Tal’s Hill And The Flattening of Baseball’s Local Character

The 2015 season marks the last stand for Tal's Hill. (via D.L.)

The 2015 season marks the last stand for Tal’s Hill. (via D.L.)

At the end of the season, The Astros are finally going to remove Tal’s Hill from center field at Minute Maid Park. The death of Tal’s Hill was inevitable; it is a combination of an easily mocked gimmick and a looming injury risk, and the only real issue keeping it from being removed as soon as Jim Crane bought the club is that somebody has to pay for the park’s makeover.

Tal’s Hill — named after longtime Astros executive Tal Smith — was never a particularly good idea. It was, as Grant Brisbee wrote at SBNation, a tacky attempt to recreate the history of some of baseball’s old ballparks like the Baker Bowl in Philadelphia and New York’s Polo Grounds. The quirks of those parks were products of their locations within their cities. Minute Maid Park’s quirks were canned nostalgia, which is probably not worth messing with the game and players in such a weird fashion. Say all you want about how absurd Miami’s Dinger Machine is, at least it’s not in play (but, admit it, that would have been amazing in its own way).

Despite it all, Tal’s Hill provided some fun moments, particularly when some of the best defensive outfielders in major league baseball history, like Andruw Jones and Carlos Gomez, have gotten their chances to take it head on. And, on the other end of the spectrum, when guys like center fielder Lance Berkman — no, really — unexpectedly conquer what has made much more agile and graceful outfielders look silly.

Even though the creation of Tal’s Hill was contrived, it picked up character over the years through scenes like Berkman shaking his head in disbelief as he realizes yes, he did just make that play. I love that unique character of ballparks, from the Green Monster at Fenway to the beauty of the San Francisco Bay at AT&T park to the ridiculousness of Bernie’s slide and the Sausage Race at Miller Park.

This unique character is the lasting imprint of what I find to be the most charming aspect of baseball’s history: its origin as a town game, as a gathering place and activity for all the young athletes in America’s early villages. Despite the tall tale of Abner Doubleday crafting baseball in the midst of the Civil War, references to baseball in America date back to the town of Pittsfield, Mass. in 1791. Pittsfield, as John Thorn wrote in Baseball in the Garden of Eden, had issued a prohibition against baseball, which was likely a pickup game played largely by young boys at the time. Perhaps there were a few too many broken windows for the Pittsfield adults to stomach. And as we all know, only the coolest things to do are banned by the old sticks in the mud in town hall.

I think there’s a substantial romantic element to that kind of origin, in which people come together and leave their own local touch on the game, something that isn’t there in the rest of America’s major team sports. Basketball originated as the product of a college physical education class, an attempt to build a sport that encourages physical health and teamwork better than any others — fascinating, I think, but neither as charming nor as organic as baseball’s origins. Football, meanwhile, was the product of Northeastern elites at Ivy League colleges as an antidote to a perceived loss of masculinity in the younger generation, a toxic fight football’s advocates have been waging for over a century.

As baseball has gone from town game to national pastime, many of its local touches have been flattened in the interest of creating a standardized product, one that makes national competitions from the World Series to the Little League World Series possible. Thorn includes a mail conversation from 1905 between A.G. Mills, who was back then attempting to compile an early history of baseball to discern who had really invented the game, and William Cogswell, a classmate of his in the 1840s and 1850s. The discussion illustrates just how different baseball was in the mid-1800s, how finely adapted the rules were to the individual places where the games were played. First, Mills wrote:

Among the vivid recollections of my early life at Union Hall Academy is a game of ball in which I played, where the boys of the side at bat were put out by being hit with the ball. You made a splendid shot at me at quite a long distance, and put me out fairly and squarely while running from second base to home. My recollection is that we had a first base near the batsman’s position; the second base was a tree at some distance, and the third base was the home base, also near the batsman’s position.”

Cogswell responded with his own memories of the Union Hall game:

My recollection of the game of base ball as we played for years at Union Hall, say from 1849 to 1856, is quite clear. You are quite right about the three bases, their location and the third base being home. When there were few players there was a rule against screwing, i.e. making strikes that now would be called “foul.” We used flat bats, and it was considered quite an art to be able to “screw” well, as that sent the ball away from the bases.”

The local character of early baseball was about much more than just geography. Every town and school developed its own rules based on the grounds available, and as the games continued, even new vocabularies (like Cogswell’s “screwing”) sprang up. This is a fascinatingly creative aspect to baseball that certainly didn’t exist in the organized leagues I played in (from little league through high school) but is instead more reminiscent of the pickup games we would play in the summer and the rules we would have to make up on the fly to account for small numbers of players or fields in which the outfield was covered by dense forests or worse, an angry neighbor’s property. Thus, quirks like “pull ball” in my hometown — in which the hitter is allowed to hit the ball only to the pull field — would develop, allowing us to keep playing with six (or fewer) players to a side, even if it did destroy most of our swings.

