Forbes Field: Pittsburgh's Ballpark from 1909 to 1970

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 10 min read

A history of Forbes Field, the Pittsburgh Pirates' home from 1909 to 1970, with the pennants, the stars and the home run by Bill Mazeroski that ended the 1960 World Series.

Forbes Field was the home of the Pittsburgh Pirates for about six decades, from the middle of the 1909 season to the middle of the 1970 season, and in that time it saw four of the club's National League pennants before Three Rivers Stadium replaced it. It opened as one of the first major-league parks built of steel and concrete and it closed as one of the best-remembered. The defining moment of its life came on October 13, 1960, when Bill Mazeroski hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth inning of the seventh game of the World Series, the only home run, as of the 2025 season, ever to end a seventh game.

This article tells the story of the park and the club that played in it: the 1909 opening, the dimensions and quirks that made the place unusual, the great teams and players of each era, what the historical record shows about the building's attendance and the seasons played there, and what survives of it today.

Barney Dreyfuss builds a park for the new century

Before Forbes Field the Pirates played at Exposition Park, a wooden ground used from 1891 to 1908 in the historical record, with a best season attendance of 394,877. By the end of that period the club was the dominant team in the National League, with three straight pennants from 1901 to 1903, and its owner, Barney Dreyfuss, wanted a ballpark that matched it. The result was Forbes Field, in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, beside Schenley Park and a short distance from the Carnegie museums and the University of Pittsburgh. The park was named for General John Forbes, the British officer who captured Fort Duquesne in 1758, the site that became the city.

The park opened on June 30, 1909, with a game against the Chicago Cubs that the Pirates lost, 3 to 2. The historical record gives the park for 1909 as a shared listing, Exposition Park and Forbes Field, which reflects the mid-season move. The club went on to win 110 games and lose 42 that year, the most wins in the franchise's history, and to win the World Series over Detroit in seven games. It was a stunning first season in a new building. The 1909 team drew 534,950 in the shared year, and the Pirates were the best team in baseball.

The materials were part of the story. Forbes Field was built of reinforced concrete and steel, as Shibe Park in Philadelphia was in the same year, and the two parks together marked the end of the wooden ballpark that burned or rotted away every few decades. The sister story of that Philadelphia park is told in the article on Shibe Park and Connie Mack Stadium.

A big park with odd corners

Forbes Field was built for a time when home runs were rare, and its outfield was enormous. Center field was one of the deepest in the majors, well over 400 feet in the early decades and more than 450 by most accounts, a distance that turned many long drives into outs. The foul lines were short by comparison, which gave the park an irregular shape that rewarded different kinds of hitters in different directions. Ivy grew along stretches of the brick outfield wall in the park's last decades, and the wall itself was part of the building's character.

The park's dimensions changed over the years as the club adjusted its fences. In 1947, when the club added Hank Greenberg and wanted to make the most of Ralph Kiner's power, it moved the left-field fence in and created a short porch that came to be known as Greenberg Gardens and later as Kiner's Korner. That detail matters because it shows how a ballpark's playing characteristics are partly a matter of choice: a club can build a park for its best hitter.

The historical record does not carry fence distances for Forbes Field, so this guide does not give them. What it does carry is attendance, and the attendance record is a way to see how the club and its building fared.

The 1960 total of 1,705,828 is the best season attendance recorded in the park, and the 1948 total of 1,517,021 is second. The 1948 figure came from a team that finished fourth, and it is a reminder that the postwar years were a general boom in baseball attendance, not just a Pittsburgh story.

The Wagner years, 1909 to 1917

The first great star to play at Forbes Field was Honus Wagner, who had joined the Pirates in 1900 and was the dominant shortstop in baseball. The database records his career as 3,420 hits and a .328 average, and his years in the new park, 1909 through 1917, run from a .339 average in the opening season to a .265 average in his last, at age 43. Wagner's profile is in Honus Wagner: Eight Batting Titles at Shortstop, and the table below shows how his Forbes Field seasons looked.

