[asrivkin]

Hi all,

Today's park is Kansas City's Association Park, home of the Kansas City Cowboys of 1886-1888. The Cowboys were in three different leagues in the three years they were here, with major-league seasons in the NL (1886) and American Association (1888) sandwiching a minor-league season in 1887.

I took what info I could from SABR's articles on KC ballpark sites and baseball in KC in the 1880s specifically, and interested folks can check out other articles on KC baseball history in a SABR collection.

Google Drive link to Kansas City Association Park

Not a whole lot of info out there to work from, but I think this has the flavor of the place for our purposes. There was general agreement that this was a terrible ballpark, and descriptions talked about it being about 10-15 feet below the surrounding grid (some sources saying it was a former pond) with dirt surrounding the pit from roadwork. There also was apparently no grass on the field. There is one sketch from the period, which I took as suggestive rather than gospel. The background is taken from near the real site of the park.

This was _not_ the KC ballpark I intended to work on, I may tackle that one (Exposition Park) next, but first I'll do a summary post with where I think we are on this.