Ainsworth Field

Exterior of Ainsworth Field, Sep-2004.

The main seating bowl, as seen from deep right field.

Fans watching the game from behind the plate are stuck with a thick Cyclone-fence-style screen.

• Location: 24th Street at Washington Place (west of Cranberry Street), Erie, Pa.
• Opened: 1947 (renovated 1980)
• Home team: Erie Sailors (1948-51), Middle Atlantic League; Erie Sailors (1954-59, 1961-63, 1990-93), Senators (1960), Tigers (1967), Cardinals (1981-87), Orioles (1988-89), PONY / New York-Penn League; Erie Sailors (1994), Frontier League
• Capacity: 3,000

By the mid-1960s, the facility had fallen into disrepair, and professional baseball ignored it for a decade and a half until renovations were completed during the 1980 season. This ushered in another period of use by the New York-Penn League. Again, though, the park deteriorated, and the Sailors left after 1993, moving 400 miles east and becoming the Hudson Valley Renegades at a new park in Fishkill, N.Y. The Frontier League came in and used the park for one season before the Welland Pirates moved south to a new park in Erie, calling themselves the SeaWolves.

The seating bowl consists of eight sections, all elevated from the field, with the dugouts cut into the bowl. This is similar to McCoy Stadium in Pawtucket, R.I. The press box is within the bowl, directly behind the plate. There is no home-plate portal. Presumably at one time, portals led to a concession and souvenir area under the grandstand. These have been filled in, however.

I had assumed that the locker rooms were probably also under the grandstand; however, site visitor Andy Postema, who played for the Sailors in 1990, tells me the locker rooms were in the school gymnasium. Rooms marked “Umpires’ Room’ and “Ground Crew” are in a separate building down the third-base line which also contains rest rooms. Bleachers extend the seating capacity down each foul line; in each bleacher, the wood planks are rotting away from the steel structure.

When I arrived, a contractor had suspended a job for a holiday weekend. He was apparently water-blasting the structure in preparation for painting. While the field appeared to be in disuse, it is clear that the city intends to keep utilizing it for amateur games.