark to find out what happened as it was happening. There was no Internet, because there were no computers. There was no television. There was radio transmission, but not radio broadcasting the way that there would be from 1920 onward.
There were no photocopies, credit cards or automatic teller machines. Air conditioning was hardly known. Very few people had telephones. In spite of the fiction of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, no one had yet launched a rocket toward space.
Today, Queen Elizabeth II is Canada's head of state – officially, she is "Queen of Canada" – but this is largely a ceremonial post. Her grandfather, King George V, was commander-in-chief, and Prime Minister Robert Borden (now on Canada's $100 bill) answered to him.
Not counting the Federal League, what we would now call Major League Baseball had 16 teams. None was further west than St. Louis. None was further south than St. Louis, Cincinnati or Washington. There was a National League team in Boston, an American League teams in Philadelphia and St. Louis. The New York Yankees had only been the Yankees officially for 3 seasons, as they were the Highlanders before that. And they had never won a Pennant.
All of these facts are no longer true.
There was professional football, but no National Football League, and the governing body of Canadian football was the Canada Rugby Union, not the Canadian Football League. There was basketball, but not really any professional basketball to speak of. There was no National Hockey League.
There was the National Hockey Association in the East, and the Pacific Coast Hockey Association in the West, and the champions of those leagues would face each other for the Stanley Cup until 1917, when the NHL replaced the NHA. Then, the NHL and PCHA champions would face each other for the Cup, until 1926, when it became an all-NHL affair.
The Vancouver Millionaires had won the Cup. No Vancouver team has won it since. The Boston Braves would still be baseball's World Champions for another few days, before being succeeded by the nearby Red Sox.
The idea of flying an airplane anywhere was risky; that of flying one across the Atlantic Ocean was lunacy. Charles Lindbergh was in junior high school. The automobile was becoming more affordable, and thus more popular, but most cars were still open rather than enclosed. Only in this year were the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts (specifically, New York and San Francisco) linked by telephone wires. Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison were both still alive, and would be for several years to come.
Babe Ruth was a rookie, and mainly a pitcher. So was George Sisler, who went on to become one of the best hitters, and one of the best 1st basemen, the game has seen to this day. Baseball's biggest stars, as they had been for a few years, were Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Walter Johnson, Eddie Collins, and "Shoeless" Joe Jackson. Christy Mathewson and Nap Lajoie each had 1 more season in him; Honus Wagner, 2 more.
Lou Gehrig was 12 years old. Joe DiMaggio was 10 months old. Ted Williams, Bob Feller, Stan Musial and Jackie Robinson would all be born over the next 5 years and change.
The top player in pro football, such as it then was, was Jim Thorpe of the Canton Bulldogs, the 1912 Olympic decathlon champion. The Heavyweight Champion of the World was Jess Willard, who had taken the title by knocking out Jack Johnson, the 1st black Champion, earlier in the year. Willard ended up defending his title just once, in 1916, before getting slaughtered by Jack Dempsey in 1919.
None of these sports stars of 1915 would live to see 1977. Mathewson wouldn't even live to see 1926, Johnson died in 1946, Ruth in 1948, Collins and Jackson in 1951, Speaker in 1958, Lajoie in 1959, Cobb in 1961, and Sisler made it to 1973.
Such was medicine at the time. There were no antibiotics. This, alone, helped to keep the average human life expectancy at around 50. Also, artificial organs were not yet possible. Transplantation of organs was not possible. There was no polio vaccine. Insulin was known to exist, but was not yet used to treat diabetes. There was no birth control pill, but there was no Viagra, either.
The English Football League was won by Everton, the blue club in Liverpool. The FA Cup was won by Sheffield United, the red club in Sheffield. Due to wartime travel restrictions in London, the Final was played at Manchester United's Old Trafford ground, even though the other team, Chelsea, was a London club.
This was the last season of English soccer before the end of the war, and when the game resumed, Liverpool and Manchester United were punished for fixing a match at the end of the 1915 League season. This led to the sports-administration equivalent of a plea-bargain: In exchange for the support of London club Arsenal against a rougher penalty, those clubs would support Arsenal's admission to the League's Division One – at the expense of the team that finished last in the last League season of 1915, which just so happened to be Arsenal's arch-rivals, Tottenham Hotspur.
(And now you know the story behind Spurs fans' claim of how Arsenal "cheated" to get into the first division: They didn't. And Spurs were not yet in North London, or in London at all: The city's boundaries would be redrawn in 1965, and that's how "the Middlesex club" got into the city.)
The Mayor of Buffalo was Louis P. Fuhrmann. The Mayor of New York was John Purroy Mitchel, the Governor of New York was Charles S. Whitman (no relation to the 1966 University of Texas sniper), and the Governor of New Jersey was James F. Fielder. None of these men would live to see 1955.
The President of the United States was Woodrow Wilson. Former Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft were still alive. So were the widows of James Garfield and Grover Cleveland. Warren Harding had just been sworn in as U.S. Senator from Ohio. Calvin Coolidge was a State Senator in Massachusetts. Herbert Hoover was running food-relief efforts to Europe as it was stricken by World War I. Franklin Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, a position his cousin Theodore had once held.
Harry Truman was farming in Missouri. Dwight D. Eisenhower was about to graduate from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Lyndon Johnson was in elementary school; Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan hadn't yet started school. John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, both George Bushes, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden were not yet born.
