Sulphur Dell: The Strangest Ballpark in America

North of the Tennessee State Capitol, on land that once reeked of a sulphur spring and a nearby city dump, Nashville played professional baseball for nearly eighty years in what may have been the strangest ballpark ever built in the United States.

Sulphur Dell opened in eighteen eighty-five when Nashville joined the Southern League. The field sat twenty to thirty feet below street level, which made it a reliable flood victim whenever the Cumberland River rose. The grandstand was wedged so close to the foul lines that the distance from the first-base line to the nearest seat was forty-two feet, and even less along the third-base side. But none of that was the truly peculiar part.

The outfield was on a hill. The terrain sloped sharply upward past the infield, rising toward a ridge before dropping back toward the fence. Outfielders stationed in right field were nicknamed mountain goats. They learned to run downhill for short pop-ups and up the slope for drives hit over their heads. Pitchers who surrendered fly balls to the terrace gave the park its most colorful unofficial name: Suffer Hell.

Sportswriter Grantland Rice christened the park by its permanent name in a January nineteen oh eight column in the Nashville Tennessean. He had been looking for something that rhymed better than Sulphur Spring Bottom, and the phrase Sulphur Dell had a ring to it. Rice would go on to become perhaps the most celebrated sportswriter in American history, famous for dubbing the Notre Dame backfield the Four Horsemen. His Nashville days gave the game that name.

The park hosted Negro League teams from the nineteen twenties through the nineteen fifties alongside the white Nashville Vols, a testament to the parallel and segregated baseball world that ran beneath the major leagues. The last professional game at Sulphur Dell was played in September of nineteen sixty-three. The park was demolished in nineteen sixty-nine. Nothing of it remains, but the name stuck to the land.