The organized game by definition eliminates these quirks. Thus, the local character instead lives on in the ballparks, from the most extravagant or historic major league parks to the shabbiest and most awkwardly built fields at high schools, from the ivy on the walls at Wrigley Field to the football goalpost jutting into play in left field at my home field at Galesville-Ettrick-Trempealeau High School in western Wisconsin. The fields are where each town and city gets to inject its own personality into the game.

(The local character of the game at my high school — and throughout most of my area, unfortunately — was largely, “We’re just waiting for football season to start.” These schools regularly used the same area for the baseball outfield and the football field. Our fence was an ugly plastic, blaze orange snow fence right in front of our football bleachers, and a number of area schools spent too little on baseball to even plant grass in the infields. The pre-game conversation on the ground rules surrounding the goalpost in left field was always an adventure. If a struck ball hit it on the fly, it was ruled foul, a rule that definitely cost my team a home run once when I was a sophomore. And if an outfielder hit the goal post on the fly with a throw, all baserunners were given two free bases, something that once turned a simple ground ball down the left field line into one of the most unlikely and hilarious little league home runs I’ve ever seen.)

A Hardball Times Update
Goodbye for now.

As much as I love to disagree with baseball’s owners, even I can’t really argue with Jim Crane’s reason’s for getting rid of Tal’s Hill and bringing in the center field fences. MLB.com’s Brian McTaggart quoted Crane in a June 4th blog post:

As you know, Tal’s Hill, some people love it, some people hate it,” Crane said. “We just thought it would be a better ballpark by moving that in. It will still be a very deep center field. There’s always been concern with the flag poles in play and danger in that and also the injuries going up the Hill, so we think this would be better for the players, utilize the space better and be a very pretty ballpark.”

Still, it feels like there is a real loss here, as one of those unique and quirky aspects of baseball is about to be destroyed in favor of concession stands and other “fan friendly” installments (read: annoying advertisements). I’m going to miss this:

And this:

And this:

Tal’s Hill was the only place in baseball where you could see the world’s best outfielders take on a challenge like that. Removing it makes sense, but I think there is always time and space to mourn when baseball gets a little less quirky and a little less weird, or loses anything that can make you gasp like those above catches can. Maybe 15 years was long enough for Tal’s Hill, maybe it was more than enough. It’s an extremely minimal complaint, I realize, and probably a futile one, too. But I want baseball to maintain its local character, and it feels like a little more of that will slip away when Tal’s Hill is flattened this winter.


Jack Moore's work can be seen at VICE Sports and anywhere else you're willing to pay him to write. Buy his e-book.
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Well-Beered Englishman
8 years ago

I, for one, am mourning the loss. My friends and I made a weekend trip to Houston to watch two games and say goodbye to the hill.

If a future commissioner ever suggests standardizing ballpark dimensions, you will find me at the riots, with a torch and a pitchfork.

Duane
8 years ago

I’ve only seen Tal’s Hill on TV, but I’ve always found it charming. Watching baseball lends itself to sitting around and chatting about history and/or what if’s. Tal’s Hill was perfect for both of those. Give it another 50 years and it would be cherished and historical and memorable.

tz
8 years ago
Reply to  Duane

They should keep the hill, but have the flagpole not be in play (sorry Richie Sexson).

And the Marlins should use the money they’ve just saved and bring the Dinger Machine into fair territory, and then trade a few competitive balance picks to the Red Sox for Hanley Ramirez (with the Sox eating 100% of his contract). Watching Ramirez play the outfield with caroms off that monstrosity would be even better than watching Bartolo Colon bat.

cass
8 years ago

There is a factual error in this article. Tal’s Hill is not an injury risk. Absolutely no one has ever suffered a major injury on Tal’s Hill. Due to how deep it is, Houston’s center field is perhaps the safest section of an outfield in baseball.

You know what’s an injury risk? Walls. Bryce Harper is probably the most famous contemporary player to suffer major injuries after wall-collisions, but he’s far from the only one. Walls with chain-link fences covering scoreboards and no padding are especially dangerous.

Removing Tal’s Hill and bringing in the fences will increase the injury risk to center fielders in Houston.

jeff mckay
8 years ago
Reply to  cass

This is kinda a wild idea Cass. Maybe the safest thing to do is put hills in front of all of the walls in stadiums so we don’t get players slamming into them. interesting.

Dennis Bedard
8 years ago

Ersatz baseball. Nostalgia just ain’t what it used to be.

Miles
8 years ago

Richie Sexson might have hit the longest non-home run of the 21st century when he hit one at least 450 ft that dinged that pole halfway up. I think the mark is still there, 15 years later. And I’m still laughing. What a metaphor for the futility of my beloved Brewers.

Also: this is fun to look at: http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s–r1nfSPp6–/c_fit,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636/1282554569241863269.jpg