The Motion Picture Directors Association, forerunner of the Screen Directors' Guild, was founded in 1915. The films they made were all silent. Audrey Munson, a sculptor's model, became the first woman to appear nude in a mainstream film, Inspiration. (No print of this film survives, but a few photos of her so unclothed do – and, how can I put this politely, she was a good choice.)
Broncho Billy Anderson, Harold Lloyd, Theda Bara (the first actress to be called a "vamp" and the performer with a higher percentage of lost films than any other actor with a Hollywood star on the Walk of Fame), Mary Pickford, and a young Charlie Chaplin were the biggest film stars of the time.
Vaudeville star W.C. Fields made his film debut, in Pool Sharks. Douglas Fairbanks (not yet married to Pickford) made his film debut, in The Lamb. The film Regeneration was released, and is considered the 1st gangster film.
D.W. Griffith premiered his film The Birth of a Nation, with its pro-South and pro-Ku Klux Klan propaganda; Griffith gave President Wilson a private screening in the White House, and Wilson said, "It is like writing history with lightning," (true, I suppose) and, "It is all so terribly true" (the hell it was).
Indeed, the American Civil War had only been over for 50 years, and there were still living veterans of the Mexican-American War (1846-48) and the Texas War of Independence (1836) – which included the Battle of the Alamo, which Griffith made into the film Martyrs of the Alamo. I wonder if he knew that the Texans were slaveholders? Maybe he did, and still didn't think the victorious Mexicans were the good guys.
J.R.R. Tolkein was about to graduate from Exeter College, Oxford. C.S. Lewis was studying at Lurgan College, in County Omagh in what is now Northern Ireland. F. Scott Fitzgerald was at Princeton University, and James Thurber was at The... Ohio State University.
Ernest Hemingway was 16 years old, Margaret Mitchell was 14, John Steinbeck was 13, Theodor Seuss Geisel was 11, Ian Fleming and Richard Wright were 7, and Tennessee Williams was 4 (and still going by Thomas Lanier Williams III). Albert Camus and William S. Burroughs were babies. Arthur Miller was born the next month. The births of Gene Roddenberry, George Lucas, Stephen Spielberg, George R.R. Martin and J.K. Rowling were well into the future.
Edgar Rice Burroughs had published Tarzan of the Apes just 3 years earlier. He preceded every superhero, none of whom had yet been created; indeed, Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster had been born only the preceding year, and Batman creator Bob Kane was born the next month.
Laurel & Hardy had not yet met. Nor had Abbott & Costello. The Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges had not yet begun their acts. No one had yet heard of Zorro, Hercule Poirot, Our Gang (a.k.a. the Little Rascals), Charlie Chan, the Hardy Boys, Mickey Mouse, Popeye, Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon.
Inflation has been such that what $1.00 would buy then, $25.52 would buy now. A U.S. postage stamp cost 2 cents, and a New York Subway ride 5 cents. The average price of a gallon of gas was 15 cents, a cup of coffee 15 cents, a movie ticket 7 cents, a Ford Model T $390, and a new house $3,200. Don't ask what a burger-fries-and-Coke meal cost: French fries, as we now know them, didn't exist yet, and the hamburger hadn't yet caught on. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed that day at 81.16. No, that is not a misprint: Eighty-one point sixteen.
The tallest building in the world was the Woolworth Building in New York. There were no telephone numbers as we now understand the term: You just asked the operator to connect you with someone else's phone. There were no ZIP Codes, either.
There was a World's Fair in 1915, the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, and it marked that city's coming-out party as a completion of its comeback from its 1906 earthquake and resultant devastating fire.
This expo introduced the mainland U.S. to the ukulele. Popular songs of 1915 included "I Love a Piano" by Irving Berlin, "M-O-T-H-E-R" by Howard Johnson (not the hotelier, or the 1980s Mets 3d baseman), "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny" by Alma Gluck, and the World War I-themed songs "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" by John McCormack, "Pack Up Your Troubles" by George Asaf, and "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier" by Alfred Bryan.
In the late Summer and early Autumn of 1915, the Ottoman Empire was undertaking the Armenian Genocide, leading to the deaths of 1.5 million people. Britain's military made the combat debuts of the tank and the aircraft carrier. The British also used poison gas for the 1st time, at the Battle of Loos, after the German Army had debuted it earlier in the year. The Imperial Russian Army abandoned Warsaw, allowing the Polish capital to be occupied by Germany.
In events unrelated to sports or World War I, construction had recently begun on the Lincoln Memorial. The Pennsylvania Railroad began electrified commuter rail service, between Philadelphia and Paoli. John B. Gruelle patented the Raggedy Ann doll. And the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that persons from the Middle East were racially "white," and had the right to become naturalized U.S. citizens. (Try getting a federal court with Bush and Trump appointees to make that ruling now.)
Paul Ehrlich, and Anthony Comstock, and Albert Goodwill Spalding died. Ingrid Bergman, and Hall of Fame basketball coach Pete Newell, and Hall of Fame hockey goaltender Frank Brimsek were born.
September 8, 1915. A Major League Baseball game is played in Buffalo, New York. With the Buffalo Blues playing the rest of their season on the road, and the Federal League then folding, no MLB game has been played in Buffalo since.
Tonight, that will no longer be the case, as the Toronto Blue Jays "host" the Washington Nationals. For the 1st time in 105 years, "The City of Light" will host baseball at the highest level.
It will only be for the next 2 months -- 3, if the Jays make the Playoffs. But maybe this will show people that Buffalo should be treated as a major league city.
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