page_title: Labatt Park
section_title: Bryce's 1876 and 1877 Baseball Guides
hierarchical_section_title: Labatt Park / Bryce's 1876 and 1877 Baseball Guides
caption_attribution_description: Images of baseball socks, from Bryce's Base Ball Guide, 1876
context_page_description: Labatt Memorial Park is a baseball stadium near the forks of the Thames River in central London, Ontario, Canada. It is 8.7 acres in size, has 5,200 seats and a natural grass field. From home plate to centre field the distance is 402 feet; from home plate to left and right field down the lines, it is 330 feet.
  Labatt Park is the "oldest continually operating baseball grounds in the world", with a history dating back to 1877. Since December 31, 1936, Labatt Park has been owned by the City of London.
  On September 7, 2011, Baseball Canada announced that historic Labatt Memorial Park in London, Ontario, had won its six-week-long, favourite ballpark contest, winning the final round where it went head-to-head with Port Arthur Stadium in Thunder Bay, Ontario. During the two-week-long, final round of online voting, where more than 19,000 votes were cast, Labatt Park won with 63 per cent of the vote.
context_section_description: This is the world's oldest baseball grounds still in existence. 
  A treasure-trove of information about early Canadian/Ontario "base ball" surfaced in 2002 when Library and Archives Canada purchased (for $10,000 from an Ottawa, Ontario, bookseller) Bryce's Base Ball Guide 1876 and Bryce's Base Ball Guide 1877, two hand-coloured, 75-page booklets published by William Bryce of London, Ontario, which originally sold for a dime.
  The two, four-inch (102 mm)  by seven-inch guides are considered to be the first significant publications on Canadian baseball.
  Bryce, a Scottish-born bookseller, news agent and sporting goods distributor in London, had a small stake in the Tecumsehs, considered by many to be the finest ball team in the entire Dominion of Canada.
  During U.S. President George W. Bush's visit to the Library and Archives Canada building on November 30, 2004, he showed a special interest in these two early Canadian base ball books which were laid out for his perusal. See here
caption: Baseball socks for sale in Bryce's Base Ball Guide 1876
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