LECOM Park: A Century of Spring Baseball
Near Sarasota, Florida
The ballpark you're passing in Bradenton opened in nineteen twenty-three, making it the oldest stadium still used for Major League Baseball spring training games anywhere in the country. That's a century of pitchers throwing off the same mound, of outfielders learning the sun angles in roughly the same outfield, of hopeful players arriving in Florida each February trying to make a roster.
The story of this park is really the story of spring training itself. When baseball's Cardinals came to Bradenton in nineteen twenty-three, they were helping establish the idea that professional teams should spend the winter somewhere warm, somewhere they could shake off the rust before the season began. The Cardinals built a modest wooden grandstand on the site of an old golf course for two thousand dollars. Two thousand dollars for what would become the oldest active spring training facility in professional baseball.
The Cardinals stayed through nineteen twenty-four, came back for a long run from nineteen thirty through nineteen thirty-six, and then departed. Various teams passed through Bradenton over the following decades before the Pittsburgh Pirates arrived in nineteen sixty-nine and settled in for what became a lasting partnership. The park was named McKechnie Field after Bill McKechnie, the Pirates manager who led the team to a World Series title in nineteen twenty-five and later won another with the Cincinnati Reds in nineteen forty, and who is widely regarded as one of the finest managers in the history of the game.
The naming rights changed in twenty seventeen when LECOM, the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine, purchased a fifteen-year deal. The name changed; the character didn't. The ballpark has been renovated multiple times over the decades, adding lights in two thousand eight and a sweeping outfield boardwalk after a ten-million-dollar renovation in twenty thirteen. But the bones are the same. The palm trees behind the outfield fence are still there. Every spring, it still smells like fresh-cut grass and possibility.
