Doc Moorefield became St. Pete’s Mr. Baseball for 1920
Part 2
Around the same time, Moorefield gets word from his winter league counterpart in Tampa that the Yankees are looking to relocate from Jacksonville for spring training. Moorefield immediately wires the Yankees business manager, W. H. Sparrow, about coming to St. Pete. Sparrow telegrams back that someone will be down around the first of the year to check things out.
Upon hearing this news, winter resident Buck Herzog wires Sparrow with his support of the Yankees coming to St. Pete. Al Lang makes inquiries, this has become his white whale once the Yankees acquired Babe Ruth. Clark Griffith of the Washington team, training in Tampa, puts in a good word also hoping to get a major league team closer to his Tampa base. Alas, it was not to be. The Yankees chose to stay in Jacksonville.
Moorefield gets his field put together sans clay, but the rest of the facility is considered to be in fine shape by January. Opening Day at the new Moorefield Ballpark was Jan. 23, 1920. The game will feature the winter league St. Pete Saints versus the Tampa Smokers. The Saints will feature Herzog in the line-up. It will be a grand occasion. The streetcars run to the park every 30 minutes. Schoolchildren are granted free admission. Famed pilot Albert Whitted will fly over the field and drop the game ball and Mayor Lang will throw out the first pitch. The first official Florida West Coast Baseball league game is played that afternoon. In addition to Herzog with the Saints, ex-major leaguer Wilbur Goode (sic, Good) is playing for the Smokers. It’s an 85-degree day but the sun is comfortably behind the spectators’ backs.
A couple of days later on January 26, Moorefield attends a meeting in Tampa of the 2nd year Florida State League. The St. Pete Saints are accepted into the league as a new franchise for the 1920 season. The league at the time is considered class “D” in professional baseball. Through this acceptance, Moorefield successfully created St. Petersburg’s first league-affiliated professional ball club.
The winter league continues with games every Wednesday and Friday during February, and off-days include a fireworks show and an evening of wrestling and boxing. An announcement is made that a team of Cubans are coming from Havana, and that the Saints will be keeping the Cuban infield players for the regular season.
Mid-March sees the MLB Indianapolis Indians arrive. The Indians disappoint a large crowd of Hoosier snowbirds waiting to greet them at the train depot when they fail to make their connection in Jacksonville. They arrive the next morning to a smaller crowd. Indianapolis has scheduled trips to Tampa to play the Washington Nationals and to Miami to play the defending World Champions, Cincinnati Reds. In return those two organizations are committed to visiting St. Pete for one game each.
Indianapolis is overall very pleased with the accommodations. They stay at the Edgewater Inn, owned by a woman from Indianapolis. They are furnished with cars to and from the ballpark, Perry Snell offers free golf at the Snell Isle course, and they receive free access to the Spa Beach pool. The Moorefield ballpark clubhouse has hot and cold running water in the showers. The bleachers run along the 3rd baseline and are screened to hold foul balls in. The backstop is nice and new.
The field is overall sufficient for their needs. But there is one significant problem. Nobody pooled the money together to get clay in the infield. The infield was sand which lacked true hops, was difficult to run on and when the wind was blowing in the right direction, constantly got in the infielders’ eyes. There was a house outside the left field fence making that boundary a bit short, but still sufficient compared to the Waterfront field.
One of the highlights for the youths in the area would be to show up for practice and shag balls for the team. In fact, at the end of practice, Manager first Jack Hendricks would line the boys up and fungo an old practice ball as far out into the outfield as he could. Whichever boy got to it first got a professional ball to take home. Hendricks had managed the St. Louis Cardinals in 1918 and would again manage in the majors with the Cincinnati Reds from 1924 – 29.
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