The Springfield Senators and Terre Haute Tots lined up for team photos as part of opening ceremonies (Courtesy State Journal-Register)
On May 12, 1925, 9,000 people watched the very first baseball game ever played at what today is Robin Roberts Stadium. They filled the grandstand, crowded the foul lines and jammed temporary bleachers erected around the outfield. “Not even on the roof of the grandstand was there any surplus room,” the Illinois State Journal reported.
Baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis threw out the first ball, with Gov. Len Small serving as his catcher; Mayor Samuel Bullard was honorary umpire. “The commissioner’s toss was good enough,” the Journal said, “but Governor Small muffed it.”
The brand-new Springfield Senators lost that first game by a 6-4 score to the Terre Haute Tots. They lost a lot more games that year, ending the season with a record of 57-78, seventh among the eight teams in the Class B Three-I league.
Springfield baseball fans didn’t care. Baseball was in its heyday as a spectator sport in the 1920s, and the city had been without professional baseball for 13 years. So when a private group, the Springfield Fans, proposed in early 1925 to organize a Three-I team and build a stadium for it, they got an enthusiastic reception.
Preliminary sketch of new stadium by architects Bullard & Bullard. Mayor Samuel Bullard was a partner. (SJ-R)
Eye-and-ear surgeon Dr. E.E. Hagler (1863-1937) led the group, while insurance executive H.B. Hill* ramrodded fundraising. The Fans collected $30,000 to build the field on the eastern section of the Springfield Park District’s Reservoir Park (“Reservoir Park” also was the original name of the baseball stadium).
The larger Reservoir Park, which dated from 1866, ran along North Grand Avenue from 11th to 15th streets. It served as both a recreation facility and the reservoir for Springfield’s public water supply. The reservoir was leveled after Lake Springfield went into service in 1935; Lanphier High School now sits on the western section of the old park.
“The baseball plant at Reservoir park sprang up with magic swiftness,” the Journal said in a year-end sports wrapup. That was a fair statement – construction, delayed slightly by a lawsuit from neighbors, didn’t start until mid-March, yet the field was playable on May 12. Under normal circumstances, the stadium accommodated 3,850 fans, 2,650 in the grandstand and 1,200 more in permanent bleachers.
The Senators’ opening day extravaganza, which also included a concert, a motorcade and a postgame Baseball Boosters dance, was in many ways the highlight of the ’25 season. Despite the Senators’ losing record, though, attendance stayed strong. Almost 117,000 fans attended baseball games at Reservoir Park in 1925, setting records for both the Three-I League and for Class B minor league baseball in general.
“In the years that are to follow,” the Journal said in its year-end story, “1925 will stand supreme for one thing at least – Springfield’s return to organized baseball.”
*Entangled in an insurance scandal, H.B. Hill shot himself to death in 1934.
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