The ivy doesn’t know Babe Ruth once stood here. It just keeps growing, crawling up the old wall at Sims-Galle Field, wrapping around concrete and surrounding a baseball diamond that has been here through wars, generations and more than a century of change in Mobile.
There are no cornfields beyond the outfield fence. No Hollywood farmhouse in the distance. No mysterious voice whispering, If you build it, he will come. Instead, there are live oaks, old brick buildings, a college campus founded before the Civil War and a baseball field sitting quietly in the middle of it all.
On most days, you could drive through Spring Hill College without realizing what you’re passing. Sims-Galle Field doesn’t announce itself like one of baseball’s cathedrals. There isn’t a giant entrance telling you Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig once took batting practice here. Nothing screams that Hank Aaron or Satchel Paige once played on this ground .
You have to go looking for those stories, and maybe that’s what makes this place so special.
Last night, baseball turned its attention toward Dyersville, Iowa, where the Phillies and Twins played beside the cornfields made famous by Field of Dreams. Millions watched the game on Netflix, built around the idea that baseball’s past never really disappears.
But about two hours south of Hattiesburg, there is another field where that idea doesn’t require a movie script.
Take Highway 98 toward Mobile, turn onto the campus of Spring Hill College and eventually you’ll find a little ballpark known for generations simply as The Pit. Stand there long enough and start digging into its history, and the names like Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Hank Aaron, Satchel Paige, Billy Williams come up.
And before almost all of those stories, baseball was already being played around here as the United States descended into the Civil War.
At Dyersville, Hollywood created a place where baseball’s ghosts could come back to life.
In Mobile, they never really left.
Dyersville Has Corn. Mobile Has Ivy.
The two places don’t really look alike, and that’s why I like the comparison. Dyersville is wide open. The Iowa sky stretches above a diamond surrounded by cornfields. There’s something almost simple about it. Grass, dirt, corn and baseball. It looks like somebody carved just enough space out of the corn field for nine guys to play a game.
Sims-Galle feels different. Instead of opening into the landscape, the field feels like it has been swallowed by history. It sits down inside the Spring Hill campus, which helps explain why generations have called it The Pit. Historic campus buildings rise around it. Trees peek over the walls. Old architecture becomes part of the backdrop.
The ivy crawls across the old concrete walls surrounding portions of field, and depending on the season, it can make the place look like Wrigley Field got lost somewhere along the Gulf Coast. But it doesn’t feel manufactured. Nobody built a retro ballpark and planted ivy because they wanted fans to feel nostalgic. This place actually got old.
That’s the difference.
The dimensions aren’t symmetrical, measuring roughly 323 feet down the left-field line, 403 to center and 312 to right. The light towers sit in foul territory and are actually in play. Those lights didn’t arrive until 2002, meaning generations of Spring Hill baseball were played entirely beneath the Mobile sun. The visiting bullpen sits outside the playing field beneath a massive live oak.
There’s no giant video board demanding your attention. No upper deck. No luxury suites overlooking home plate. You can look across the diamond and still see the old Spring Hill campus surrounding it.
Baseball Before Baseball Looked Like Baseball
Spring Hill officially traces intercollegiate baseball on the site to 1889, giving Sims-Galle its distinction as the oldest continuously used college baseball field in the country. That’s impressive enough until you realize baseball at Spring Hill goes back even farther.
The game was being played on the campus around 1860.
Abraham Lincoln had not yet taken office. There was no World Series, American League or Yankees. Fenway Park and Wrigley Field were more than half a century away. The idea of a multimillion-dollar professional baseball player would have sounded ridiculous.
Yet somebody was already playing baseball at Spring Hill College.
When the Civil War broke out. Mobile became one of the Confederacy’s most important cities, the war eventually reached the area, and Union troops occupied the Spring Hill campus near the end of the conflict. There are even stories of Civil War-era cannonballs being dug up out of the outfield grass..
Eventually the country reunited. Professional baseball developed. The World Series arrived. The dead-ball era came and went. Babe Ruth changed the sport. Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier. Baseball expanded west. Free agency arrived. Stadiums came down and new ones went up.
Spring Hill kept playing baseball.
That’s what is difficult to comprehend when you stand there. Sports venues aren’t supposed to last this long anymore. We call stadiums “old” after 30 years and start talking about replacing them after 40.
Sims-Galle isn’t a recreation of an old baseball field.
It is an old baseball field.
And the beautiful game in its purest form, never left.
The Road From Spring Hill to Havana
Of all the stories connected to Spring Hill, the Cuban baseball connection might be the one that deserves more attention than any other.
During the 1860s, Cuban brothers Nemesio and Ernesto Guilló attended Spring Hill College. Along with fellow Cuban student Enrique Porto, they encountered the American game of baseball while studying in Mobile. Eventually the brothers returned to Cuba, but they didn’t leave baseball behind.
They took it home.
Nemesio brought baseball equipment back to the island and became one of the early pioneers of Cuban baseball. What followed eventually became one of the greatest baseball cultures in the world. Cuba developed its own clubs, leagues, traditions and legends. Generations later, Cuban baseball players would become some of the most recognizable names in the sport.
It’s remarkable to stand at Spring Hill and think about how far that story traveled. A couple of Cuban students arrive at a small college in Mobile, discover a game and carry it across the Gulf. The game catches on. More people play. Clubs form. Decades pass. Baseball becomes embedded in Cuban culture.
And one of the earliest roads in that story leads back here. Dyersville gave baseball one of its greatest fictional stories. Spring Hill helped bring baseball to another country.
