The Polo Grounds and Its Odd Shape: Baseball's Strangest Field
The Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan had foul lines under 300 feet and a center field almost 480 feet deep. This guide covers its shape, the Giants, Willie Mays's catch, the Yankees and the 1962 Mets.
Baseball's rulebook sets a minimum distance for new ballparks and says nothing about a maximum, and no field ever tested that freedom the way the Polo Grounds did. The last and most famous version of the park, in upper Manhattan beside the Harlem River, was shaped like a bathtub or a horseshoe. Its foul lines were so short that an ordinary fly ball could leave the park, and its center field was so deep that the hardest-hit balls to the middle of the field were routinely caught. A batter could homer on a pop-up and be robbed on a line drive that would clear the fence in any modern stadium.
That strangeness made the place unforgettable, and it hosted some of the sport's best-remembered moments: a shot that won a pennant in 1951, an over-the-shoulder catch in the 1954 World Series, and the first two seasons of the 1962 New York Mets, who lost 120 games in their first season. This article describes the park's shape, how it affected play, who called it home and how it ended. Every number about the Giants, Yankees and Mets comes from the historical record; the dimensions of the park are given as approximate, because they were never the subject of a modern survey and sources differ by a few feet.
Four parks with one name
There was not one Polo Grounds but four, all in Manhattan, and the historical record labels them with Roman numerals. The name came from the first site, a field near the northern edge of Central Park where polo had been played. The New York club used the first Polo Grounds from 1883 to 1888, the second in 1889 and 1890, and the third from 1891 into 1911. That third park stood on a lower site under a cliff called Coogan's Bluff, in the part of the city now known as Harlem, and that is the location people mean when they say the Polo Grounds.
In April 1911 a fire destroyed much of the wooden grandstand. The club rebuilt in steel and concrete on the same site, finishing in time for the summer, and the database calls that structure Polo Grounds IV. It served as the Giants' home through 1957 and then hosted the Mets for two more seasons, 1962 and 1963, before it was torn down in the mid-1960s. Public housing towers now stand where the field was.
The bathtub shape and the dimensions
The shape was a result of the site. The land under Coogan's Bluff was a narrow, irregular lot, and the builders fitted a field and a horseshoe of stands into it. The double-decked grandstand ran down both foul lines and curved around the outfield in a horseshoe, with the open end in deep center field. From above, the long, narrow field inside that curve looked like a tub.
The approximate distances are the best-known fact about the park. Down the left-field line the fence was a little under 280 feet from home plate, and down the right-field line it was about 258 feet. To straightaway center, the distance was roughly 480 feet, with the clubhouse standing in deep center field. The upper deck in left and right field overhung the field of play, so a fly ball could hit the facade of the second deck or land in the stands that jutted out over the outfield.
For comparison, Oriole Park at Camden Yards in the American League has distances of 333 feet to left, 410 to center and 318 to right in the site's reference data, and Target Field has 339, 404 and 328. Measured against those, the Polo Grounds was about 50 feet shorter down the left line, around 60 feet shorter down the right line and roughly 70 feet deeper to center. A modern designer who proposed that shape would be asked to explain it, and the sport's modern rules would not allow it for a new park. The Polo Grounds predated those rules by decades.
What the shape did to the game
Three effects follow from the geometry. The first is that the park rewarded a particular kind of hitter. A left-handed batter who pulled the ball in the air toward right field could hit a home run on a swing that would be an out almost anywhere else. Mel Ott, the Giants' left-handed slugger, hit 511 home runs for the club between 1926 and 1947, a total that is third on the franchise list, behind Willie Mays and Barry Bonds. Whether the park inflated his total is something the historical record cannot answer, since it does not split home and road statistics, but it is a standard part of the story of his career.
The second effect is the reverse. A batted ball hit hard to the middle of the field, which would be a home run at most parks, was often a long out at the Polo Grounds. That favored outfielders with great range, because the center fielder had a huge area to cover and a long run to the wall. It also produced triples and inside-the-park home runs, since a ball that got past the outfielders had a long way to roll. Willie Mays, who played center field for the Giants from 1951, collected 141 triples in his career in all parks, a number consistent with a style of play that the park encouraged.
The third effect is on pitchers. A pitcher who induced fly balls to the middle of the field could be rewarded, and a pitcher who allowed pulled fly balls to the short corners could be punished. Familiarity with those quirks counted for something, and the Giants played 77 of their games there in a 154-game season.
The Giants and their pennants
The park's central tenant was the New York Giants, and the historical franchise sheet shows how much success happened there. The club won pennants in 1888, 1889, 1904, 1905, 1911, 1912, 1913, 1917, 1921, 1922, 1923, 1924, 1933, 1936, 1937, 1951 and 1954, which is 17 league championships over the years the Giants played in the Polo Grounds, and World Series titles in 1888, 1889, 1905, 1921, 1922, 1933 and 1954. John McGraw, who managed the club from 1902 to 1932, won 2,583 games and lost 1,790 in 4,424 games, the greatest total in the club's history.
The player lists read like a Hall of Fame roll. Christy Mathewson won 372 games for the club between 1900 and 1916 and has the franchise's lowest career earned run average among pitchers with at least 1,000 innings (2.12). Carl Hubbell won 253 games and the Most Valuable Player award in 1933 and 1936. Bill Terry hit .341 for the Giants across 14 seasons, and Ott drove in 1,860 runs and scored 1,859. For more on Mathewson, see the Christy Mathewson profile in this series, whose subject pitched in the third version of the park and the early years of the fourth.
