Culture

Why one of baseball's unique skills, switch hitting, is trending toward extinction

Published

3 hours ago

August 8, 2024

Why one of baseball's unique skills, switch hitting, is trending toward extinction

CLEVELAND — Francisco Lindor is a natural right-handed batter who desperately wanted to switch hit as a child to be more like his heroes. His brother and his cousin were both switch hitters, as was his favorite player, Hall of Fame second baseman Roberto Alomar.

Lindor pleaded with his father, Miguel, to bat left-handed. Miguel fought against it for years because Lindor was such a good hitter from the right side. Why intentionally make yourself worse by doing something so unnatural? It didn’t make sense.

“That was the way my dad forced me to practice,” Lindor said. “If I did everything right, then I could hit from the left side.”

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Now Lindor is part of a dwindling subset of players. Switch hitters are a dying breed in the major leagues, particularly among Americans.

Of the roughly 550 batters to log a plate appearance through the end of June, only 58 were switch hitters, according to Stathead. It continues a trend from last season, when baseball’s switch hitters plummeted to their lowest numbers in 50 years.

Only 26 of those are American-born players, one more than last year, which saw the lowest number among Americans in nearly 60 years.

While Latin players are often encouraged to switch hit as children, it has almost become taboo among youth in America. Seattle Mariners manager Scott Servais spent 11 years as a right-handed catcher in the majors. He believes being a switch hitter is the biggest advantage in all of sports.

“Youth baseball in our country has changed dramatically over the last 15 years,” Servais said. “The focus ultimately comes down to college scholarships or getting into pro ball, and the lack of patience in letting those things develop in young players. So they get on Select teams and they’re traveling all over the country and Mom and Dad are paying a lot of money to put you in front of all of the top coaches. Why would we ever put you in a situation where you might fail? And you’re going to fail. Switch hitting is really hard. It’s really hard when you’re young. And they’re afraid of failure.”

Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor, who had to convince his dad to let him switch hit, is part of a shrinking number of major leaguers who can hit from both sides. (Charles LeClaire / USA Today)

Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh is unsure which side of the plate is his natural side. Raleigh, like Baltimore’s Adley Rutschman, is a triple world score combination of a switch-hitting catcher with power. He has always been right-hand dominant in everyday activities, but from his earliest memories in baseball, the slugging catcher could swing the bat from both sides of the plate because his father made him do it that way.

“Every day I thank the Lord my dad made me a switch hitter,” Raleigh said. “Because I see some of this nasty stuff that’s being thrown up there.”

The number of switch hitters in baseball has been declining for the last decade and finally bottomed out last year, when only 63 of more than 650 players logged at-bats from both sides of the plate. That’s down from an all-time high of 111 switch hitters in 1998. American-born switch hitters peaked at 78 in 1987, according to Stathead.

Carlos Beltrán was a rookie with the Kansas City Royals during baseball’s switch-hitting peak. He played 20 years and hit 438 home runs as one of the best switch hitters of his era. He began toying with the idea after playing winter ball in Puerto Rico with Bernie Williams, who also switch hit. Beltrán struggled so much staying back on offspeed pitches and breaking balls that he wanted to give up and go back to hitting solely right-handed. Kevin Long, now the Phillies hitting coach, was with Beltrán in the minors and encouraged him to stick with it.

“Thank God for Kevin Long,” Beltrán said. “He said, ‘We are so close. Let’s stay with it. Keep trying.’ I was grateful that I had a coach that believed that what I was doing was the right thing. And he didn’t let me really go back to the right side. I don’t know what my career would have been if I only would have been a right-handed hitter.”

Carlos Beltran credits Kevin Long for encouraging him to stick with it in the minors when he was struggling to hit left-handed. (Bob Levey / Getty Images)

Baseball has changed drastically since Beltrán played. The game is more specialized, even at the youth levels, as hitters chase data and cutting-edge metrics. The changes make some of the past greats bristle.

