The Grounds: Bendix Field and Playland Park

1943–1954

The Blue Sox played their first three seasons at Bendix Field and their last nine at Playland Park, and the move between them is one of the few off-field facts about the club that a state marker bothers to record: "Their move in 1946 from Bendix Field to the more centrally located and better-equipped Playland Park, near here, increased attendance." Playland had begun as Springbrook Park, a trolley park on the St. Joseph River between Ironwood and Twickenham Drives, part of a fair and amusement complex with a race track, a dance hall and midway rides; the ballpark there dated to the 1890s — the venue record gives a first game in 1896 and a game under lights as early as August 28, 1904 — and a race track was added in 1916. Pete Redden became the park's manager in 1924 and renamed it Playland Park after a public naming contest. Its listed capacity was 3,500. Its oddity was its infield: home plate sat on the race track itself, which made sliding home a treacherous business, especially, as one archive caption notes, for players in skirts.

The Blue Sox' first game at Playland was played on May 26, 1946 — the date is fixed by the marker dedication held on its seventy-fifth anniversary — and the move worked as advertised. A crowd of 2,916 on July 14, 1946, was the largest Monday crowd the club had drawn to that date, and by mid-July the season's attendance, 47,715, stood only some 2,000 below the whole 1945 total at Bendix Field. The park's sporting life was wider than the Blue Sox: it hosted South Bend's only NASCAR race, on July 20, 1952, before about 3,700 spectators. The park closed in 1960 or 1961 — the local accounts differ by a year — and the grounds became a lighted par-3 golf course. The site is now the River Crossing student housing of Indiana University South Bend, opened in 2008; of Playland Park itself, only the concrete grandstand remains. The state marker for the Blue Sox stands near the site, on the campus.

Sources

1. Indiana Historical Bureau, marker 71.2021.1 — the 1946 move from Bendix Field to Playland Park and its effect on attendance; marker siting near the Playland grounds.
2. StatsCrew venue record for Playland Park — Springbrook Park origins, opened 1896, capacity 3,500, first night game August 28, 1904.
3. The Clio, Playland Park entry, and Wikipedia, Playland Park (South Bend) — Redden's renaming contest, the race track, closure in 1960 (Clio) or 1961 (Wikipedia), the par-3 course, and the surviving grandstand.
4. Winthrop University archives photograph caption — home plate on the race track and the hazard of sliding home in skirts.
5. Indiana University South Bend, marker dedication release, May 26, 2021 — the seventy-fifth anniversary of the first Blue Sox game at Playland Park.