Polo Grounds - Polo Grounds I

Polo Grounds I

The original Polo Grounds stood at 110th Street between Fifth Avenue and Sixth Avenue, directly across 110th Street from the northeast corner of Central Park. The venue's original purpose was for the sport of polo, and its name was initially merely descriptive, not a formal name, often rendered as "the polo grounds" in newspapers. The Metropolitans, an independent team of roughly major-league caliber, were the first professional baseball team to play there, beginning in September 1880, and remained the sole professional occupant through the 1882 season. At that time the Metropolitans' ownership had the opportunity to bring them into the National League, but elected instead to organize a new team, the New York Gothams – who soon came to be known as the Giants – mainly using players from the Metropolitans and the newly defunct Troy Trojans, and entered it in the National League, while bringing what remained of the Metropolitan club into the competing American Association. For this purpose the ownership built a second diamond and grandstand at the park, dividing it into eastern and western fields for use by the Giants and Metropolitans respectively. Polo Grounds I thus hosted its first Major League Baseball games in 1883 as the home stadium of two teams, the American Association Metropolitans and the National League Gothams. The dual-fields arrangement proved unworkable because of faulty surfacing of the western field, and after various other arrangements were tried, the Metropolitans and Giants alternated play on the eastern field in later years until the Metropolitans moved to the St. George Cricket Grounds on Staten Island in 1886.

An early highlight of Giants' play at the Polo Grounds was Roger Connor's home run over the right-field wall and into 112th Street; visitors to the site today can judge for themselves that this was an impressively long home run for its time or any time. Connor eventually held the record for career home runs that Babe Ruth would break in 1920.

The original Polo Grounds was used not only for polo and professional baseball, but often for college baseball and football as well – even by teams outside New York. The earliest known surviving image of the field is an engraving of a baseball game between Yale University and Princeton University on Decoration Day, May 30, 1882. Yale and Harvard also played their traditional Thanksgiving Day game there on November 29, 1883 and November 24, 1887. (See Football below)