“This generation has lost the ability to hit,” said former Reds star Eric Davis, now a special assistant and roving instructor for the club. “You have a lot of guys today who are caught up in exit velocity and launch angle and they’re not being taught how to hit. They’re not good hitters. So the game is not going to bless them unless you develop a skill to play the game for a long time. And switch hitting for some guys is an avenue to play the game for a long time.”

Davis, who hit right-handed during his 17 seasons in the majors, switch hit early in his career but said he gave it up as a minor leaguer because his coaches told him he didn’t struggle to hit sliders. The majority of switch hitters are natural-born righties learning to hit left-handed. The biggest benefit is to hit sliders from right-handed pitchers that break toward the left-handed batter, rather than trying to hit pitches tailing away as a right-hander.

In youth leagues, however, pitchers don’t throw breaking pitches until they’re teenagers, and most don’t develop great movement until closer to high school. It leaves kids struggling to hit from a side of the plate where they aren’t comfortable and aren’t having success. And they’re doing it to hit breaking pitches that won’t actually start breaking drastically until years later.

There is no magic age to begin switch hitting, but various hitters and coaches polled on the subject believe the right age to start ranges from 9 or 10 years old up to around 13. Beltran, who started switch hitting in the minor leagues, is the rare exception. For teenagers who wait until they reach high school, it’s often already too late.

“If you have problems with sliders and you want the ball coming toward you rather than going away from you, work on being a switch hitter,” said Cleveland Guardians veteran coach Sandy Alomar Jr., who played 20 years in the majors as a catcher. Alomar came up as a switch hitter like his brother, Roberto. His father made both boys switch hit at a young age. Sandy dropped hitting left-handed his first year in the minors, while Roberto compiled 2,724 hits, 210 home runs and 12 consecutive All-Star appearances as one of the greatest switch hitters of all time. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2011.

Rutschman, Lindor and Cleveland’s José Ramírez are among the game’s best switch hitters today. Ramírez made his sixth All-Star team this year and Rutschman made his second. Lindor did not make the team, but his season was good enough to justify another All-Star bid.

Guardians third baseman José Ramírez, who competed in this year’s Home Run Derby, is among baseball’s best current switch hitters. (Jerome Miron / USA Today)

Reds third baseman Jeimer Candelario is one of the few American-born switch hitters, but he actually skews the numbers a bit. Candelario counts on the U.S. side because he was born in New York City, but his father moved the family to the Dominican Republic when he was 5 to open a baseball academy. Candelario worked on a plan developed by his father to hit from both sides of the plate every day as a child.

Latino players comprised about 30 percent of major-league rosters last year. They made up more than 60 percent of all switch hitters.

“It’s a lot of work. It’s not easy,” Candelario said. “Not every day is going to be perfect, but it’s the consistent work every single day. If you don’t fall in love with it, you’re not going to have success. You have to love it.”

Not everyone believes in the concept. Mets hitting coach Eric Chavez, who batted .268 with 260 home runs over 17 years as a left-handed hitting third baseman, marvels at what Lindor can do, but he doesn’t encourage others to try it.

“You’re two different people, two different swings,” he said. “Because the body moves differently. You’re right-hand dominant, now you come to the left side and your right hand is on the bottom (of the bat). You’re training two different swings.

“You can have a right-handed at-bat and feel really good. In that same game, you can go lefty and think, ‘Oh crap, where’s my swing?’”

Alex Miklos played Division I baseball at Kent State University, where he was a three-year captain and led the nation in triples in 2014. He is now co-owner of BioSport Athletics, a baseball and softball facility in suburban Cleveland that opened two years ago and has trained between 900 and 1,000 athletes ranging in age from 7 up through the professional ranks. Miklos estimates that roughly half of the players who have trained at BioSport are position players. Out of those 450-500, he said about 10 have asked about switch hitting and only three or four have worked on it consistently.

“There’s no such thing as being too early. The earlier the better,” Miklos said. “But there’s definitely too late. It’s something you have to commit to. By the time you’re 13 or 14 years old, you’ve established patterns. It’s really tough to develop that ability from the other side of the plate.”