Three October moments: 1921, 1951 and 1954
The park's name is attached to several famous October events. In 1921 the Giants beat the Yankees five games to three in a best-of-nine World Series, and the whole series was played at the Polo Grounds, because the Yankees were the Giants' tenants at the time and had no home of their own. In 1922 the Giants swept the Yankees again. In 1923 the Yankees, now in their new stadium across the river, won the Series in six games.
In 1951 came the most famous home run in the sport's history. The Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers finished the regular season tied, and a three-game playoff followed. In the ninth inning of the deciding game on October 3, the Giants' Bobby Thomson hit a three-run homer off Ralph Branca to win the pennant, 5-4. The historical standings record the Giants at 98-59 and the Dodgers at 97-60 for the season because they include the playoff games, which the Giants won two games to one. That homer has been called the Shot Heard 'Round the World, and the radio call of it by Russ Hodges is among the most replayed in broadcasting history. Willie Mays, a rookie that year, was on deck.
Then there was the 1954 Series, in which the Giants met the Cleveland Indians, who had won 111 games, the most in the American League's history up to that time. Cleveland were heavy favorites. The Giants swept them four games to none, and the series is remembered for what happened in the eighth inning of Game 1: Vic Wertz hit a long drive to deep center, and Mays, with his back to home plate, caught it on the run over his shoulder and fired the ball back to the infield. The Giants won the game in the tenth inning on a home run by a pinch-hitter, Dusty Rhodes. The catch is arguably the most famous defensive play in baseball, and it was made possible by a center field that deep. For the Indians' side of the story, read the best single-season teams by winning percentage. Mays was the National League's Most Valuable Player that year, with a .345 average, 41 home runs and 110 runs batted in.
The Yankees as tenants
The Giants were not alone in the park. The Yankees, then a young club that had begun life as the Highlanders at Hilltop Park, shared the Polo Grounds with the Giants from 1913 through 1922. That is a decade in which the Yankees were a tenant at someone else's ballpark, and in which they acquired Babe Ruth. The crowds grew, and the Yankees opened a stadium of their own across the Harlem River in the Bronx for the 1923 season. The Yankees' best attendance at the Polo Grounds, 1,289,422 in the historical record, shows how large the audience had become.
The sequel is told in the original Yankee Stadium, which had a short right-field porch, a feature that suited a left-handed pull hitter in much the way the Polo Grounds' short right-field line had. The Polo Grounds was also used for other sports. The football Giants played there from the 1920s into the 1950s, and a famous heavyweight boxing match took place there in 1923.
The 1962 Mets: a different kind of history
The Giants left after the 1957 season for San Francisco, where the historical record shows them first at Seals Stadium and then at Candlestick Park, and the Dodgers left Brooklyn for Los Angeles the same year. New York had no National League baseball for four seasons. The Mets, a new expansion club, began play in 1962, and since their own stadium was not ready, they moved into the Polo Grounds, then more than 50 years old.
The team was famously bad. The 1962 Mets went 40-120, finishing tenth in a ten-team National League, and the historical franchise sheet ranks it first among the worst seasons by winning percentage in the club's history. The 1963 team lost 111 games. Casey Stengel, the manager, was a figure of national interest, and the best attendance of the two Polo Grounds seasons was 1,080,108. The Mets moved to Shea Stadium in 1964, and the Polo Grounds was demolished that year.
Why parks like this no longer exist
The Polo Grounds was one of a group of old parks in which the field had been fitted to the lot, not the other way around. Ebbets Field in Brooklyn and Forbes Field in Pittsburgh were also fitted into the streets around them. For other old parks, read Ebbets Field, Forbes Field and Shibe Park.
After the 1950s, the sport moved toward symmetrical, multipurpose stadiums on large suburban or downtown sites, and then, in the 1990s, back toward smaller parks with deliberate quirks. Modern ballparks use odd walls and nooks to add character but build them within a limited range, and the minimum-distance rules for new parks prevent anything as extreme as the Polo Grounds. The result is a game that is easier to compare across cities and less likely to produce a catch like Mays's, which depended on a wall that was almost 480 feet away.
Common questions
How far was the Polo Grounds fence? About 258 feet down the right-field line, a little under 280 down the left-field line, and roughly 480 to the deepest part of center field. Sources vary by a few feet, which is why this article says about.
Did Willie Mays catch the ball at the wall? No. He caught it well in front of the wall, but still deep in center field and very far from home plate. The wall behind him was farther away than at almost any other major league park, which is part of why the catch looked so impossible.
Why did the Giants leave New York? They moved to San Francisco for the 1958 season, along with the Dodgers' move to Los Angeles. The reasons involved attendance, the age of the park and the opportunity on the West Coast, and the historical record shows the result but not the motives.
Who played there after the Giants? The Mets, in 1962 and 1963. The database lists Polo Grounds IV as their home for those seasons.
Where to go next
If this article made you curious about how to score a game from the stands of an old park, how to keep score at a youth game covers the basics. The mathematics of a pennant race, such as the Giants' 1951 comeback, are explained in magic numbers explained. For the Yankees' next home, read the original Yankee Stadium, and for current coverage of stadiums and fans, see the ballparks and fans topic page. The Giants' current record is on the San Francisco Giants team page.