West End Park

Branch Rickey chose Orange and moved the Cardinals there from Brownsville, Texas, for spring training, The Record reports, and the team stayed at the Holland Hotel as guests of the Rotary Club. Lutcher Stark, then 33, formed the Orange Athletic League and also built the Sunset Grove Country Club course, which Commissioner Landis played in 1922. The 1921 exhibition against the Yankees was across the state line in Lake Charles, where the Cardinals lost 14-9 and Babe Ruth homered before nearly 2,200 fans. The March 24, 1922 game at West End Park was the Cardinals' last in Orange.

What the plaque says

West End Park West End Park, a baseball field with wooden grandstands, was an institution in Orange for nearly 80 years. The park was originally constructed to draw a professional baseball team to the city for spring training. Orange was the center of Orange County in the 1920s and underwent a shipbuilding boom during World War I, as the lumber mills were beginning to run out of native county timber. H.I. Lutcher Stark, a graduate of the University of Texas, formed the Orange Athletic Association to attract a professional baseball team. The St. Louis Cardinals took the field for their first practice on February 28, 1921. The practice was supposed to be private, but fans, young and old, came to catch a glimpse of some of the biggest names in baseball and hall of fame legends, such as Branch Rickey, Rogers Hornsby, Connie Mack and George "Specs" Toporcer. The first Commissioner of Baseball, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who is also in the Hall of Fame, visited the city and watched a game from the grandstands. Orange's local businesses benefitted from the national attention brought on by the spring training camp and the Cardinals agreed to return for spring training in 1922. Though the cardinals did not return to Orange the following year, West End Park continued to be used for many years by local high schools, youth and adult baseball teams. The West Orange-cove Consolidated Independent School District, which owns the property, removed the last remaining dugouts and flattened the field in 2009. Even though it is no longer in use, the memories of thousands of orange locals that played on the same field as baseball legends remain. (2015)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stark Museum of Art — 0.5 mi
  A white-marble museum in Orange built by the Stark Foundation and opened in 1978, holding Western art, American Indian art, Audubon's Birds of America and Steuben glass, free to enter.
• Shangri La Botanical Gardens and Nature Center — 0.7 mi
  More than 250 acres on Adams Bayou, begun by H. J. Lutcher Stark in 1937, with garden rooms, a cypress-tupelo swamp, a heronry blind and free pontoon tours in season.
• Museum of the Gulf Coast — 19 mi
  Port Arthur's regional museum in a former bank building: fossils, Native Americans, the petroleum story, a 125-foot history mural and Halls of Fame for musicians, athletes and artists.
• Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum — 20 mi
  A re-created oil boomtown on the Lamar University campus, with a derrick, period shops, a 1941 granite monument and an optional re-enactment of the January 1901 Lucas gusher.

More markers nearby

• First National Bank of Orange — steps away
• Orange Chamber of Commerce — 0.2 mi
• First Christian Church of Orange — 0.3 mi
• Homesite of Dr. Edgar William Brown — 0.4 mi