Sulphur Dell: Nashville's Impossible Ballpark

If you stood just north of Nashville's state capitol in the first half of the twentieth century, you were standing near one of the strangest baseball fields ever built. Sulphur Dell hosted professional baseball in Nashville from eighteen eighty-five to nineteen sixty-three, and for nearly eighty years it drove outfielders absolutely mad.

The ballpark took its name from the sulphur spring that had made this low-lying hollow a fashionable mineral resort in the nineteenth century. Grantland Rice, the celebrated sportswriter who would later coin the phrase the Four Horsemen for Notre Dame's famous backfield, first called it Sulphur Dell in a column for the Nashville Tennessean, and the name stuck. The park eventually earned a grimmer nickname among the players who suffered through it: Suffer Hell.

The reason was the terrain. The outfield was not flat. A steep slope began just behind the infield and shot upward at a forty-five-degree angle, leveled off briefly on a ten-foot-wide shelf, then resumed its climb to the fence. By the time a right fielder reached the base of the fence, he was standing twenty-two and a half feet above the playing surface. The right field fence itself was only two hundred sixty-two feet from home plate, because getting anything further would have required climbing a small mountain. Right fielders at Sulphur Dell were nicknamed mountain goats. Stories circulated of outfielders falling down the incline, falling up the incline, and one man who gave up entirely and crawled down on all fours.

The Nashville Vols played here from nineteen oh one until nineteen sixty-three, though the Southern Association folded after the nineteen sixty-one season; the team sat out nineteen sixty-two and returned for one last year under a different league. Their final game at Sulphur Dell was September eighth of that year, a doubleheader victory. The ballpark was demolished in nineteen sixty-nine. Decades later, Nashville built a new minor league stadium on the same ground, bringing baseball back to the site of that impossible hill.