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ALL STAR GAMES: 1935, 1954, 1963, 1981 (the most of any stadium!) LIGHTS: 1939
BEEN THERE: I drove by in 1998, but to my dismay, Browns Stadium was already under construction at the site.
Cleveland (Municipal) Stadium was the second of the gigantic "inter-war stadiums," i.e., those built in the 1920s and 1930s, and had an even bigger capacity than the first one, Yankee Stadium. In contrast to "the House that Babe Ruth built," however, Cleveland Stadium ended up as a white elephant, and came to be known as "the Mistake on the Lake." In a way, the city of Cleveland paved the way for the pernicious trend of "stadium socialism" by paying for the construction of the gargantuan stadium where the Indians began playing in 1932. The city fathers were hoping to attract the Olympic Games in that year, but lost out to Los Angeles. (What were those people thinking??? How could they ever expect a medium-size city like Cleveland to come even close to filling such a big stadium on a regular basis?)
The layout of Cleveland Stadium was laterally symmetrical but elongated, somewhat like the Polo Grounds in New York or Memorial Stadium in Baltimore, but with one side (the outfield) being much broader than the other. This showed that it was designed specifically (but not exclusively) with baseball in mind. One of its interesting features was the slope in front of the bleacher section. Since the distance to center field was so great (470 feet!), however, this slope hardly ever affected play. In fact, NO ONE ever hit a home run into the center field bleachers! Soon after the Indians moved in on a permanent basis in 1947, they installed a new inner fence to make home runs easier, so that slope was no longer in play. Like many other baseball/football hybrid stadiums, there was a very large foul territory, and to rectify this, at some point (I would guess 1968 based on the capacity figures cited in Lowry's book), they built several additional straight rows on either side, pushing the dugouts forward by about ten feet. (This change is reflected in the "dynamic" diagram above.)
Since not many people had enough spare cash to pay for baseball tickets during the Depression, the Indians decided to move back to their former home League Park in 1934. Then in 1936 they played one game there against the Yankees, and from 1937 until 1946 they used Municipal Stadium (as it was then called) more and more frequently, especially for Sunday and holiday games when higher attendance was expected.
Even though Cleveland Stadium only had two decks, the upper deck was enormous and stretched way out toward center field, thus providing ample room for 74,000 seats, more than at any other baseball stadium, aside from the anomalous Memorial Coliseum in L.A. In 1948 the Indians set a World Series attendance record of 85,000, which was the original capacity for football games. For the next half century, however, the stadium was usually much less than half full, which had a depressing psychological effect on the fans and players alike. Whereas Cleveland had been one of the fastest growing urban centers in America at the beginning of the 20th century, the decline of the industrial "Rust Belt" in the 1970s left it out in the cold.
The position of the fence was shifted slightly a few times over the years, and the dimensions listed above are representative of the "stable" 1954-1964 period. From 1980 on, for some reason, the distance to left center field was generally about ten feet shorter than in right center field. In 1976 the fence was raised from six to eight feet, and that height remained fairly constant for the rest of the stadium's life. In 1991, the outfield fence was moved back 15-20 feet to take advantage of the fact that the Cleveland outfielders were more apt at chasing long fly balls than batting them. It didn't help, so they moved the fence back in the next year.
CINEMA: There were some aerial shots of Cleveland Stadium in the movie Major League (1989) starring Charlie Sheen and Bob "Mr. Baseball" Uecker, but all of the baseball game scenes were filmed in Milwaukee County Stadium. This was convenient for Uecker, since he was the play-by-play announcer for the Brewers.
The Indians' biggest stars in their glory days of the 1940s were pitcher Bob Feller (who served in the Navy during World War II) and shortstop/manager Lou Boudreau, both of whom were elected to the Hall of Fame. In the 1960s Rocky Colavito led the team on a few pennant races. As the stadium and the city rusted away in the 1980s, the team became a perennial bottom-dweller, as satirized in the movie Major League. But from the depths of despair there arose a new winning spirit in Cleveland, helped by municipal subsidies that made possible a beautiful new asymmetrical ballpark several blocks away. At least this time, the taxpayers' money was better spent than in 1932! Apparently few people if anyone missed the old stadium very much.
The Cleveland Browns played football here from 1946 until 1995. Even though many of the seats were far away from the gridiron, and hidden in the shadows on those bleak November afternoons, the stadium nevertheless generated a unique thrilling atmosphere. The blue-collar fans congregated in the bleacher section next to the east end zone, an area that was known as "the Dawg Pound." Browns players who scored touchdowns on that side often kept running up the slope into the arms of their adoring fans. It just ain't the same at the new Browns Stadium, which was built on this same site in 1999 -- three years after Cleveland Stadium was demolished.
SOURCES: Lowry (1992), Gershman (1993)
