Fair Grounds Base Ball Park

The plaque's 1888 opener belonged to a league with an unlikely birth. John J. McCloskey, the player-manager later called the father of the Texas League, brought a barnstorming team from Joplin, Missouri, to Austin to play the champion New York Giants; his club won the first two games and the Giants left town. McCloskey later said the league was born of that upset. Houston was a charter club with Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Galveston and San Antonio, but the circuit stayed shaky for years, sitting out the seasons of 1891, 1893, 1894, 1900 and 1901.

What the plaque says

Fair Grounds Base Ball Park Semi-professional baseball was a major attraction at the first annual state fair held in Houston in May of 1870. One year later, the fairgrounds moved to a new location near where Main Street ended onto the prairie at Houston's south edge. The fairgrounds had a racetrack, grandstand, and permanent exhibit hall that sat on eighty acres. The fair offered competitions, livestock shows, dancing, and baseball. The earliest multi-city baseball competitions in Texas were played at the Houston Fair Grounds Ball Field until the state fair left Houston forever in 1878. The fair grounds were rented as a city park, and the ball field at Travis and McGowen streets remained vibrant. The professional Texas Association, the first intercity baseball league in the state, played games at the field in 1884. Even as the old fair grounds were being developed, the six square blocks between McGowen, Main, Drew, and Milam remained open for baseball. On April 1, 1888, the inaugural game for the Texas League was played at Fair Grounds Park, with Houston defeating Galveston 4-1. In 1896, the grandstands were rebuilt with enough seats for 2,500 spectators. It continued to hold games for the Texas League, major league exhibitions and top African American teams in Texas until 1904, when the six blocks where the field sat were developed. Less than a year after baseball moved away, the blocks were subdivided and sold as residential and commercial properties. (2014)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 0.7 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.
• Emancipation Park — 1.0 mi
  The Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.
• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 1.0 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.
• Rothko Chapel — 1.4 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.

More markers nearby

• League of United Latin American Citizens, Council 60 — 0.3 mi
• Courtlandt Place — 0.4 mi
• St. Joseph Hospital — 0.6 mi
• San Jacinto High School — 0.6 mi