Youth sports have become so competitive in the U.S. that kids feel like every at-bat matters, even on the club level or travel leagues, Miklos said. It can be difficult for kids — and coaches — to “give away” at-bats in games to work on player development, such as a right-handed hitter learning to bat left-handed.

Whether the number of major-league switch hitters begins to increase again, particularly in the United States, will depend on how it is handled in the youth leagues going forward. The data isn’t encouraging.

Out of about 140 of baseball’s best prospects listed on FanGraphs’ preseason list, ranging from Class AAA down to Rookie ball, 34 were switch hitters who had yet to debut.

Eight were Americans.

GO DEEPER

Missing Bats, Part 1: How an obsession with strikeouts upended the balance of baseball

(Photo of Francisco Lindor: Jamie Sabau / Getty Images)

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Culture

NBC wants Snoop Dogg to return for future Olympics

Published

10 hours ago

August 7, 2024

Press Room

NBC wants Snoop Dogg to return for future Olympics

Follow live coverage of Day 12 of the 2024 Paris Olympics, with 21 gold medals on offer

Bow-wow-wow, yippie-yo, yippie-yay, Snoop Dogg may continue on NBC’s Olympics coverage in a big way.

Asked by The Athletic this week if NBC Universal plans to ask Snoop to return for on-air work at the 2026 Milano-Cortina Games and Olympics beyond, two key members of NBC Universal’s leadership group answered in the affirmative.

“Snoop has done everything and beyond what we ever expected him to do here in the Paris Games,” NBC Sports president Rick Cordella said. “He has been enthusiastic. He has been optimistic. I think we’d be really thrilled to have Snoop back in any capacity he would want to come back in.”

Cordella’s boss, Mark Lazarus, the chairman of NBCUniversal Media Group, when asked if the company would ask the performer to return to the Olympic family, quickly responded, “Yes.”

Snoop Dogg has been ubiquitous on NBC’s Olympic coverage and at various Paris venues. He has become such a part of the Olympics that BBC News ran a headline tagging him as” America’s cheerleader at the Olympics.” The 52-year-old had a small role at the Tokyo Games in 2021 as part of a recap commentary show on Peacock alongside comedian Kevin Hart but has exploded in Paris where he has put himself in all sorts of situations with athletes and sports as a roving correspondent. It’s resonated.

Watching the #ParisOlympics steeplechase got us thinking about Snoop Dogg’s unforgettable commentary. 😂
📺 NBC & Peacock pic.twitter.com/GawPPJXoDO
— NBC Sports (@NBCSports) August 5, 2024

“This all dates back to Tokyo in 2021. Kevin Hart and Snoop Dogg were co-hosts of a comedy highlight show on Peacock called ‘Olympic Highlights,’ and there were several clips that went viral, but also what stood out to me was Snoop’s passion for the Olympics, and also in his own unique way his reverence for the athletes and their stories,” said Molly Solomon, the executive producer and president of NBC Olympics production and the point person who championed Snoop’s increased on-air visibility.

“Over the last year and a half, we got together with Snoop and really brainstormed what this role could be. I called him an Ambassador of Happiness. If you watch his content, everybody wants to meet Snoop, take a selfie with Snoop and just be around Snoop. We’ve been pleasantly surprised by his popularity, but you never ever underestimate Snoop Dogg. He’s this wonderful mix of swagger and positivity and just the charisma and vibes are so positive. He’s got this curiosity about the Olympics that is undeniable.”

Said Snoop to The Associated Press this week: “This opportunity was nothing but a chance for me to show the world what it’s supposed to look like when you put the right person in the right environment.”

#FollowTheDogg Snoop n Phelps!! Tune in tonite 😁😆🔥💪🏿 🏊🏽‍♂️ 8/7c on @nbc & @peacock pic.twitter.com/6EuMHgVjBR
— Snoop Dogg (@SnoopDogg) July 30, 2024

The performer has been part of an Olympics that has been wildly successful for NBC Universal so far. Through the first full 11 days of the Games, NBCUniversal said it had a total audience delivery average of 32.6 million viewers across the combined live Paris prime time (2-5 p.m. ET) and U.S. prime time (8-11 p.m. ET/PT).

