A Jumbo Baseball Facility

A look in from the left-field foul pole at Huskins Field and the athletic buildings beyond.

From behind the plate, a view of academic buildings on the other side of the railroad tracks.

The view from the first-base stands.

• Location: Tufts University, College Avenue east of Boston Avenue, Medford, Mass.
• Opened: 1990
• Home team: Tufts Jumbos, New England Small College Athletic Conference
• Capacity: 250

The facility has very limited seating, with room for only about 250 spectators in aluminum bleachers that were installed in 2013, replacing wooden bleachers that occupied the same footprint. The field itself, featuring a natural surface and no lights, is full-sized to left and center fields, but right field pinches in to just 309 feet thanks to the railroad tracks. A lighted soccer and lacrosse field sits beyond the left-field foul pole. The indoor recreation facilities are on the other side of College Avenue.

Tufts athletic teams feature a unique nickname, the Jumbos. In the 1880s, the showman P.T. Barnum, a practicing Universalist, made a donation to the school, which had been founded in part as a Universalist seminary. One of the buildings Barnum endowed was a natural history museum featuring the stuffed hide of Jumbo the elephant. The school’s teams quickly earned the Jumbos name, and official logos feature an elephant and tusks.

A new scoreboard installed in 2013 is dedicated to Adrian Misic, a youngster with terminal brain cancer who was an honorary member of the Jumbos baseball team from 2008 until his death in 2010. His last words were “Mom, Mom ... perseverance, perseverance.” That last word is inscribed on the board, and Adrian’s mother established The Perseverance Foundation to assist similarly situated families. Several players on the Tufts baseball team assist with the efforts of the foundation, part of the school’s longstanding commitment to service.