Hot Springs features roots of Major League Baseball
By Roy Ockert Jr.
March 12, 2012
My hometown has been associated with horse racing for many years now, and it is earning a reputation for postseason basketball, which is why I’m here this time.
The Sun Belt Conference has found a home for its championship tournament, and Arkansas teams are quite happy about that.
But Hot Springs once was known as a spring training mecca for big league baseball teams. A news release from the local tourism organization recently pointed out that more than 45 percent of the people in Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame “either played baseball or were in some way associated with baseball training” here.
Big league teams eventually opted for sunnier climates in Florida and Arizona, but some of MLB’s roots are in Hot Springs, and the city is establishing The Historical Baseball Trail to document “Hot Springs: The Birthplace of Spring Baseball.”
The effort so far has documented more than 300 players, managers, team owners, journalists and other famous people associated with baseball in Hot Springs. When the MLB teams stopped coming to Hot Springs, some teams from the Negro League started filling the void by training here, and that is being documented, too.
On March 29 a trail consisting of 26 historical markers linked to the latest digital technology will open to the public.
One of those will be the location of the old Whittington Park field, which was the site of practices and spring training games in the early 1900s. Baseball historian Bill Jenkinson has authenticated a 573-foot home run hit in 1918 by Babe Ruth, which easily cleared the fence and wound up in the Alligator Farm across the street.
I spent a lot of time in Whittington Park as a kid, not playing baseball because the field had been replaced by then, but it was still a great amusement park, complete with rides and a miniature golf course. The Alligator Farm is still open and remains a top tourist attraction.
The starting point for the trail will be in Hill Wheatley Plaza at the south end of Bathhouse Row in downtown Hot Springs. Several plaques will be there, including the names of the players who trained here and a printed brochure. That’s also where you’ll be able to connect to the online tour guide.
Actually, a good place to get a sense of Hot Springs’ connection to baseball’s roots is the nearby Convention Center, which is the site of some Sun Belt basketball games and related activities this week. Among the many historical pictures on display are some that document the city’s baseball history.
Many of the photos show Babe Ruth in his younger days — starting when he was a young left-handed pitcher for the Boston Red Sox. That 500-foot-plus homer might have helped convince his manager that he should be playing every day when he was traded to the New York Yankees in 1919.
Ruth found lots of other things to do in Hot Springs, and he kept coming here for years after his team moved spring training elsewhere. In 1915, his first year to train here, the Babe left most of his paycheck at Oaklawn race track. He was also known to play 54 holes of golf in a day as part of his early regimen to melt off the winter pounds.
In his book “The Life and Times of Babe Ruth” author Leigh Montville quotes New York sportswriter Marshall Hunt:
“The Babe would go to Hot Springs for two or three or four weeks depending on how he felt or if Ed Barrow [the Yankees’ general manager] looked at him and said, ‘My God, you slob.’ Barrow would call me, and the Babe and I would take off and go down there and play a lot of golf and do a lot of hiking.”
Another undated photo at the Convention Center shows several Red Sox players climbing one of the mountains that can be reached easily from downtown Hot Springs. You don’t see pictures like that today.
The site of Whittington Park, which was surely the original “field of dreams,” today is mostly under a parking lot serving the Weyerhaeuser offices.
Among the other photos on display are several featuring Cy Young, whose all-time record of 511 victories was good enough to get the pitcher of the year awards named after him; Honus Wagner, whose team, the Pittsburgh Pirates, trained in Hot Springs more than any others; Tris Speaker, the Red Sox Hall of Fame outfielder who is posing on top of an alligator; Grover Cleveland Alexander, the Philadelphia Phillies’ great pitcher; and several other team pictures.
One of the latter shows the 1932 Pittsburgh Crawfords of the Negro League, and it includes two Hall of Famers, Leroy “Satchel” Paige and Josh Gibson.
Five baseball historians were brought to Hot Springs to help with the documentation of the baseball trail, and they traced the first spring training to 1886, when the Chicago White Stockings started training and playing spring games here.
Jaycee Field, which sat behind the Boys Club on Belding Street, was close enough to where I lived as a child that I could ride my bicycle there. I watched a minor league baseball team, the Hot Springs Bathers, play there for a few years, and on that complex my baseball career started and ended.
That won’t be part of the baseball trail, though.
Roy Ockert is editor emeritus of The Jonesboro Sun and may be reached by email at royo@jonesborosun.com.