Agate Type

Inside Sprudel Park

The West Baden Sprudels, a black professional team managed for four years by the great C. I. Taylor and starring such players as Dizzy Dismukes, George Shively, and C. I.’s brothers Ben and Candy Jim, played their home games in Sprudel Park. This was an amazing structure, part of the luxury West Baden Springs Hotel complex, that consisted of a baseball field circled by an enclosed, elevated bicycle track, with the hotel’s dome—the largest freestanding dome in the Western Hemisphere—looming in the background.

Kevin Pope has been able to collect some photographs and other materials related to the Sprudels. Among these items is the following postcard, showing the Sprudels inside the park sometime from 1910 through 1913:

 

The postcard is unfortunately too blurry to identify anybody for sure, although I will guess that the guy kneeling in the center with the collie mascot is C. I. Taylor. He appeared in this 1920 photo of the Indianapolis ABCs in a very similar posture (albeit without a dog):

Kevin has also dug up some ledger pages with some player names and salaries. Here’s one page from 1911:

I can confirm that a couple of these guys did indeed appear for the Sprudels in 1911: Luther O’Neal (catcher) and Sutton (no first name, first base). The others could include Albert Toney, Big Jim Norman, Leonard or Roland Griffin, W. Higbee, Hub Alexander, and Lou Oliver, all players around this time for the French Lick Plutos (the Sprudels’ archrivals), Indianapolis ABCs (C. I. Taylor’s next team), Birmingham Giants (Taylor’s previous team), or Chicago Union Giants. The $30 or $40 paid to everybody but “Griffen” sound like a week’s or maybe a month’s pay; Griffen’s $3 must be for one game.

In addition, Kevin has a much later version of the French Lick Plutos, the 1931 “Pluto Red Devils of French Lick and West Baden”:

The ’31 Pluto Red Devils were themselves probably not a top drawer professional club, but they did play the Louisville White Sox of the Negro National League:

(Louisville Courier-Journal, May 31, 1931, p. 39)

And Kevin has also run across some photos of a black fraternal organization from the same area, ca. 1910, perhaps showing some of the men associated with the ball club (though I don’t recognize anyone):

The Cubs in Sprudel Park, 1908

In the comments Kim Agan points out that the last time the Cubs won the World Series, back in 1908, they took spring training at the luxurious West Baden Springs Hotel in Indiana—at Sprudel Park, a ballpark surrounded by an enclosed bicycle track. Under the name Sprudel Park, it would the following year become the home of the West Baden Sprudels, a black professional team.

Here’s a photo of the Cubs in Sprudel Park that spring (from this link provided by Kim), which gives a great view of what the ballpark looked like inside:

You can see the hotel, with its free-standing dome (then reputedly the largest in the western hemisphere), just peeking over the bicycle track that formed the ballpark’s walls. (From what I can tell the enclosed track was also where fans were seated, though maybe they also set up bleachers inside the track.) Check out more photos of Sprudel Park here--they’re worth a look.

sprudel park

A while back I called the Catholic Protectory Oval, the Bronx home of the New York Lincoln Giants, “one of the most remarkable settings for Negro league baseball.”  Now I’d like to introduce what’s unquestionably the most remarkable setting for Negro league baseball: Sprudel Park in West Baden Springs, Indiana, birthplace of Larry Bird and home of the West Baden Sprudels in the 1900s and 1910s.

The Sprudels were organized and run by black employees of the palatial West Baden Springs Hotel, which boasted of the largest free-standing dome in the Americas, and advertised itself as the “Eighth Wonder of the World.”

Both the Baden hotel and its great rival in the adjacent community of French Lick existed because of the mineral springs of the region, and both hotels marketed brands of mineral water—the West Baden hotel called its brand “Sprudel Water,” while French Lick sold the eventually much more famous “Pluto Water.”  The hotels’ black professional baseball teams named themselves after the mineral water brands.  By 1910 both clubs had gotten pretty serious—the Sprudels had hired Charles Isham Taylor, famous manager of the Birmingham Giants, to run the club, and he brought along his ballplaying brothers, including eventual Hall of Famer Ben Taylor.  The Plutos, meanwhile, had built their own ballpark, Pluto Baseball Park (more on this another time).

The Sprudels had no need to build a park, because a venue already existed.  The Indianapolis Freeman described it in 1911:  “The park is the prettiest in the West and very much different from all other ball parks, the fans having an opportunity to see the games from an elevated bicycle track, fifteen feet high” (March 18, 1911, p. 7).  This does not quite capture the reality of the park, as you can see from this 1911 postcard:

And here’s an amazing aerial view on another postcard, this one from John Martin Smith’s book of photographs and postcards, French Lick and West Baden Springs:

There’s also a Sanborn fire insurance map from 1913, which unfortunately cuts off in the middle of the velodrome/baseball park:

And here, also from Smith’s book, is a look at the upper level of the bicycle track, where fans could sit in deck chairs and watch C. I. Taylor’s Sprudels, or the major league clubs that took spring training here.

The odd shape, the bicycle track/grandstand with vacationers looking on from their deck chairs, the tennis courts in center field, the hotel’s great dome, possibly visible over the top of the structure if you looked back toward home plate, the ambience of the surrounding gardens…all of this combined to make the West Baden Base Ball Park, or Sprudel Park as it was usually called by the newspapers reporting on games, one of the weirdest settings for professional baseball you can imagine.

The Sprudels and Plutos began to fade away as baseball powers in the mid-1910s, and Sprudel Park burnt down in 1928.  But today, to judge from Google Maps, it looks like a baseball field of some sort, with a backstop and outfield fence, lies directly on the former site of Sprudel Park.  Even though the angles are a little different and the course of the creek seems to have been altered since 1913, you can orient yourself by the gray cross of the little bridge and walkway across the creek, which remains.