YMCA Baseball Fields and Athletic Park - 230 North Arsenal Avenue

The home at 230 North Arsenal Avenue marks the former entrance of the Baseball Fields and Athletic Park.

"As the Indianapolis Indians look to celebrate 125 seasons of professional baseball in Indianapolis this year, members of the Arsenal Heights neighborhood have been discovering their neighborhood’s own unique role in baseball history. Upon finding an 1898 Sanborn map of the neighborhood showing a ballpark between Ohio, Arsenal, New York, and Oriental streets, several neighbors began digging up any information they could find on the park. What they found was several histories of professional baseball parks that refer to the park, often with contradictory information and differing names: Market-Oriental Park, East Ohio Street Park, and Indianapolis Park. Some histories suggested the park hosted the Indianapolis Hoosiers when they were in the majors as part of the National League, a team that had multiple future Hall of Famers, including Amos “The Hoosier Thunderbolt” Rusie. Other history books indicated the ballpark was used primarily by later minor league teams in the city and after major league baseball had left the city.

Approaching the end of the 19th century, baseball was the national pastime, but football had become the sport of choice on college campuses. By the 1880s, the game was expanding to western universities, including many in Indiana. The first intercollegiate football games in Indiana took place at the old Athletic Park, the baseball grounds located at the current location of Methodist Hospital, in 1884.

In 1886, a group of Yale students and graduates native to Indianapolis formed the Indianapolis Athletic Association (IAA) with the intent to bring rugby football rules to Indiana. Games were initially played at the old Athletic Park on the current Methodist Hospital grounds. The 1886 league included teams from Wabash, Franklin, Butler, Indiana, and Hanover, with Wabash winning the first state championship.

In 1889, the YMCA sought to create a new park for football and other sports in the city, and worked in close conjunction with the football proponents of the Indianapolis Athletic Association. Maria Fletcher Ritzinger, leased a parcel of land she owned in Arsenal Heights between Arsenal, Ohio, Oriental, and Michigan streets to the YMCA to be used for the athletic park. YMCA Athletic Park’s grand opening was a field day on September 7th, 1899. Under the auspices of the YMCA, state college football transitioned from the IAA to a newly created college athletic conference, the Indiana Intercollegiate Athletic Association, for the 1899 season. The season was set up in tournament fashion and all games were hosted at YMCA Athletic Park. The conference included teams from Purdue, DePauw, Wabash, Indiana, Butler, and Hanover.

By 1890, all of the teams had their own home fields, but Butler adopted YMCA Athletic Park as their home field. The 1890 season appears to be the first time the down-and-distance rules (3 downs to advance the ball 5 yards) and play from scrimmage were incorporated into the Indiana game. Thus, these were the first games in Indiana that were distinctively American, rather than rugby, football.

In 1891, the YMCA could no longer afford to maintain the park and it was dismantled. Butler played their games instead at the old State Fairgrounds in what is now Herron-Morton Place.

A new baseball park was built on grounds of the former YMCA park in 1892, generally referred to as the East Ohio Street grounds. Butler returned to use the park as their home field until they built a field on their Irvington campus in 1897. In the final years of the century, the park grew out of favor for hosting football as newer athletic parks were developed elsewhere in the city. In 1899, Maria Ritzinger’s heirs had the land parceled and developed as a new subdivision, named “Arsenal Park,” making way for the homes that currently reside there. While little evidence remains of its existence today, this little park in Arsenal Heights can make two claims to sports history: one of the founding sites of baseball’s American League, and the birthplace of Indiana football."

- This is an excerpt from an 2011Urban Times article by John Houser