The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1916-05-15
Brooklyn Had the First
 Enclosed Baseball Park

Any lucky individual who possessed
 as much money as is now invested in
 baseball plants would be entitled to look upon John D. Rockefeller as a
 financial ptker, Just how much cash
 has. been spent in providing shrines for the worship of the baseball fans it is impossible to state, but one may state without-a fear of successful con- tradiction that it represents a nifty sum. Yet it has been only a little
 more than a half century since the first regular baseball plant was erected.
 Fifty-four years ago today, on May IS, 1862,e the first enclosed baseball
 park in the world, the Union Grounds in Brooklyn, was formally opened. Up to that time baseball had been played in open fields. Occasionally the play CTS passed the hat to raise funds to cover expenses, but such contributions as were made were entirely voluntary, except at occasional games played on race tracks. or other enclosed fields which were dedicated to other sports than baseball. Brooklyn had the hon or of building the first enclosure which was intended primarily for the enter tainment of baseball devotees. It was 3. rude and uncouth park, as com pared with the great plants of today, and would now scarcely pass muster in the humb1est of Class D towns, but the Brooklyn fanatics were mighty
 
 It was on Long Island, too, that the
 first baseball game to which adnais- sion was charged was played In 1859, three years before the opening of the Union Grounds in Brooklyn, a club representing the City of Churches c1ashed with a New York team on the Fashion Race Course on Long Island. The admission fee was fifty cents, and more than l, ,500 people paid this brace to see the game. At most of the games on the Union Grounds in the sos the regular admission fee was ten cents, although. a quarter was occasionally the initiation fee to inn portant contests. This tariff prevailed in most of the other cities and towns where enclosed fields were built in the '6Os. The Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first professional club, raised the ante to half a dollar in 1869, being the first club to establish that at its regu- lar price. In 1866, however, a new mark had been set by a game between the Brooklyn Atlantics and the PhiIa- delph1a Athletics, when more than D. 900 people paid a dollar each.
 The Philadelphia Athletics of the sos had their grounds at Seventeenth street and Columbia avenue. the plant consisting of a rude grandstand that would seat only a few hundred. and a long bench back of the foul line. The grandstand was largely for ladies and their escorts, and most of the masculine fans considered that it was effeminate for a man unaccompanied by a lady to sit in the stand. In Bos- ton most of the early games were played on the Common, the catcher standing near the Beacon street mall, and the large crowds paid nothing.
 Up to 1868 the baseball rules for bade remuneration for players, but this was openly disregarded by many clubs years before that. The first club to pay a player regular salary was the Athletics of Philadelphia. That was in 1864. Al Reach, now the head of a big sporting goods house in the Quaker City, was then playing with Brooklyn. He was star at the game, and the Athletics offered him a regu- lar salary if he would jump Brooklyn and play for Philadelphia Reach zac- i cepted the proposition, and became the first man to make a living out of play | ing ball. The Athletics soon added other paid players to the roll, but the Cincinnati. Reds was the first all-pro- fessionaI club.