By Bob Ryan, Globe Staff, 08/05/85
It's neither a respected elder such as Wrigley Field or Fenway Park, nor a cantankerous, but ultimately lovable, older brother such as County Stadium in Milwaukee. Municipal Stadium in Cleveland lives out its role as the forgotten, crotchety aunt, living in aching loneliness in her much-too-large house out there on the lake.
No existing stadium has a more negative image. It is, without question, the only old ballpark without charm. The only way to camouflage the stadium's essential drabness would be to fill it with bodies, but the Indians have been so unrelentingly mediocre for over the past quarter-century that patronage is negligible. There has not been a meaningful series played in this ballpark after Labor Day since September 1959, when the Indians finished second to the White Sox. How, therefore, could people be held accountable for not coming?
"It's unfortunate to relate the city and the attendance," insists Herb Score, the one-time pitching sensation who has been broadcasting Indians games for the last 22 years. "We have raised two or three generations of youngsters who have never seen the Cleveland Indians as a winner. I don't think we'd have to win a pennant to get people out here. It would be enough to be competitive, so we'd have a chance to win."
You simply cannot exaggerate how depressing it is to play in Cleveland. It is no major news happening when a three-game series there draws fewer than 15,000 people.
The very size of the park is self-defeating from a business standpoint. The monster stadium lists a baseball capacity of 74,118, or 25,000 more than anyone needs to operate a baseball franchise. "If you have a good ball club, or even a reasonably good ball club," explains Bill Veeck, "Municipal Stadium is great. But if you have a bad ball club, it works against you. Twenty-thousand people look lost, and it's very bad psychologically, because we are a gregarious animal."
The stadium's sheer size is very bad in another sense. "With all these seats," points out new team president Peter Bavasi, "there is no demand for advance tickets in this town."
Bavasi and his owners cling to the widely held notion that all Cleveland needs is a good enough team to rekindle what is assumed to be a widespread general baseball interest in Cleveland. "There hasn't been an event here in 25 years," Bavasi says, echoing Score. "But we think people care about baseball. We always do well on Opening Day (61,978 to see the Yankees this year and 74,420 to see the Tigers two years ago).
"The town," contends Cleveland center fielder Brett Butler, "is just hungry."
Cleveland once was a superb baseball town. The 1948 World Champion Indians attracted 2,620,627 people, a major league record that stood until the Dodgers broke it in 1962, and an American League record until New York exceeded that figure in 1980. Attendance was excellent for the next seven years. Nobody was complaining, as they would later, that the stadium was too cold, or too dank or too big or too anything. It may never have been what you would call ''pretty," but it was functional and if you had a reason you just gave the dog a bone, locked the house and went to the edifice that our old pal Jim Woods referred to as "The Big House On The Lake."
So dominant were the Indians three decades ago that Cleveland Browns' owner-coach Paul Brown was moved to write NFL commissioner Bert Bell in January 1955 pleading for a better schedule than the one he had in '54,
because, among other things, he found it difficult to compete with the Indians.
"Not only do I feel that the Cleveland Indians will probably win the championship again," wrote Brown, "but I also know that this is primarily a baseball town and we are hopeless from the standpoint of publicity at that time."
Butler and his teammates would have a hard time believing that one. Current Browns owner Art Modell leases the stadium from the city and runs it himself. The Indians are his tenants.
But why such a massive stadium in Cleveland? The answer is simple: hubris. When ground was broken in 1930, Cleveland was the fifth-largest city in America. It had a grand vision of itself, and the prevailing civic posture was, "Why not?" Cleveland believed it deserved a great stadium. Moreover, the city was hoping to attract the 1932 Olympics. When the International Olympic Committee instead awarded the bid to Los Angeles and its Coliseum, perhaps Cleveland should have interpreted the action as a negative omen.
The city naturally assumed the Indians would be pleased to play there. The first major league game was played on July 31, 1932, when Philadelphia's Lefty Grove beat the home team's Mel Harder, 1-0, before 80,184 fans. The Indians did move in for the entire 1933 season, but this was in the depths of the Depression and the team could attract only 387,936 fans to the oversized structure. Owner Alva Bradley therefore moved his team back to 27,000-seat League Park, (greatly pleasing left-handed sluggers Hal Trosky and Earl Averill, who preferred the 290-foot right-field line of League Park to the 340-foot right-field line of Municipal Stadium) and for the next dozen years the Indians shuttled between the dramatically contrasting locales, playing their Sundays and night games (League Park never installed lights) in the larger park. When Veeck bought the team in 1947, he moved the team permanently to Municipal Stadium.
By such objective standards as auto access, availability to public transportation, parking, sight lines and the willingness of management to do whatever it takes to please the customer, Municipal Stadium is a perfectly satisfactory place to see a baseball game. Bavasi has tried to brighten up the austere playing surface with placards bearing the team's three retired numbers (Averill's 3, Lou Boudreau's 5 and Bob Feller's 19), as well as placards containing the insignia of each American League team, on the outfield wall. But nothing can blot out the uneasy feeling produced by staring at all those empty seats. "What exactly am I doing here?" is a question Indians fans are likely to ask themselves.
It's a vicious cycle, because manager Pat Corrales suggests that playing without fans can't help but affect the players negatively. However, winning some games, and therefore creating the possibility of an "event," as Bavasi calls it, would bring in the fans.
Score, for one, says he knows which is the chicken and which is the egg. ''Put Detroit or Toronto in here," he says, "and we'll draw two and a half million."
They did once before. You can look it up.
REMNANTS OF PROUD TRIBE
The field and a portion of the stands of old League Park in Cleveland are still in existence. Built in 1891, the Indians played there regularly until 1932, when Municipal Stadium was built. The Tribe played the entire 1933 season at Municipal, then moved back to League Park (capacity: 27,000) in 1934, where they played for the next dozen years, with the exception of Sundays and night games (lights were never installed in League Park), which were played in Municipal.
Much history was made in League Park. In the same game in 1920 that Elmer Smith hit the first World Series grand slam, Bill Wambsganns turned in the only unassisted World Series triple play . . . Addie Joss threw a perfect game there in 1908 . . . Johnny Burnett went 9 for 11 in a 1932 18-inning game . . . Better to be left-handed (290 feet to right) than right-handed (375 to left).
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