Enron field -- WTF?

So I was watching the cubs vs astros game tonight when I noticed something for the first time…

Enron has a small hill in center field! No joke, you have to run up a slope to get to the wall in straight away center. Not only is there a hill there, a support from above comes down just on the field side of the wall, making it in play.

Who the hell designed these features? Why would you have a hill in center field?

Well, the flagpole in play is, I’m fairly sure, a nod to old Tiger Stadium, which had one of those in center field.

As for the hill, I think that goes back even farther. Fields used to have hills instead of warning tracks, IIRC.

Anyway, they’re ways to make the park more ‘traditional’

Someone’s gonna break their leg on that thing someday… A real dumb idea.

no joke someone is going to get hurt on that thing…if it was tradition to have a hill instead of a warning track, thats one tradition that should stay gone…

Nah. Baseball fields are supposed to be different. Its part of the advantage of the home feild. The hill and flag very, very rarely come into play.

Yeah, I remember last season seeing a few people bite the dust when they hit that hill. NOT a good idea. And as DynoSaur said, it’s flag pole, not a support. Either way, still dumb.
But I do like the train.

Didn’t the old Polo Grounds have a statue in center field?

I’m all for each field being different, allowing for the home field advantage. Heck I can even take the ivy covered --brick-- walls at Wrigley field…but that hill is really asking someone to get hurt.

There’s a cricket ground in Kent, England (Canterbury I think) which has a large tree some yards in from the boundary.

A shot from the batsman hitting the tree without a bounce scores 6 runs. With a bounce scores 4.

The tree also provides shade for outfielders when there’s not much happening in the middle.

Which is quite often.

The hill in center is Tal’s Hill, named for Astros’ president Tal Smith, whose idea it was. It’s intended as a sort of homage to the Crosley Field of Smith’s Cincinnati youth. Crosley had a significant incline up to the wall in lieu of a warning track (btw, Crosley was unique in this – it wasn’t common practice as DynoSaur suggested).

Fenway Park did have Duffy’s Cliff, a 10-foot mound in front of the left-field wall, from the left-field foul pole to the flagpole in center, from 1912 until 1934, when it was greatly reduced. The bullpens were also in fair territory until 1940, when they were moved to right field behind a shorter fence, mainly to boost Ted Williams’ home run production (the bullpen area was nicknamed “Williamsburg”).

Flagpoles in play also used to be much more common at both the major and minor league levels – Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis (home of both the Browns and Cardinals) had one until the 1950s, and Yankee Stadium had one, IIRC, as well as the monuments for Gehrig, Ruth, and Miller Huggins; when the fences were moved in, these ended up outside the outfield wall, but were in play for years. Tiger Stadium was the last of the old parks to have a flagpole in play, so in a way you could say it passed the torch to Enron since it closed as Enron opened.

The Polo Grounds didn’t have any statues in center field (you’re probably thinking of the monuments at Yankee Stadium), but it did have all sorts of odd angles, not to mention the incredibly deep center field (varying from 480 to 505 ft. from the plate through the years), with the clubhouse and its steps in the deepest part. The bullpens were in fair territory in left-center and right-center.

Among other in-play obstacles, the Huntington Avenue Grounds in Boston (home of the Red Sox before Fenway) had a tool shed – though with a center field depth of between 530 and 635 feet, one assumes it didn’t come into play too much.

Forbes Field in Pittsburgh had several oddities; the bottom of the light standards around the outfield were in play, as was the flagpole in center. During the second half of the 1943 season, a 32-ft high wooden Marine at parade rest stood against the left-field wall, just to the right of the scoreboard, and was in play.

And that’s just at the major league level. There are even more quirks in minor league parks, though not as many as there once were. Ponce de Leon Park here in Atlanta, for instance, had not just a slope, but a magnolia tree standing on it, in play in center field (the tree stood until very recently, though the park’s been gone for thirty years or so). Several ballparks I’m familiar with have sloping ground; Ray Winder Field in Little Rock, home of the Arkansas Travelers, has a decided downward slope in right field – from the visitor’s dugout on the third base line, you can barely see the right fielder’s head. And it used to have a flagpole in play. At a recent game at Municipal Stadium in San Jose, I noticed that the infield is significantly higher than the outfield, with a pretty sharp dropoff right behind first base, tapering off (though still noticeable) behind second. The most direct comparison to Enron, however, was the center field at Engel Stadium in Chattanooga, former home of the Chattanooga Lookouts. The center field fence at Engel was 471 feet from home, and was a 20-foot-high cinderblock wall. Like at Enron, there was a warning track at about 410 feet, beyond which there was a very steep incline up to the wall. Just to the left of straightaway center, the bank was planted in red and white flowers to spell “Lookouts”. In a couple of the last seasons at Engel, the Lookouts built a fenced pen in the corner of the centerfield wall for two camels, named Larry and Lumpy, who would be brought out to parade around the perimeter of the field during games. During the season that Michael Jordan played at Birmingham (1997?), the Lookouts erected a temporary chain-link fence at the back of the warning track and used the incline as space for overflow seating. Once Jordan was gone the next year, however, so was the fence. The Lookouts moved to their boring new BellSouth Park last season, though Engel still stands and is used for amateur and high school games.

Sources:
http://www.ballparks.com
http://www.baseballparks.com
http://www.sportingnews.com/baseball/ballparks/enron.html
http://www.baseballparks.com/Enron.htm

ballpark.com seems to back me up on the statue in the Polo Grounds:

Tonight, a fly ball was hit to the hill in center field. The center fielder for the Pirates had no problems making a nice over the shoulder catch on the hill.

Mea culpa. I mainly used the pages on the Polo Grounds to confirm the things I did know, and didn’t scan it as carefully as I should’ve.