Tom Shieber of the Hall of Fame posted an article today on his "Baseball Researcher" blog about a panoramic baseball photo from the early 20th century that he had been asked to identify. Using some fine historical detective work, he determined that it's a picture of the first game played at National Park, later known as Griffith Stadium, in Washington, DC on April 12, 1911. It was a concrete structure on which construction had started just a month earlier, after the wooden ballpark on the same site had burned down. The roof would not be added until later in the season, and the upper deck not until the following year, but the park was complete enough to host the opener against the Boston Red Sox. William Howard Taft attended that day and threw out the ceremonial first pitch to start the MLB season, a tradition he had inaugurated the year before at the old wooden ballpark.
I love photos like this and the detective work used to identify them, and I know others here do too. Here is the link to Shieber's blog post:
http://baseballresearcher.blogspot.c...l-history.html
And here is the photo:
