Arenas of Broken Dreams

Even in warm winter sunshine, the old stadium in Miami, Fla., looks dreary, a victim of vandals, rats and politicians.

Broken glass rests on home plate. The only mound in the bullpen is a stack of tires. Rotting dugout steps are littered with trash, including an empty package of chewing tobacco to provide a clue:

Baseball was here.

Satchel Paige pitched at Miami Stadium, Mickey Mantle homered off the scoreboard, and Jackie Robinson raced around the bases. With neon foul poles and a cantilevered roof, the ballpark stood as a monument to a booming, exotic city.

Now, it serves as another kind of symbol. The scoreboard has fallen into the outfield, and the foul screen is in the stands. The ballpark, like the city, ahs fallen on hard times.

Concrete crumbling, paint peeling, rails rusting. Vandals recently moved in and ripped out hundreds of seats to sell as scrap metal.

The ballpark has been abused and abandoned. City employees still answer the phone at a number listed for Miami Stadium, but they rarely even mow the grass.

Ten years ago, the ballpark within view of downtown was still the home of minor-league games and major-league spring training. Now, city officials dealing with a $68 million budget deficit want to sell the 14-acre property.

“What’s tragic here is that the city has surrendered it,” says Rolando Llanes, a University of Miami architecture professor who is writing a book about the ballpark. “It is the city’s property and their responsibility. You surrender the public trust when you surrender the building to the elements.”

From nearby Interstate 95, the 9,500 seat stadium looks majestic. the curved roof defies gravity as it hangs without pillars over the grandstand like a huge heron.

Llanes says the design combined Art Deco and postwar modernism, terms not normally associated with ballparks.

“It’s a very unique structure,” he says. “It’s a perfect, baseball stadium in terms of sight angles and all the pragmatic issues. It’s an architectural monument.”

Anthills dot the infield dirt, while weeds grow in the outfield--and in the light towers. The press box is a shell, gutted by Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

This was once the best time of year at Bobby Maduro Miami Stadium--the ballpark’s full name, honoring a local organizer of youth baseball programs.

The Baltimore Orioles made the stadium their spring-training headquarters for 32 years, and the legendary Brooklyn Dodgers pad a visit nearly every March in the 1950s. An exhibition game between the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox in 1951 drew nearly 18,000 fans.

“I know of no more beautiful stadium in the country,” baseball commissioner Happy Chandler said at the ballpark’s dedication in 1949.

“It was a showplace for baseball,” says local sportscaster Sonny Hirsch, a batboy at that first game.

The park was home to the Miami Marlins, the minor-league namesake for the team that now plays 10 miles north of the city. In 1956, Satchel Paige arrived for the Triple-A team’s season opener in a helicopter.

“He was supposed to land in the middle of the outfield,” Hirsch recalls. “Instead, he landed right behind second base and scattered dirt all over everybody in the ballpark.”

The turnstiles still work. Scattered on the concrete floor just inside the main entrance are mattresses, blankets and bags of old clothes, along with dozens of sheets advertising a 1982 Miami Marlins game.

Cal Ripken and Ted Williams played at Miami Stadium. So did the Who. Sugar RAy Robinson and Archie Moore fought there. Men’s and women’s roller derby drew big crowds, as did a rally of Cuban exiles in 1968.

But an adjacent warehouse district failed, the neighborhood deteriorated, and attendance at the stadium dwindled.

“The lady grew old, and nobody really cared,” Hirsch says. “It turned into a dump.”

In 1988, the Miami Marlins moved their Florida State League games to a high school field. Two years later, the Orioles left for Sarasota. With that, the city that lost the Miami Dolphins and the Orange Bowl to the suburbs also lost baseball.

Ralph Fonseca shakes his head when he talks about the decline of Miami Stadium. He has lived nearby since 1968, when his father moved the family to Miami from New York.

“He figured baseball across the street--you can’t beat that,” Fonseca says. “That’s why he bought the house.”

Fonseca attended more than 100 games, usually sitting behind home plate.

“It was a beautiful stadium” he says. “Now it looks like a dungeon, and the city has done nothing about it.”

“I don’t think we’ve done an aggressive job of keeping vandals out,” acknowledged Christina Abrams, Miami director of public facilities. The city decided this month to seal the entrances with concrete blocks.

Professor Llanes says local leaders should step to the plate and preserve the ballpark as a community center and park for high school and college sports.

“You have to find a way to convey the message to your citizens that you’re not willing to give up on places like this,” he says.

A sickly palm tree hovers over the wall in right field, and a rat roots through trash in left. Grade school boys skipping class sit in the stands smoking cigarettes.

No peanuts. No Cracker Jack. No baseball.