{"id":1301,"date":"2013-03-18T05:50:16","date_gmt":"2013-03-18T09:50:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/?p=1301"},"modified":"2013-03-18T12:34:30","modified_gmt":"2013-03-18T16:34:30","slug":"polo-grounds-light-still-burn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/?p=1301","title":{"rendered":"POLO GROUNDS LIGHTS STILL BURN!!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"playing-field\"<\/a><\/p>\n

by: Brandon Loomis The Republic | azcentral.com<\/p>\n

By day, the lights are about the least obvious visual attractions at Phoenix Municipal Stadium. But what else around the Cactus League shouts louder about ba…seball\u2019s hopeless devotion to the past?<\/p>\n

The rusty sandstone buttes of Papago Park loom large beyond the outfield, and a perfectly groomed lawn is center stage on game days. The posts that raise the lights 100 feet above the playing field have shined down on all of this and much more.<\/p>\n

The park, built in 1964 and updated twice since, is the oldest active home to Arizona\u2019s spring-training circuit, now that Tucson\u2019s Hi Corbett Field is no longer in the mix. But as anyone walking the concourse behind the stands along the third-base line may have read in a concrete inscription added a decade ago, it\u2019s those 10 tall, steel cylinders that really speak to the good old days.<\/p>\n

Willie Mays watched his drive float past them when he hit the park\u2019s first home run. But even that wasn\u2019t the beginning.
\n
\nThe San Francisco Giants brought the poles with them when they moved their training here in 1964, but not from Candlestick Park. The towers with the fist-size anchor bolts came from the Polo Grounds, the New York park that the Giants left behind for California in the 1950s. That park was dismantled after the New York Mets moved to Shea Stadium several years later.<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t know the reasoning,\u201d said stadium manager James Vujs, a city employee and baseball enthusiast. \u201cA nostalgia thing for the Giants? Cost? I don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Giants left for Scottsdale in 1982, and now their cross-Bay rivals, the Oakland A\u2019s, use the Phoenix stadium. The poles stayed put. The lamps they hold up have been updated to 1,500-watt metal halides, and they\u2019re illuminating new chapters of baseball history. Imagine the throng of Japanese reporters following Hideki Matsui when he played for the A\u2019s in 2011.<\/p>\n

Who knows what they\u2019ll illuminate in a couple of years? Oakland\u2019s contract is up next year, and there\u2019s talk that Muni could become the Arizona State University Sun Devils\u2019 home if the A\u2019s shuffle over to Mesa to inhabit HoHoKam Park once the Chicago Cubs vacate it for a new Mesa stadium.<\/p>\n

Vujs recounts how the A\u2019s banned power duo Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco from taking batting practice in the practice field next to the stadium because they kept hitting cars that drove by on Van Buren Street.<\/p>\n

With pride in his tenant organization, he also notes that the A\u2019s brought the Cactus League\u2019s first World Series title here in the early 1970s.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just the lights that show flashes of history. If you\u2019re sitting in the grandstand, look down and notice the narrow gap in the concrete at the base of your seat. That\u2019s where the Giants tried what Vujs believes was baseball\u2019s first air-conditioning system. A central evaporative cooler pumped cool breezes at fans\u2019 feet, for a very short experiment.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey realized it only cooled your ankles,\u201d he said, \u201cand they never used it again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Flourishes like that and the original stone berm cradling the seating bowl remain, but an $8.6 million upgrade in 2003 \u2014 with new seats, deeper dugouts, better shade and a big-league press box \u2014 left the rest of Muni looking thoroughly modern.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by: Brandon Loomis The Republic | azcentral.com By day, the lights are about the least obvious visual attractions at Phoenix Municipal Stadium. But what else around the Cactus League shouts louder about ba…seball\u2019s hopeless devotion to the past? The rusty … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1301"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1304,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1301\/revisions\/1304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}