A note before starting--after some offline advice from Garlon, I'll be setting the park factors to 1.00 for this and upcoming parks. I'll try and go back and do so for the previous few parks, with a new revision number.
Hi all,
Thanks again for the kind words and encouragement!
And Pelican, I certainly encourage folks trying their hand at this!
Today I've got the storied
original Sportsman's Park, home to the
American Association's St. Louis Browns, owned by the (in)famous Chris van der Ahe. There is a
ton of material out there about this team, which won four pennants in the MLB-level American Association 1885-1888 and one nascent "World Series".
This park site hosted baseball since the 1860s, and after the Browns left this park in 1893 for Robison Field (which was made years ago by silvam14!) they rebranded as the Cardinals. When the AL added a St. Louis team in 1902, they grabbed the now-vacant Browns name and put up a new park on the now-unused Sportsman's Park site, which was the ballpark some of you old-timers may have visited in-person back in the day.
Google Drive Link to Sportsman's Park 1882
I haven't play-tested this one yet, but rather than wait I figured I'd post it now. I don't see any reason this one should be tricky with the grid or walls or anything, and it looks OK in game. There are a couple of Easter eggs like the beer garden in right field, which was in play in real life. Here it's entirely in foul ground, but the grid is set so that the players can run through it--go ahead and change the grid if you don't want that. I'm reasonably happy with this one, it wasn't nearly as technically challenging as the Brooklyn or Boston parks I posted recently.
This is its circa 1882 appearance, and for those curious I'm using
this site as guidance for lines on the field etc. The claim there is that the "players line" and "coaches line" were in place and stretched the length of the field, so I stuck them in. I also found photos with actual ads in the park from the right time, and since there were only two of them I added them in. The other Easter egg is the scoreboard, which probably is too far to ever be seen in-game. There's an 1883 photo of the team in front of it, which was probably taken at their home opener that year based on the teams involved, so I used Retrosheet to put in plausible scores on an adapted version of that scoreboard.
I've decided to try to get at least one park done for each franchise before starting a 2nd one for each franchise. At least at the moment I'm planning to do Philadelphia next, likely the "Philadelphia Base Ball Grounds", then probably Pittsburgh?
As ever, I hope you enjoy it!