The home run totals show how the park played in the deadball period. Wagner never hit more than nine in a season there, and he hit 36 in the nine years combined. The Pirates were still a power-poor team in those years because almost everyone was. Wagner holds the franchise career records for runs scored (1,521) and ranks second in hits (2,967), behind only Roberto Clemente's 3,000.

The decade after Wagner brought a second championship. The 1925 Pirates, winners of 95 games, met the Washington Senators in the World Series and came back from a three-games-to-one deficit to win in seven, with the deciding game played in the rain at Forbes Field. The Senators started Walter Johnson in that game, and he is profiled in Walter Johnson: The Big Train and 110 Shutouts. The Pirates then won the pennant again in 1927, led by the brothers Paul and Lloyd Waner, but were swept by the New York Yankees in four games. Paul Waner won the Most Valuable Player award that year and holds the club's best career batting average among players with 3,000 at-bats at .340, and the Pirates' career hit list includes Waner's 2,868, Pie Traynor's 2,416 and Lloyd Waner's 2,317.

The lean years and Ralph Kiner

The years after the war were mostly bad for the club, but they produced one of the great seasons of power hitting in the game. Ralph Kiner joined the Pirates in 1946 and led the National League in home runs in each of his first seven seasons, tying for the lead in some of them. The database shows 23 in 1946, 51 in 1947, 40 in 1948, 54 in 1949, 47 in 1950, 42 in 1951 and 37 in 1952. His 301 home runs for the franchise are the second-highest total in club history, behind Willie Stargell's 475.

The team around him was weak. The Pirates went 42-112 in 1952, the worst record in the franchise's history since 1890, and followed it with 50-104 in 1953. Kiner was traded in the middle of the 1953 season. The Pirates then took years to rebuild.

1960: the season and the swing

The 1960 Pirates went 95-59 and won the National League pennant by seven games, hitting 120 home runs, scoring 734 runs and allowing 593. Dick Groat won the Most Valuable Player award, and Vern Law won the Cy Young Award, which in those years went to one pitcher from either league. Roberto Clemente, in his sixth season, batted .314 with 16 home runs. Mazeroski, the second baseman, hit 11 home runs and won a Gold Glove.

The World Series against the Yankees was one of the strangest in the history of the game. By the numbers, the Yankees were far better: they outscored the Pirates 55 to 27 over the seven games, and they won three of them by lopsided scores. But the Pirates won four close games, and the series went to a seventh game at Forbes Field.

The game was a sequence of lead changes. The Pirates led early, fell behind, regained the lead in the eighth when Hal Smith hit a three-run home run, and then gave back two runs in the ninth to tie it at 9. Mazeroski led off the bottom of the ninth against Ralph Terry and hit a pitch over the left-field wall. He remains the only player to end a seventh game of the World Series with a home run, and the swing is one of the most replayed in the game's history.

Mazeroski's career numbers do not look like those of a slugger. He finished with 2,016 hits, 138 home runs and 853 runs batted in over 17 seasons, all with Pittsburgh, and a .260 batting average. His reputation rests on his defense at second base, eight Gold Gloves in the database, and on the one swing. He reached the Hall of Fame through a Veterans Committee vote, which is a measure of how long it took the sport to settle the question of his place.

Clemente's part in the series is easy to forget. He had a hit in every game, a streak that helped the Pirates keep pace with the more powerful Yankee lineup. He went on to win the Most Valuable Player award in 1966, the batting title in 1961 with a .351 average and the Gold Glove in each year from 1961 through 1972. His 3,000th hit, in 1972, came at Three Rivers Stadium, after Forbes Field had closed.

