Rensselaer Adventures

This blog reports events and interesting tidbits from Rensselaer, Indiana and the surrounding area.

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Phantom ballfield

In the Board of Trustees room at Saint Joseph's College hangs an aerial photograph of the campus taken a few years ago. Examining it carefully one day, I noticed that there seemed to be the faint impression of a baseball diamond in front of the Science building. Today this field is sometimes used for band practice but little else. If you look carefully at the picture below, which is my photograph of the photograph, you might be able to make it out.
Here is a closer look. Can you see it now?
I played with the contrast, tint, black levels, etc. to try to make this phantom image stand out more. You should be able to clearly see it in the picture below.
And in the larger view below, you can see it has the same size as the current baseball diamond.
I took a close look at the field from ground level and could see nothing indicating that there was ever a baseball field there. The science building is close to the infield, so I thought that maybe this field had been abandoned shortly after the Science Building was built. However, I talked to someone whose connection to SJC is considerably longer than mine, and he told me that it was still the ball field in 1952 but no longer the ball field in 1960, when it had been replaced by the current field.

The current ball field is named after Gil Hodges, who played on this old field in the early 1940s. My source said that he was able to hit a ball over the trees into the reflecting pond. If he was able to do that, he certainly was able to hit the science building and maybe break a window or two.

2 comments:

Ed said...

If you walk out there and kick around a little it's very obvious. The platform for the flag pole still exists (or did several years ago).

Anonymous said...

Neat!