Crosley Field - The Terrace

The Terrace

As previously noted, Crosley Field was usually among the smallest parks in Major League Baseball, both in seating capacity and playing field size.

Probably the most famous (or notorious) feature of Crosley Field otherwise was the fifteen-degree left field incline, called "the terrace". Terraces were not unusual in old ballparks. Most of them were constructed as a way to make up the difference between field level and street level on a sloping block. And most of them were leveled out ("Duffy's Cliff" at Fenway Park and Left Field bump at Wrigley Field are two examples) or covered by bleachers (Ebbets Field for example).

The story of the Crosley Terrace is the reverse of the long-departed "Duffy's Cliff". There was no terrace in evidence during the ballpark's days as the Palace, which had a fairly high wall whose base was below street level. The terrace came about when the new ballpark was constructed for 1912. The club received permission to expand the playing field, by way of the city closing the eastbound lane of York Street. Instead of building a very high wall and retaining a level playing field, the club built a somewhat shorter wall with its base at roughly street level, with the sloping terrace making up the difference in grade.

As baseball boomed during the 1920s, many clubs built additional seating in their once-spacious outfield areas. The outfield area at Findlay and Western was already small, so building inner bleachers was not practical, and the Crosley terrace persisted and became one of the park's trademarks. It was used, as Duffy's Cliff had been, for temporary spectator seating, in the days when standing-room-only crowds would be allowed at the fringes of the field behind ropes. The terrace also served as a "warning track", in lieu of the more typical dirt or gravel warning tracks that began to appear at most other ballparks by the 1950s. The slope was at least as much warning to an outfielder as a flat track was. Although the terrace was most prominent in left field, it extended clear across the outfield.

The Crosley terrace was nowhere near as extreme as the terrace at Nashville's Sulphur Dell, but it still frustrated many outfielders, mostly left fielders and mostly from visiting teams. Babe Ruth was victimized by it on May 28, 1935, playing for the Boston Braves in his brief final season. He was headed for the Hall of Fame, but one day as Ruth was headed up the Crosley terrace, he fell down on his face.

Frank Robinson, however, loved it. In the early 1990s, when the Baltimore Orioles were planning their future home, Oriole Park at Camden Yards, Robinson, an Orioles executive and one-time Reds star, unsuccessfully lobbied to get the team to install a terrace in left field.

When the Houston Astros' new facility, Enron Field, was being built, a prominent addition to the field was a 30-degree center field incline with a flagpole, which was dubbed "Tal's Hill" in reference to its proponent, Astros executive Tal Smith.

To commemorate their Crosley Field years, the main entrance of the Cincinnati Reds' new park, Great American Ball Park, features a monument called "Crosley Terrace" that features inclines and statues of Crosley-era stars Joe Nuxhall, Ernie Lombardi, Ted Kluszewski, and Frank Robinson. References to the terrace are also visible. This monument was designed by architecture firm Populous and sculptor Tom Tsuchiya.