Baseball
Norwood has also hosted Baseball since 1951 with the South Australian Baseball team being tenants until 1988. Between 1951 and 1988 Norwood Oval hosted the Claxton Shield competition on six occasions (1951, 1956, 1961, 1966, 1971, 1976 and 1981) with the winners being NSW (1951), Victoria (1956 and 1981) and SA (1961, `66, `71 and `76).
The original Australian Baseball League (ABL) started in 1989 with Adelaide represented by the Adelaide Giants. The ABL ran from 1989 until it folded in 1999 with the Giants playing all of their home games at Norwood Oval with most being under lights. During their time in the ABL the Giants were affiliated, as were every other team in the league, with a team from Major League Baseball. In a massive coup the Giants managed to get themselves affiliated with the 1988 World Series champions the Los Angeles Dodgers with the team receiving 3-4 'import players' a season from the Dodgers Minor League system to compliment their array of 'local' talent. Unfortunately during the ABL the Giants never made the ABL's championship series.
Following the collapse of the ABL after 1999 and the short lived International Baseball League of Australia (IBLA) which ran from 1999-2000 until the 2002 the Claxton Shield was revived in 2003 with South Australia playing their games at the Thebarton Oval before moving back to Norwood Oval in 2009.
In August 2010 it was announced that there would be a new Australian Baseball League and that Coopers Stadium would be the home ground of Adelaide Bite, the team representing Adelaide in the ABL.
As of February 2012 Norwood Oval's field dimensions for baseball are:
Left Field - 320 feet (98 m)
Centre Field - 390 feet (120 m)
Right Field - 290 feet (88 m)
Read more about this topic: Norwood Oval
Famous quotes containing the word baseball:
“Spooky things happen in houses densely occupied by adolescent boys. When I checked out a four-inch dent in the living room ceiling one afternoon, even the kid still holding the baseball bat looked genuinely baffled about how he possibly could have done it.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“I don’t like comparisons with football. Baseball is an entirely different game. You can watch a tight, well-played football game, but it isn’t exciting if half the stadium is empty. The violence on the field must bounce off a lot of people. But you can go to a ball park on a quiet Tuesday afternoon with only a few thousand people in the place and thoroughly enjoy a one-sided game. Baseball has an aesthetic, intellectual appeal found in no other team sport.”
—Bowie Kuhn (b. 1926)
“The talk shows are stuffed full of sufferers who have regained their health—congressmen who suffered through a serious spell of boozing and skirt-chasing, White House aides who were stricken cruelly with overweening ambition, movie stars and baseball players who came down with acute cases of wanting to trash hotel rooms while under the influence of recreational drugs. Most of them have found God, or at least a publisher.”
—Calvin Trillin (b. 1935)