2001 34c Legendary Baseball Fields: Forbes Field

U.S. #3515
34¢ Forbes Field
Baseball’s Legendary Playing Fields
Issue Date: June 27, 2001
City: New York, NY, Boston, MA, Chicago, IL, or Detroit, MI
Quantity: 125,000,000
Printed by: Avery Dennison
Printing Method: Photogravure
Perforations: Serpentine Die Cut 11.25 x 11.5
Color: Multicolor

Vintage postcards of ten famous baseball fields are displayed on the Baseball’s Legendary Playing Fields se-tenant. Descriptive text appears on the back of each stamp.

Three of the ball fields are still in use. Yankee Stadium is known as the “House that Ruth Built.” It was built in 1922 in the Bronx, the largest stadium at that time, to hold all the fans who wanted to see the New York Yankees and Babe Ruth. The Chicago Cubs have been playing at Wrigley Field since 1916. It was there during the 1932 World Series that Babe Ruth hit his famous “called shot” home run. Boston Red Sox’s Fenway Park opened April 20, 1912, the same day the newspapers reported the sinking of the Titanic. The park is known for its tall, green, left-field wall, known as “The Green Monster.”

Tiger Stadium is the earliest of the structures to have been built, erected in 1896 on the site of a nineteenth-century Detroit hay market.

Two Pennsylvania playing fields opened in 1909.    Shibe Park hosted the Philadelphia Athletics first and then the Philadelphia Phillies. It was one of the first modern steel-and-concrete stadiums. Forbes Field, built for the Pittsburgh Pirates, was a huge ball field, boasting the longest plate-to-foul-pole distances in the National League.  

When the White Sox’s Comiskey Park opened in Chicago in 1910, on top of an old city dump, it was considered the finest baseball facility in the world.  

Beginning in 1911, the New York Giants played at the Polo Grounds depicted on the stamp. It was the location for all the games of the first “Subway” World Series in 1921.

The Cincinnati Red’s Crosley Field, which opened in 1912, hosted major league baseball’s first night game in 1935.

Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, sported a majestic, eighty-foot marble rotunda and gilded ticket windows and turnstiles. In 1960, it became the first of these legendary playing fields to be demolished.

Forbes Field opened on June 30, 1909, in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood and was the Pirates’ home for more than 60 years. It was named for British General John Forbes, whose forces captured Fort Duquesne during the French and Indian War, and it was among the first major league ballparks built of concrete and steel. Its outfield was one of the largest in baseball. Roberto Clemente spent his Pirates career in right field there, starting in 1955, and sent line drives into the right field screen for more than a decade.

Clemente produced one of the most unusual finishes in baseball history at Forbes Field. On July 25, 1956, the Pirates trailed the Cubs by three runs in the bottom of the ninth, and Clemente hit a walk-off inside-the-park grand slam. It is the only documented one of its kind in modern major league history. His best-known games there came in 1960, when he batted .312 with 94 runs batted in as Pittsburgh won the pennant. In the World Series against the New York Yankees, he hit safely in all seven games and batted .310.

The 1960 World Series ended at Forbes Field with Bill Mazeroski’s home run in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 7, one of the most famous hits in baseball history. Clemente played in that eighth-inning rally too, singling before Hal Smith’s three-run homer put the Pirates ahead. Forbes Field closed on June 28, 1970, with a doubleheader against the Cubs, and the Pirates moved to Three Rivers Stadium. Clemente reached his 3,000th hit there in 1972, but the park where he began his career was Forbes Field.