When Major League Baseball Came to The Pit
There was a time when Major League Baseball teams didn’t exist behind the walls of billion-dollar stadiums. They traveled. They barnstormed. They played exhibitions in cities and towns that would never host a major league franchise.
Sometimes they even played college teams.
In 1910, the Chicago Cubs came to Spring Hill and played the Badgers at The Pit. This wasn’t some forgettable Cubs team passing through Mobile, either. Chicago was one of baseball’s powers and would win 104 games and the National League pennant that season. Spring Hill actually kept it respectable, losing 4-1 in a rain-shortened exhibition.
Three years later, the Cincinnati Reds came through and played Spring Hill, winning 11-3.
It’s almost impossible to imagine that happening today. Imagine the Cubs pulling their team buses onto the Spring Hill campus, walking down to this little ivy-covered field and playing the Badgers on a random afternoon. It would probably be one of the biggest sporting events in Mobile that year.
Back then, it was simply part of baseball’s wandering culture.
The Day Babe Ruth Showed Up
Then came 1924.
By then, Babe Ruth wasn’t simply a baseball player. He was becoming one of America’s first true sports celebrities. He had transformed the home run from something unusual into the centerpiece of the sport and had already become larger than life.
And somehow, his travels brought him to Spring Hill College. Ruth and members of the New York Yankees visited Spring Hill and took batting practice with the Badgers.
I always wonder what that afternoon sounded like. No walk-up music. No giant scoreboard. Probably just students gathered around a little college baseball field and the unmistakable crack of Ruth’s wooden bat echoing across campus.
Where did the balls land? Did one clear a wall and disappear somewhere onto campus? Did students watch from one of the surrounding buildings? Was there some kid standing along the field who spent the next 60 years telling everyone about the day he watched Babe Ruth hit baseballs at Spring Hill?
A City That Shouldn’t Have This Many Hall of Famers
Babe Ruth was only visiting Mobile. The players who actually came out of the city make its baseball history even harder to believe.
Hank Aaron. Satchel Paige. Willie McCovey. Billy Williams. Ozzie Smith.
Five Baseball Hall of Famers from one Gulf Coast city. Plenty of states would be proud of that list. Mobile produced it from one city.
And Sims-Galle became part of that larger baseball world. Spring Hill’s history includes Satchel Paige among the stars who appeared on the field, while other ballpark histories connect Hank Aaron and Billy Williams to games at The Pit.
That’s where standing at the field becomes different from reading a plaque.
Look toward home plate and think of the different generations of baseball history that crossed paths on the same little piece of ground.
The Best Part is it is Still a Baseball Field.
Maybe my favorite thing about Sims-Galle isn’t Babe Ruth, the Cubs, Cuban baseball or even its age.
It’s that Spring Hill still plays here.
College players still take batting practice on the same ground. Pitchers warm up beneath the old trees. Someone still drags the infield. Parents still show up to watch their kids. Foul balls still leave the yard. Spring Hill players still walk to the plate trying to drive in a runner from second.
The history is everywhere, but nobody has put it behind glass. Sometimes we preserve a historic sports venue so much that it stops being the thing that made it historic in the first place.
Sims-Galle Field never stopped being a ballpark.
It’s old. It’s quirky. It’s imperfect.
And they’re still playing baseball, over 166 years later.
The Two-Hour Road Trip From Hattiesburg
That’s what makes Sims-Galle exactly the kind of sports road trip I love from Hattiesburg. You don’t need a flight, a week off work or a $300 ticket. You can leave in the morning, point the car south toward the Gulf Coast and be standing beside one of the oldest pieces of baseball ground in America a couple of hours later.
Once you reach Spring Hill, don’t just find the field, snap a picture and leave. Drive around the campus first. The live oaks and historic buildings immediately make the place feel different from a typical college campus. Then find The Pit and walk around it.
Find the ivy-covered wall.. Look at the old buildings beyond the diamond. Find the live oak near the visiting bullpen. Notice those strange light towers sitting in foul territory. Then find somewhere to stop for a minute.
Picture 1910 and the Chicago Cubs walking onto the field. Picture the Reds arriving three years later. Picture Babe Ruth taking his swings. Picture Satchel Paige. Picture Hank Aaron playing with his brothers.
Then look back onto the diamond and realize some college kid is still standing in the batter’s box trying to hit a baseball over the same ground.
That’s the road trip.
You aren’t checking another stadium off a list.
You’re walking through the layers of baseball history.
The Gulf Coast’s Field of Dreams
Last night, millions of baseball fans looked towards Iowa. They’ll saw the corn, the uniforms and one of the most recognizable baseball settings in America. They’ll remember Kevin Costner playing catch with his dad. They’ll remember Shoeless Joe walking out of the corn. And they’ll be reminded why Field of Dreams has stuck with baseball fans for decades.
The movie was never really about a baseball diamond. It was about memory. It was about people who aren’t here anymore and the places that somehow keep them close. Baseball just happened to provide the bridge between the two.
That’s why Sims-Galle reminds me so much of Dyersville. The Iowa version was created to make us feel like baseball’s past is still around if we know where to look. Spring Hill doesn’t have to create that feeling.
The evidence is all around you.
It’s in the old campus buildings overlooking the field. It’s underneath the live oaks. It’s in the stories brought back across the Gulf to Cuba. It’s along the outfield wall. The world around it has changed beyond recognition. The Civil War ended. Generations came and went. Major League Baseball grew into a multibillion-dollar business. Ballparks were built, demolished and replaced.
The ivy kept growing.
And down in The Pit, somebody kept throwing a baseball.
Dyersville has the corn.
Mobile has the ivy.
And if baseball really does have ghosts, I can’t think of many places on the Gulf Coast where you’d have a better chance of finding them.
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