Nashville now and then: News from the Hot Stove League

Famed sportswriter Ring Lardner dubbed Sumner County native Hub Perdue "The Gallatin Squash" after the 192-pound, 5’ 10” pitcher made it to the big leagues from Nashville in 1911. Cigarette card image from Library of Congress

This month in 1884, professional baseball came to Nashville. And supposedly, the Yankees were the first to play baseball in our city.

Of course that would be the Union Army, occupier of Nashville during the Late Unpleasantness of the early 1860s. Soldiers are said to have played the game in an open area north of downtown known as Sulphur Spring Bottom.

Whatever the game's local origins may have been, Nashville went pro just before Christmas 1884. On Dec. 22, the Nashville Daily American reported that a “baseball park,” complete with “a handsome and commodious amphitheater” would be constructed along Jackson and Cherry (later Fourth) Streets in the low-lying area between Capitol Hill and Germantown.

The American Baseball Club had leased the diamond for five years starting March 1885. The club would play in the newly formed Southern League, along with teams from Atlanta, Savannah, Memphis, Macon and Charleston, S.C.

The Nashville Americans would later be known as the Nashville Vols, and their field as Sulphur Dell.

“Nashville base-ball stockholders are going thoroughly to work to make next season one of the special attractions,” the article announced. Their stadium would include “a dancing-hall and refreshment booths.” And they were funding “important improvements” to the Sulphur Spring area. Dikes and drainage would protect it from flooding, a new pump system would be installed to draw up the sulphur water for drinking, and a handsome new bathhouse was slated.

“The effect of these improvements in the Sulphur Spring Bottom, which has so long been a public eye-sore, can well be imagined,” the Daily American commented. “There is little doubt that the spring house grounds and base-ball park will become the most popular summer resort in the city.” The newspaper predicted that the local shareholders would “realize handsomely upon their investment.”

As the years went by, Nashville’s ballpark acquired a peculiar reputation. To make it fit within a city block, architect William R. Gunn designed it with typical left and center field measurements of 334 and 421 feet respectively, but the right field fence was only 262 feet away from home plate.

And the ground in front of the fence sloped at a 45-degree angle, meaning that a right fielder had to start chasing a fly ball uphill from the 224-foot mark.

Nashville-born sportswriter Grantland Rice, lyrical as always, started calling the park Sulphur Dell in his early days at the new Nashville Tennessean newspaper, founded in 1907. It didn't take long for pitchers who had to take the mound there to develop their own sobriquet for the field: "Suffer Hell."

One indication of how friendly the park was to hitters: When Bob Lennon of the Vols hit 64 home runs in 1954, he tagged 40 of them at the Dell.

The Vols struggled financially for years and finally shut down in 1963. Sulphur Dell suffered the final indignity of being used as a tow-in lot before it was razed in 1969. A state-employee parking lot occupies its site today.