“We judge success here first and foremost by having a product that is appealing to audiences in that they come to in large numbers — and that is clearly happening in the Olympics,” Lazarus said. “The last few haven’t been as large as we had thought they would be. These Games are exceeding all of our expectations.”

Required reading

(Photo: Tom Weller / VOIGT / GettyImages)

Culture

F1 midseason driver rankings: Young drivers ascend while veterans fight back

Published

17 hours ago

August 7, 2024

Press Room

F1 midseason driver rankings: Young drivers ascend while veterans fight back

After visiting four continents, covering 14 races, and seeing seven different drivers win, the paddock enjoys a well-deserved rest during the summer shutdown. This mandatory 14-day break, during which teams are prohibited from making any changes to the car’s performance, is a crucial period for reflection and planning. It’s a time when teams can’t do any work on the car’s performance, but it’s hard to imagine some won’t reflect on their performance ahead of the final 10 races.

The expectation heading into 2024 was that Max Verstappen would continue to dominate. Instead, the Ferrari, McLaren, and Mercedes drivers have won races this year (Lewis Hamilton is the only two-time 2024 race winner out of those six competitors). McLaren is closing the gap to Red Bull thanks to the consistency of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, and the fight at the top of the grid is tight.

There have been plenty of surprises up and down the grid compared to this time last season. Here are our top 10 drivers from the first 14 races of the season. As always, let us know your thoughts in the comment section at the bottom.

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It hasn’t quite been the dominant Max Verstappen of 2022 or 2023 when F1 Sundays became routine: lights out, wait 90 minutes, and hear the Dutch national anthem. Yet he has remained at the very top of his game, making up for Red Bull’s slip in performance compared to its rivals.

The early phase of the season followed the well-worn script, as Verstappen won at a canter at Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Japan and China. But since the start of F1’s European season, he’s been forced to dig deep and produce some terrific displays to keep winning. Winning at Imola and Barcelona despite the threat of Lando Norris in the McLaren required Verstappen to be at his very best; he didn’t miss a beat. Even a race like Spa, where he could only finish fourth, took a mighty effort from 11th on the grid.

It hasn’t been a spotless season so far by any means. Verstappen’s clash with Norris in Austria and his move on Lewis Hamilton in Hungary showed that his aggressive edge, not required in the past two years, is still there—not always to his benefit.

Despite Red Bull’s recent performance dip and McLaren’s emergence, Verstappen has extended his points lead in five of the last six races. He may no longer have the outright quickest car, but Verstappen remains remarkably hard to beat.

Photo:

(GIUSEPPE CACACE/AFP via Getty Images)

Five seasons, more than 100 grands prix, nearly 1,900 days. Lando Norris waited a long time for his first F1 win since joining the grid in 2019, finally coming at the Miami GP this year.

Since that moment, the McLaren driver has taken the battle to Verstappen. The talent is evident, and the car is strong. He should have more than one win to his name this year. There’s been a few close calls, like at the Spanish GP when he felt “I should have won. I f—d the start.” More recently, he also dropped at the start of the Belgian GP after starting fourth, losing multiple spots after misjudging the exit of Turn 1.

“I’ve given away a lot of points over the last three or four races just because of stupid stuff—mistakes and bad starts,” he said after the race. “I don’t know why. It’s just silly things, it’s not even difficult stuff. It’s just Turn 1, trying to stay out of trouble, trying to make sure there’s a gap and not get hit.”

Norris can fight for wins, but small mistakes and iffy starts have proved costly, points-wise. Only 78 points separate the McLaren driver and Verstappen. Because the Dutchman operates at a high level, these little details matter.

Photo:

(Qian Jun/Xinhua via Getty Images)

Watching Piastri this year, you’d be astonished to learn this is only his second season on the F1 grid. The Australian takes everything thrown at him gracefully and calmly, even as McLaren’s surge puts him amid a constructors’ title fight going into the remainder of the season.

Piastri hasn’t quite been on Norris’s level this season, trailing 11-3 in their qualifying head-to-head, but the gap is typically marginal. He was the only driver capable of challenging Charles Leclerc through the Monaco weekend, ending up P2, and finally got the victory he deserved in Hungary despite McLaren’s best efforts to make a mess of the situation.

