Recreation Park (San Francisco)

Recreation Park was the name applied to several former baseball parks in San Francisco, California in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century.

Recreation Grounds, dating to ca. 1868, location unknown, was San Francisco's first enclosed ballpark

Recreation Park, dating from roughly the 1890s, located at 8th and Harrison Streets, was used by several clubs including the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League from 1903 until being destroyed by the famous earthquake on April 18, 1906. The Seals temporarily moved to Oakland while the city of San Francisco was being rebuilt.

Recreation Park, the best known of these ballparks, located at 15th and Valencia in the Mission District, was the home of the Seals during 1907-13 and then 1915-30 after a one-year experiment playing in Oaks Park in Oakland. The Oaks, in turn, had essentially moved into Recreation Park in 1907 and played most of their games there (except Thursdays and Sunday mornings) until their new Oaks Park was opened in 1913, although they continued to play some games in San Francisco until sometime in the 1920s. This congenial arrangement was made easier by the fact that J. Cal Ewing, founding father of the PCL, owned both clubs for their first couple of decades. The ballpark sat 15,000. It also become the home of the Mission Reds (a.k.a. "Missions") upon their arrival in 1926. The ballpark was abandoned when Seals Stadium, a mile east of the old park, opened in 1931 and became the new home of both the Seals and the Missions.

ources

*"Ballparks of North America", Michael Benson, McFarland, 1989, p.362-363
*"Take Me Out to the Ball Park", Lowell Reidenbaugh, The Sporting News, 1983 & 1987 p.256
*"Lost Ballparks", Lawrence S. Ritter, Viking Studio Books, 1992, p.169-170