Braves Field

Fifty years ago, Boston’s National League baseball team went to Milwaukee, leaving Boston University to move into Braves Field

by George Sullivan

A close play at the plate against the Cardinals in front of a sparse crowd in 1937. The Braves enjoyed a resurgence in the late 1940s, but attendance soon plummeted again. They drew just 281,278 in 1952, their final year in Boston. Photograph by Leslie Jones, Boston Traveler. Courtesy of Boston Public Library Print Department.

If you’ve ever attended an event at BU’s Nickerson Field, you’ve been in the house that Ruth quit.

Back in 1935, when it was Braves Field, Babe Ruth signed with the Boston Braves, lured by the hope of becoming manager. Lame and hurting and out of shape at age forty, he started the season playing like the Bambino of his Yankees heyday. On opening day at Braves Field, he singled and homered off the great Carl Hubbell to drive in three runs in a 4-2 Boston victory over the New York Giants.

But Ruth soon realized that he was in no condition to keep playing, and that the Braves had no intention of naming him manager. On June 2, in the clubhouse at Braves Field, a bitter Babe announced his retirement.

It’s hard now to picture Nickerson as a baseball park. But fifty years ago this summer, for $430,000, BU bought a stadium steeped in sports memories -- and promise -- from the Braves, who had just moved to Milwaukee. Although the team’s hasty departure broke the hearts of local Braves fans, the University’s acquisition of Braves Field was a godsend for a school that desperately needed a large athletic facility on campus.

	The crowd makes its way down Gaffney Street (Harry Agganis Way since 1995) toward Commonwealth Avenue after a late-1930s game, a scene that looks a bit like a contemporary post-Commencement exodus. The old Braves office building now houses the BU Police and the BU Children’s Center. Photograph by Leslie Jones, Boston Traveler. Courtesy of Boston Public Library Print Department. View large image

A COM undergraduate at the time, I had mixed feelings about the fate of that field of dreams off Commonwealth Avenue. I had been going to Braves games since I was seven years old, and I was devastated when they left the “Wigwam” for a city a thousand miles to the west. But four months later I rejoiced when the University bought the field. It changed the geography of BU, establishing a new western outpost and a new home for Terrier teams.

“Unlimited opportunity and a centralized athletic setup best describe the potential and purpose of the University’s newly acquired property,” wrote the Boston University News that September. “To construct a park of this type,” athletic director and football coach Buff Donelli said, “would cost the University four to five times more than we actually paid for Braves Field.”

Still, the beloved Braves were gone for good.

An old sportswriter -- and fan -- tends to wax too poetic and heavyhearted about a long-lost local professional team. Goes the sad Frank Sinatra song: “Yes, there used to be a ballpark right here.” Nonetheless, as thousands of graduates, relatives, and friends gathered at Nickerson Field for this year’s BU Commencement ceremony, I wondered how many of them gave even a moment’s thought to the major league baseball played at the site for thirty-eight seasons. Right here, in the old home of the Braves.

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