Bowman Field
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Bowman Field is a minor league baseball stadium in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. It is home to the Williamsport Crosscutters of the New York - Penn League. Official seating capacity is 4,200.
The logging town of Williamsport has hosted minor league baseball since even before 1923, when Bowman Field was completed to host the city's entry as an original franchise in the New York-Pennsylvania League (now the Eastern League), called the Williamsport Billies. The Eastern League was at Bowman off and on for nearly seventy years, through the 1991 season with the Williamsport Bills. That team moved to Binghamton, New York, the next season and became the Binghamton Mets.
For the 1994 season, baseball returned to Bowman with the New York - Penn League's Williamsport Cubs. The club became the Crosscutters, a Houston Astros farm team, in 1999. Significant stadium upgrades took place prior to the 2002 season.
The field's most infamous event took place in 1987. Dave Bresnahan was catching for the Bills, who were in seventh place in an eight-team league, playing the last-place Reading Phillies in a meaningless late-August game.
With a runner on third base, Bresnahan switched catcher's mitts and put on a glove in which he had secreted a shaved-down potato. When the pitch came in, Bresnahan fired the potato down the third-base line, enticing the runner to sprint home. Bresnahan then tagged the runner with the baseball, prompting the umpire to award the runner home plate for Bresnahan's deception.
The president of the Eastern League took offense to what it perceived as Bresnahan's affront to the game, banning the grandnephew of Hall of Famer Roger Bresnahan from its league. However, the citizens of Williamsport applauded Bresnahan for his ingenuity, eventually prompting the club to retire his number.
External links
- Stadium Views - Ball Parks of the Minor Leagues (http://www.geocities.com/paulsminorleagueparks/Williamsport.htm)