Labatt Park

Labatt Park

Labatt Memorial Park (formerly Tecumseh Park, 1877–1936) is a baseball stadium near the forks of the Thames River in central London, Ontario, Canada. It is 8.7 acres (35,000 m2) in size, has 5,200 seats and a natural grass field. From home plate to centre field the distance is 402 feet (123 m); from home plate to left and right field down the lines, it is 330 feet (100 m).

Labatt Park is the "oldest continually operating baseball grounds in the world", with a history dating back to 1877. Since December 31, 1936, the park has been owned by the City of London.

On September 7, 2011, Baseball Canada announced that historic Labatt Memorial Park in London, Ontario, had won its six-week-long, favourite ballpark contest, winning the final round where it went head-to-head with Port Arthur Stadium in Thunder Bay, Ontario. During the two-week-long, final round of online voting, where more than 19,000 votes were cast, Labatt Park won with 63 per cent of the vote.

However, Fuller Field in Clinton, Massachusetts made it into the Guinness Book of World Records in September 2007 as the "world’s oldest continuously used baseball diamond/ field", dating back to 1878—a year after Tecumseh Park-Labatt Park opened in 1877—as Fuller Field's home plate and bases have purportedly remained in the same location since 1878, whereas home plate at Labatt Park has been moved (within the same field) from its original location in 1877.

In September 2008, however, Labatt Park replaced Clinton, Massachusetts' Fuller Field in the 2009 Guinness Book of World Records (page 191) as the "World's Oldest Baseball Field." Then on October 10, 2008, Guinness's online record for the World's Oldest Baseball Field was switched back to Fuller Field in Clinton, Massachusetts. World's Oldest Baseball Field

On May 30, 1994, the park was designated by London City Council under Part IV of the Ontario Heritage Act as an historic site via By-Law No. L.S.P.-3237-544, with the ceremonial plaque unveiling at the front gates of the park occurring on July 1 (Canada Day), 1994, prior to a doubleheader between the London Majors and Toronto Maple Leafs of the Intercounty Baseball League.

The park's designation occurred after a six-month-long lobbying effort spearheaded by the volunteer, non-profit organization, The Friends of Labatt Park, which has undertaken a number of initiatives during the past 18 years to enhance and promote the ballpark, its history and ambience.

A possible new stadium for the Montreal Expos was proposed (to replace the aging Montreal Olympic Stadium which the Expos had called home since the 1970s), also to be named Labatt Park. However, plans for the new stadium were shelved when the necessary public funding could not be secured.