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THIS AUCTION IS FOR THE ITEM(S) OF THE PLAYER(S) LISTED ABOVE IN THE AUCTION TITLE AND PICTURED BELOW
(1) AL LANG FIELD COMMERATIVE POSTER 18X24 MINT CONDITION
SEE ARTICE BELOW:
Al Lang Field hosts final game Friday
By ROGER MOONEY
ST. PETERSBURG --
The members of the Junior Olympics baseball team climbed the dugout steps to the field and glanced around the old ballpark rimmed by palm trees and drenched in sunshine.
"You know who played on this field?" Jim Belcher asked.
Nope.
"Mickey Mantle and Stan Musial," Belcher said.
Bob Gibson and Tom Seaver.
"You'd see their mouths open as they looked around the stadium," said Belcher, who helped organize the tournament played in 1990 in St. Petersburg.
Lou Brock and Yogi Berra and . . .
He could go on and on dropping names, but you get the point.
"Everyone who was somebody played at this park," Belcher said. "That's the significance of this site. This is the history of baseball in America."
It was a glorious Monday afternoon, and Belcher sat in the seat he has occupied behind home plate at Al Lang Field for the past 11 spring trainings.
He will sit there only once more, Friday, when the curtain closes on the ballpark built in 1947 and renovated in 1977.
The Tampa Bay Rays host the Cincinnati Reds in the final spring training game played on the historic site. Next year, the Rays will train in Port Charlotte, bringing an end to 89 seasons worth of spring training baseball in St. Pete.
"It will be a sad day," said Belcher, a 59-year-old real estate agent who moved from St. Louis to St. Pete in 1989 so he could be close to his Cardinals, who trained there from 1946-97.
"I can't visualize a club not having spring training in St. Petersburg, Florida," said Rays senior adviser Don Zimmer, who played his first game at Al Lang Field in 1954.
"It brings tears to my eyes," said John Fagen, a great nephew of Al Lang. "St. Petersburg created what spring training is today, and now St. Petersburg is losing that, and that's a shame."
It was Al Lang who came to St. Petersburg in 1910 with the idea of beating the respiratory illness that caused one doctor to give him only six months to live. Lang was so grateful the warm weather and sunshine helped cure his ailments he wanted to thank his adopted town he called "Saint Spearsburg" in a big way.
He wrote his good friend and Pittsburgh Pirates owner Barney Dreyfuss and invited the Pirates to train in St. Petersburg. Dreyfuss wrote back:
"Al Lang, you must think I'm a damn fool, suggesting I train in a little one-tank town that's not even a dot on the map."
In 1913 Lang did convince the Chicago Cubs to leave New Orleans for Florida's West Coast, but the Cubs overshot St. Pete and trained in Tampa.
Lang persisted and enticed the St. Louis Browns to come to St. Pete in 1915. With only the exception of the war years, the dateline "St. Petersburg" has appeared each spring in papers across the country.
The first games were played on Coffee Pot Bayou, where a 2,000-seat grandstand was built so fans could watch the Browns. A crowd that doubled the capacity of the new park saw the Cubs beat the Browns 3-2 on March 27, 1915, in the first game between two major league teams ever played in the state of Florida.
Realizing two teams were better than one, the city built Waterfront Park in 1918 on the site close to where Al Lang Stadium sits today.
By then Lang was mayor of St. Pete.
The locals called him "Uncle Al." He would soon become known as "Mr. Baseball."
Baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis would come to call Uncle Al his friend. So would Yankees owner Col. Jake Ruppert as well as Branch Rickey, Jimmy Foxx, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Musial.
After the Browns came the Boston Braves, the Yankees, the Cardinals, the New York Mets, Baltimore Orioles and the Rays. The New York Giants trained in St. Pete in 1951.
Zimmer remembers seeing Al Lang in the stands, wearing a black suit and fedora. It's possible John Fagen and his brother, Hugh, where at Uncle Al's side.
They attended games every Sunday, mingling with the players in the home team dugout or the pitchers as they ran sprints in the outfield after throwing their final pitch that afternoon.
The new stadium built in 1947 was named for St. Pete's Mr. Baseball.
"It's one of the best parks in baseball," Belcher said.
Fans seated along the right side of the stadium can watch the sailboats glide over Tampa Bay. Palm trees sway in the breeze outside the stadium.
Walk inside, and you walk into history.
"I think the memory that's burned into my mind is the Cardinals final game here in 1997 when Mr. Musial played 'Take Me Out to the Ball Game' on his harmonica, and all the living Cardinals Hall of Famers came back for the game," Belcher said. "That was a very sad day."
The Rays have grand plans for Friday. There will be a fly-over from MacDill Air Force Base, posters for the first 6,500 fans, the announcement of the All-Al Lang team and a free postgame barbecue on the field.
The site then will be left to the voters of St. Pete, who will ultimately decide on the Rays' plans for a state-of-the-art, open-air ballpark with a retractable roof that is expected to be ready in 2012.
"If this ever happens, this will be one heck of a place," said the 77-year-old Zimmer. "It will be a real unique place. If it works, I hope I'm alive to see it."
Fagen, now 64 and living in north Georgia, will be on hand for the pregame ceremonies.
He said the day will be "bittersweet," but Uncle Al, who died in 1960 at the age of 89, would shed very few tears.
"Uncle Al was a progressive-thinking man," Fagen said. "Change means better. He would be happy St. Pete has a major league team, and if we have a major league team, then he would have wanted to do anything to make them happy."
The name of the proposed ballpark will be determined by the highest bidder. But a street that will run behind the stadium will be called Al Lang Way.
"That's OK with me," Fagen said, "because it will get people asking, 'Who is Al Lang?' "
He was the guy with the dream; the reason McKechnie Field sits in Bradenton and cities like Lakeland, Sarasota, Fort Myers and Vero Beach are long-time spring training destinations.
"I didn't know it when I was a kid," Fagen said. "I realized it after his death that Uncle Al was the grandfather of spring training."
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