Beyond the Pirates

A ballpark outlives its tenants, and Forbes Field had several. The University of Pittsburgh's football team and the Pittsburgh Steelers played there, and the Negro Leagues' Homestead Grays used the park for some of their home games, with stars such as Josh Gibson in their lineup. The park hosted the All-Star Game in 1944 and again in 1959. On August 5, 1921, a game between the Pirates and the Philadelphia Phillies at Forbes Field was broadcast by the radio station KDKA, and it is widely cited as the first major-league game ever heard on the radio.

One of the most unusual events came late in a great player's career. On May 25, 1935, Babe Ruth, then playing for the Boston Braves, hit three home runs at Forbes Field in a single game, the last of them the 714th of his career and reputed to be the first ball ever hit over the right-field roof. The historical record shows that he played only 28 games for the Braves that year and hit six home runs in all, and that his final game was on May 30, five days later. Ruth is a figure in the history of nearly every park in the major leagues of his time, and his farewell at Forbes Field is among the best-known of the entries. The place of the park among the classic stadiums is part of the broader story told in the original Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds and its odd shape.

The end of the park, and what survives

The Pirates won the pennant in 1960 and then went more than a decade without another. Their next league title came in 1971, after the club had moved to Three Rivers Stadium. The historical park listing for 1970 reads "Forbes Field/Three Rivers Stadium," because the club began the season in the old park and moved in the middle of it, and for 1971 it lists Three Rivers alone. The new stadium was a round, multipurpose building along the river, the kind of ballpark that Camden Yards would later be built in reaction to.

Forbes Field was demolished after the move, and the site became part of the University of Pittsburgh campus. A section of the outfield brick wall still stands, with ivy, and a marker inside a university building shows where home plate stood. Each year on October 13, fans gather at the wall to listen to a recording of the broadcast of Mazeroski's home run. The tradition is a reminder of the building's place in the memory of the city.

Players who shaped the building

The Hall of Fame list for the Pirates in the historical record shows how many of the club's great players wore its uniform for long careers, some of them partly at Exposition Park or Three Rivers Stadium. Honus Wagner played 18 seasons for the club, Roberto Clemente 18, Willie Stargell 21, Lloyd Waner 17, Pie Traynor 17, Bill Mazeroski 17, Max Carey 17, Paul Waner 15 and Fred Clarke 15. Stargell hit 475 home runs for the franchise and Clemente's 3,000 hits are the club's career leader. Max Carey stole 688 bases for the Pirates, the most in club history, and Wagner stole 639.

On the mound, the club's leaders in the database include Wilbur Cooper with 202 wins, Babe Adams and Sam Leever with 194 each, and Bob Friend with 191. Roy Face's 188 saves led the franchise's list, and Face and Bob Friend were pillars of the 1960 team. Babe Adams pitched for the club from 1907 to 1926, and his three victories in the 1909 World Series are among the most celebrated pitching performances in the club's history.

Common questions

When did Forbes Field open? On June 30, 1909. The Pirates lost the first game to the Chicago Cubs, 3 to 2.

When did it close? The Pirates left in the middle of the 1970 season. The historical record lists 1970 as a shared year between Forbes Field and Three Rivers Stadium.

What is Forbes Field most famous for? Bill Mazeroski's home run on October 13, 1960, which ended the seventh game of the World Series and gave the Pirates the championship over the Yankees.

Who named it? The park was named for General John Forbes, a British officer of the eighteenth century associated with the capture of Fort Duquesne and the founding of Pittsburgh.

What happened to the site? It became part of the University of Pittsburgh. A portion of the outfield wall remains.

How many World Series did the Pirates win while playing there? Three by the database's accounting: 1909, 1925 and 1960. The club also won pennants in 1927 and lost that World Series to the Yankees.

Where to go next

For other classic parks of the same period, read about Tiger Stadium and Navin Field and Ebbets Field, and for how the club's modern years compare, the Pirates team page has the current record and schedule. The site's ballparks and fans topic collects more on the places the game has been played, and the history topic covers the people.