Before the Machine. Mark J. Schmetzer
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baseball that underwent something of a makeover between the 1960 and 1961 seasons. The ballpark itself was brightened up with a paint job, the old green being covered up with a couple of coats of white, while additional space had been found on the massive scoreboard in left-center field for the two new American League teams.
More glaring was the change in the area around Crosley Field, which showed unmistakable signs of the ever-growing dominance of the automobile. For decades, space for parking cars around Crosley had been an afterthought. Most of the fans arrived for games in buses or trolleys or on trains that pulled in a few blocks south of the ballpark at Union Terminal. Most fans could walk back and forth easily, while most of those who drove to the games had to settle for finding parking spots on the narrow, neighborhood streets around the ballpark.
The unexpected success of the 1956 team, and the relative explosion in attendance, forced Reds management to face the fact that more and more fans were going to be driving cars to games and would need safe places to park. The one, 400-spot lot one block south of the ballpark on Dalton Street wasn’t nearly enough. Powel Crosley started talking with city officials about finding a way to add 5,000 spots around the area, and he wasn’t shy about holding the future of the franchise over the city’s head.
“There are so many other cities ready to offer a stadium, adequate parking space, and everything of that sort, practically for nothing,” Crosley said. “In this competitive situation, we are entitled to ask for some additional parking space.”
The Reds, located in one of the smallest markets in major league baseball, always had been a regional team. As the 1950s turned into the 1960s and the development of the interstate highway system made it less time-consuming to drive long distances, license plates from Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia became more common sights in parking lots at Reds games.
Eventually, on April 28, 1958, the Reds and the city signed an agreement under which the city agreed to build parking lots and Crosley guaranteed that the franchise would remain in Cincinnati for at least five years.
Beginning in 1959, the city was able to start working out deals with surrounding property owners and clearing lots for parking spaces. Before the 1961 season, one major landmark fell victim to the needs. The Superior Laundry building, located across York Street beyond the left field wall, was demolished. The demolition also meant the loss of the Siebler Suit advertising sign, which guaranteed a new suit for any player who hit the sign with a home run. Reds slugger Wally Post had picked up more than ten Siebler suits through the years, while Willie Mays of the New York/San Francisco Giants had led visiting players with seven.
The team’s official 1961 yearbook includes a page featuring an aerial view of Crosley Field from the south. The word “parking” is stamped over eleven different lots around the ballpark, adding spaces for a total of 6,000 cars, up from 3,500 available in 1960. The city spent just less than $1,200,000 to buy the properties, clear them, and build the lots.
“The city-owned parking lots will all be surfaced and have guard rails of some sort around each lot,” the article reports, adding, “New roads, such as the Dayton Expressway, are making it much easier for Reds fans to get to Crosley Field.”
As added evidence of the automobile’s growing dominance, fans could see, just beyond the center- and right-field walls, the pathway for what eventually would become the Mill Creek Expressway portion of Interstate 75. This was the latest link in the chain of a Hamilton County highway that had been started in 1941 as a four-mile stretch from Hartwell Avenue north to Glendale-Milford Road, which helped make it easier for workers to get to the Wright Aeronautical Plant—later a General Electric facility—in Sharonville, where engines for World War II bombers were being built.
The stop-and-start nature of the interstate system at that time made getting to Reds games much different than it is today. Ferguson recalled the challenges of getting to Crosley from Dayton.
“There were three or four ways to come,” he said. “You could come straight down U.S. 25 right through Miamisburg, or you could take a couple of side roads over to (state route) 741 that ran parallel to 25, east of there. Another way we took was going partway down 25, then swinging west past Middletown over to 747. Eventually, that would hit Spring Grove Avenue when it went way on out.”
By the late 1950s, according to a history of Interstate 75 written by Jake Mecklenborg for “Cincinnati-transit.net,” the highway had advanced south to the Ludlow Viaduct, getting closer to linking up with the Kenton County expressway in Northern Kentucky. The last link was the four-mile stretch from the Ludlow Viaduct to the Ohio River, including construction of the Brent Spence Bridge. Space for the stretch through Cincinnati’s West End and Queensgate neighborhoods still was being cleared in 1961. Eventually, as many as 20,000 people from close to 5,000 families, as well as 551 businesses, would be displaced.
The city cleared out the buildings on York Street, behind Crosley Field, to create additional parking spaces.
Before construction prevented it, the Reds were able to use the cleared area beyond the outfield walls for—you guessed it—parking.
TWO
Taking Aim
Considering the concealed weapon charge Frank Robinson still was dealing with when he arrived in Tampa, Florida, for spring training in 1961, some people might have found it a bit ironic that the sound of gunfire was common around the Cincinnati camp.
Nobody was particularly alarmed, however, for two reasons—it was expected, and the guns shot only BBs.
They were part of an exercise designed by a Columbus, Georgia, company known as Unlimited Enterprises to improve the players’ focus. A brainstorm of ever-innovative owner Powel Crosley Jr., the idea was for the players to shoot BBs at targets tossed into the air. The targets got progressively smaller and smaller, from baseballs to discs to pennies, all the way down to BBs, which meant the shooter was trying to hit a BB with a BB. The instructors—Lucky McDaniel, Mike Jennings, and John Hughes—eventually would tell shooters to “look at the shiny side of the BB.”
Reds players shoot at the sky during spring training.
Outfielder Wally Post hit six consecutive discs in one stretch before knocking out a wad of paper stuffed into the middle of the disc on his seventh shot.
“It was eye-hand coordination stuff,” pitcher Jim O’Toole said.
“The object of all this is for the boys to correlate their attempts to hit my targets with their attempts to hit baseballs,” Hughes said. “I’m trying to get the players to concentrate on their target, whether it’s a baseball or disc. I have the boys shoot with both eyes open, and I teach them that they should think of the gun or bat as merely a working member of their body.”
Shooting BBs at BBs actually had been implemented by Crosley a couple of years earlier.
“My best year was 1959, and that was the year we had a week of this shooting in spring training,” outfielder Vada Pinson recalled. “Last year I bought a little gun and worked out myself, but that’s not as good as when you have someone helping you. These drills teach you to concentrate, and they help you to pick up the ball faster. Learning to do those things isn’t going to hurt any batter.”
Pitcher Bob Purkey was convinced the drills also helped the mound staff.
“Sometimes a pitcher gets out there and just throws without concentrating completely on his target,” Purkey admitted. “I’ve done it. These drills help me concentrate. You can’t hit the spots if you aren’t concentrating. That’s the difference between a thrower and a pitcher—concentration.”
“They got us down to where he would throw a BB in the air and we could hit it,” young pitcher Jim Maloney said. “We’d started with big washers, bigger than a silver dollar, ten feet in front of you. Within two to three weeks, we were doing