How Smith’s Ballpark carried on a decades-long baseball legacy

SALT LAKE CITY ( ABC4 ) — Smith’s Ballpark is located on what has been Salt Lake’s “baseball corner” for 80 years, according to ABC4’s Craig Wirth.

Smith’s Ballpark is the third baseball palace to stand at that location, but after the Salt Lake Bees played their last game at the stadium, Wirth wanted to revisit the first park to occupy the space.

Before there was Smith’s Ballpark, there was Derks Field — but even before that, there was Community Park.

In the 1930s, the original Salt Lake Bees played — and shortly after that, Art Teece began selling popcorn for five cents and sodas for a dime at the park.

“When you are under the excitement like here at a ballpark, you eat more than you would eat at home,” Teece previously told Wirth. “A bag of peanuts, two or three hot dogs, a Coke — if you did that at home, you would die of indigestion.”

Most of the players on the team had grown up playing ball in warm southern states and had never been to Utah before the nights at Community Park. The late Tribune sports editor John Mooney told Wirth that the players were generally homesick for the south.

When the war came, minor league baseball was suspended — but the military began playing games at the park to support the war effort.

Soldier Joe DiMaggio and his Santa Ana Air Base would play the Salt Lake Air Base, and when DiMaggio came into town, the papers couldn’t get enough of it.

“You couldn’t have squeezed another fan into the place,” Mooney said. “We had the largest crowd ever in Community Park … we had to seat them around the fence.”

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