Fleming Field is a

baseball Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each, taking turns batting and fielding. The game occurs over the course of several plays, with each play generally beginning when a player on the fielding t ...

stadium in

Yonkers, New York Yonkers () is a city in Westchester County, New York, United States. Developed along the Hudson River, it is the third most populous city in the state of New York, after New York City and Buffalo. The population of Yonkers was 211,569 as en ...

, and was briefly home of the independent league Yonkers Hoot Owls in 1995. The ballpark was constructed and mainly suited for high school and amateur baseball; it was home of the semi-pro Yonkers Chippewas in the 1950s and 60s. The King and His Court, the four-man barnstorming softball team, also played there in the 1960s. However, in 1995 it would host minor league baseball for the first time. The newly formed Independent

Northeast League The Northeast League was a professional independent baseball league that operated in the Northeastern United States from 1995 until 1998 and from 2003 until 2004. Between 1999 and 2002, the league was part of the Northern League after the two leag ...

(now known as the Can-Am League) consisted of six teams, all from New York State, and was looking to have a presence near

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

. Literary agent Adele Leone was approached by the league after expressing an interest in owning a team and shortly thereafter the Hoot Owls were formed. The park was not really suited for such a high level of baseball; it had concrete slab seating, no permanent concessions, no permanent restrooms, no dugouts and at the time, no permanent lighting. Leone would spend thousands of dollars of her own money to install permanent lights for the field. The most noticeable defect in terms of a professional team playing on the field was that Fleming Field did not (and does not) have infield grass, making the Hoot Owls one of the very few teams in American professional baseball history to play their home games on an all-dirt infield. (All-dirt fields are common elsewhere, such as in Asia.) After a terrible 1995 season, marred by a 12–52 record and attendance of less than 200 fans per game, Leone had no choice but to fold the team. Since then, Fleming Field has gone back to its roots and continues to host amateur games.

External links

Review of the Stadium
Sports in Yonkers, New York Baseball venues in New York (state) Buildings and structures in Yonkers, New York High school baseball venues in the United States Sports venues in Westchester County, New York {{NewYork-baseball-venue-stub