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| From Baseball's Canadian-American League by David Pietrusza: Baseball had originally been played at the Fairgrounds (now the Belmont Circle), but that changed in 1905 when a ball field was built on Neahwa Park’s site. In October 1908 Dr. Lewis Rutherford Morris, a descendant of Gouvernor Morris, a framer of the United States Constitution, bequeathed 75 acres of land, including the field, to the city. The area was known as Morris Park until 1911 (gratitude evidently didn’t last very long even then) when it was renamed Neahwa (meaning “Gift”) Park. Collegiate players from Brown, Holy Cross, Syracuse, and Williams College played ball there in the summers of circa 1910-12. The New York-Penn League’s Oneonta Giants, under “Big Ed” Walsh, briefly had Neahwa as their home in 1921. Many major league barnstorming teams visited the site, including Babe Ruth’s and Christy Matthewson’s. Ruth walloped a number of gargantuan blasts at the park, but the longest homer ever was hit by shortstop Austin Knickerbocker. In 1930 a grocer left $5,000 in his will to fix the place up. In 1939 another five grand (this time in WPA funds) was expended, replacing the 1908 wooden grandstand with a steel supported structure (although if you look at it today, it sure looks like it’s been there since 1908). Lights were installed in 1940, just in time for the Can-Am League. “It was a tremendous ball field,” adds Knickerbocker. “Down the line it was about 337 on each line and then it went out to about 400 real quickly and continued that way all around the ballpark. There were only two balls hit out all year. I hit one, and Leon Riley of Rome hit the other.” The ballpark itself was renamed Damaschke Field in 1968, after “Dutch” Damaschke, vice president of the old Can-Am team and chairman for over 35 years of the Parks and Recreation Commission. In 1966, the Oneonta Red Sox returned in the guise of a New York-Penn League franchise, but the next year the working agreement switched to the Yankees and remains so today. But even now the park is sort of run down, its low bleachers appearing to have come from some defunct Southern Class D circuit. The operation refuses to sell beer. Promotions are relatively few and far between. Varmints occasionally scurry in from the woods to either the stands or onto the field. (If you’ve never witnessed a bullpen full of players attacking a marauding rabbit with their bats, I can assure you, it’s quite a sight.) And yet the team draws amazingly well. Oneonta is a town that loves its baseball, and as the smell of hot dogs and popcorn and sausages wafts through the crowded stands, you can almost see Austin Knickerbocker over at short . . . |
| Neahwa Park Oneonta, New York |