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From Baseball's Canadian-American League by David Pietrusza:
The Fair Grounds, later known as Berkshire or Glovers Park, must have been fine for auto
races, boxing, wrestling, standardbred and greyhound racing, and even for shows and
circuses, but it was just not very suitable for baseball when the Can-Am League first laid eyes
upon it in 1937.
“The outfield was a hayfield in those days,� recalls Harry Dunkel. “Terrible. The
ballpark wasn’t any good. It didn’t have good fences around it. They were the kind
they put along the roads in the wintertime, snow fences.�
That wasn’t all. On the Beavers’ first visit to the place in 1937, the Smiths Falls
Record News reported: “The mud was so deep that hard-hit balls plopped into the mud
and were frequently turned into double plays.�
Actually, baseball had been played at the site for some time. On May 31, 1898, the local
McKeevers and Adelphis played to a tie; the game ended after three and a half innings when
the only available ball was hit into some weeds on the edge of the outfield and was lost!
In 1940 installation of lights was financed via the sale of stock. Guy Barbieri remembers the
park as “kind of dilapidated� in 1947. In 1948 the park was thoroughly overhauled
again, and in 1950 a new orange and black color scheme was added to the scoreboard.
But that was at the very end of its useful life. We next come across the park as a mouldering
shadow of itself.
In 1960 Leader-Herald sports columnist “Jigger� Thompson wrote about Glovers Park
as it stood in decay, and the picture he drew was all too true of so many of the old parks:
It’s no longer Glovers Park. It’s Lovers Park. Someone painted out the“Gâ
€� on the grandstand.
It no longer hustles with activity as it did ten years ago. Even nine years ago, the last
year there was Canadian-American League baseball....
There’s no outfield fence to skid homers over. The grass and weeds are high.
The last reminder of Can-Am ball is the scoreboard, weather-beaten but still readable.
The grandstand still is there. So is the press box and what’s left of the locker rooms.
You can almost hear shouts of “Play Ball!�
You can almost hear shouts of “Let’s go, Glovers!�
Almost.
It took local fans several years to convince themselves that Can-Am baseball never
would return.
The park was demolished in the mid-1960s for the Nichols Plaza Shopping Center, and only
the light towers remained as brooding, silent witnesses to what had been, until they too were
finally removed in the mid-1970s.
The Fair Grounds, later known as Berkshire or Glovers Park, must have been fine for auto
races, boxing, wrestling, standardbred and greyhound racing, and even for shows and
circuses, but it was just not very suitable for baseball when the Can-Am League first laid eyes
upon it in 1937.
“The outfield was a hayfield in those days,� recalls Harry Dunkel. “Terrible. The
ballpark wasn’t any good. It didn’t have good fences around it. They were the kind
they put along the roads in the wintertime, snow fences.�
That wasn’t all. On the Beavers’ first visit to the place in 1937, the Smiths Falls
Record News reported: “The mud was so deep that hard-hit balls plopped into the mud
and were frequently turned into double plays.�
Actually, baseball had been played at the site for some time. On May 31, 1898, the local
McKeevers and Adelphis played to a tie; the game ended after three and a half innings when
the only available ball was hit into some weeds on the edge of the outfield and was lost!
In 1940 installation of lights was financed via the sale of stock. Guy Barbieri remembers the
park as “kind of dilapidated� in 1947. In 1948 the park was thoroughly overhauled
again, and in 1950 a new orange and black color scheme was added to the scoreboard.
But that was at the very end of its useful life. We next come across the park as a mouldering
shadow of itself.
In 1960 Leader-Herald sports columnist “Jigger� Thompson wrote about Glovers Park
as it stood in decay, and the picture he drew was all too true of so many of the old parks:
It’s no longer Glovers Park. It’s Lovers Park. Someone painted out the“Gâ
€� on the grandstand.
It no longer hustles with activity as it did ten years ago. Even nine years ago, the last
year there was Canadian-American League baseball....
There’s no outfield fence to skid homers over. The grass and weeds are high.
The last reminder of Can-Am ball is the scoreboard, weather-beaten but still readable.
The grandstand still is there. So is the press box and what’s left of the locker rooms.
You can almost hear shouts of “Play Ball!�
You can almost hear shouts of “Let’s go, Glovers!�
Almost.
It took local fans several years to convince themselves that Can-Am baseball never
would return.
The park was demolished in the mid-1960s for the Nichols Plaza Shopping Center, and only
the light towers remained as brooding, silent witnesses to what had been, until they too were
finally removed in the mid-1970s.
| Glovers Park Gloversville, New York |
| (Glovers Team Photos Courtesy of Tom Dworak) |