Burnett Field: Forty Years of Dallas Baseball

In the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, not far from the Trinity River, a baseball field once stood that was home to professional baseball in this city for forty years, long enough to see the sport's economics, its racial politics, and the ambitions of a minor league city all play out in full.

Burnett Field opened in nineteen twenty-four on land near Jefferson Boulevard, successor to Gardner Park, which had just burned. The park seated ten thousand five hundred fans along the third-base line at the edge of the floodplain. It hosted the Dallas Steers, a Texas League club that won the league championship in nineteen twenty-six and immediately followed up with a victory over the New Orleans Pelicans in that year's Dixie Series, the minor league championship of the South.

Over the next four decades, the team changed its name six times, Steers, Rebels, Eagles, Rangers, reflecting the shifting minor league affiliations and the chaotic economics of professional baseball in a city that had not yet landed a major league franchise. The ballpark itself was named Burnett Field in nineteen forty-eight for its owner Dick Burnett, and the name became permanent in nineteen fifty-one.

The Eagles years, from nineteen forty-eight through nineteen fifty-seven, included some of the best baseball Burnett Field ever saw. The Dallas-Fort Worth Rangers of the early nineteen sixties, operating under Pacific Coast League affiliation, drew fans from across North Texas before moving to Vancouver in nineteen sixty-four.

After baseball left, the Dallas Cowboys used the field as a practice facility during their own inaugural season in nineteen sixty. The stands came down not long after. The forty-year arc of Dallas minor league baseball that played out here preceded the city's major league era by nearly two decades and was for a generation the only professional game in town.