Fleming Field

Scene as you walk into Fleming Field from the upper street, Mar-2004.

The seating area is spartan, to say the least.

A wide view of the seating bowl.

• Location: Prescott Street at Garfield Street, Yonkers, N.Y. (map it using Google Maps)
• Opened: Before 1959
• Home team: Yonkers Hoot Owls, Northeast League (1995)
• Capacity: 1,500 (approx.)

The City of Yonkers dedication sign.

I saw a semi-pro game at Fleming Field in Yonkers back in 1983, and the facility looked pretty much like this. The restroom facility you see behind home plate appears to be the only improvement that was made to the park for the Hoot Owls, who nearly finished that first season. (Another correspondent indicates that the restroom facility wasn’t there when he attended a Hoot Owls game, but that it’s an even later structure.) They failed to play several games, possibly rainouts that were not made up, and finished with an abysmal 12-52 record.

If I gave parks at which I never saw a professional game my usual one-to-five-baseball rating, Fleming Field would probably owe me a baseball or two. It’s no wonder the Northeast League wasn’t able to get back into the New York metro market until the dawn of the New Jersey Jackals in 1998.

Fleming Field dates back to at least 1959. An article published by Rory Costello of the Society for American Baseball Research identifies a semipro team called the Yonkers Chippewas as having utilized Fleming as its home field. Costello cites an item in the Yonkers Herald Statesman stating that a game against the “Dodger Rookies” originally scheduled for Fleming that September was relocated to Ebbets Field, the former Brooklyn Dodgers home stadium that was demolished less than six months later.