McLaren’s belief that it has the best driver lineup in F1 has been justified so far this year. We always knew how good Norris was, but Piastri’s ability to duke it out at the front was something we had yet to see in F1. Now, it’s abundantly clear just how good he is. Piastri’s mistakes are rare, and if he can find that extra tenth, then it may be a more even split between him and Norris through the closing 10 races.

Photo:

(ATTILA KISBENEDEK/AFP via Getty Images)

In true Charles Leclerc fashion, the Monegasque’s season has been one of dizzying highs and gutting lows, rarely leveling out into any sustained, consistent form. Not that it’s entirely his fault.

The emotional home victory in Monaco, delivered through the tears in his eyes in the closing laps as he achieved the childhood dream he shared with his father, looks set to kickstart Leclerc’s season. Ferrari seemed to be back in contention at the front, building on a steady start to the year.

However, the upgrades on the SF-24 car have yet to work as anticipated. Even if the team can see more performance in the car, it is a) not enough relative to Mercedes, McLaren or Red Bull and b) hard to harness, particularly with a return to the bouncing for the first time in years.

Leclerc admitted after Silverstone that the recent races had been “worse than a nightmare,” but he has continued to perform. His lap at Spa was a significant achievement. He took pole after Verstappen’s penalty before finishing third in what is currently the fourth-fastest car. Leclerc remains Ferrari’s best asset, even if luck has not been with him recently.

Photo:

(Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)

This is George Russell’s strongest season, with fewer mistakes than in 2023.

Once again, the year didn’t start smoothly for Mercedes, which seemed to still struggle with its car concept. However, it brought an upgrade to Monaco that came alive at the following race in Canada, where George Russell put the W15 on pole position.

But after leading for 20 laps and holding an advantage, the Briton lost it on the straight when Norris breezed past and to Verstappen moments later when Russell misjudged the final chicane. Later in the race, as the track was drying following some rain, Russell was hunting down the lead again. Still, he went wide at Turn 8, allowing Norris to slip past him again for second.

“For me, it was just one too many mistakes at key moments that cost us a shot of fighting with these two towards the end of the race,” Russell said after securing his first 2024 podium finish. Mistakes do happen, but drivers need to be able to seize a moment when the opportunity presents itself. Russell had the chance to do so two races later at Austria. When Verstappen and Norris tangled, the Mercedes driver zipped past into the lead and held off Piastri, giving Mercedes its first win since the 2022 season.

Even with a few mistakes this season, Russell has stayed ahead of his teammate, outqualifying and finishing ahead of Lewis Hamilton in most races. But he has endured heartbreaking moments, like a DNF at Silverstone due to a suspected water system issue and disqualification after winning the Belgian GP due to an underweight car.

Photo:

(Mark Thompson/Getty Images)

Carlos Sainz’s season has been an absolute roller coaster.

It started before Bahrain when news broke that Hamilton would join the Prancing Horse in 2025, throwing Sainz’s F1 future into question. This question followed him throughout the first half of the season, and the speculation ran rampant. It wasn’t until after Spa that he announced he’d join Williams next season. But on top of the rumor mill, the Spaniard missed a race after being sidelined with appendicitis in Saudi Arabia, with Ollie Bearman competing in his place.

In Spa, Sainz admitted that “it hasn’t been easy having to deal with, first of all, having to miss a race, but mainly with all the discussions about my future going on in the background.” But he still has shown up and performed decently well, considering the circumstances. Sixteen days after surgery, Sainz won the Australian GP, capitalizing on the moment after Verstappen retired early.

Ferrari had a competitive car early in the season, but Sainz’s results began falling away as others progressed more than the Italian crew. But in the teammate battle, Leclerc outqualified Sainz, 8-5, and finished ahead of the Spaniard, 7-5, in races they’ve been classified.

Photo:

(Peter Fox/Getty Images)

Seventh may seem harsh. After all, Hamilton has won two of the last three races and ended a two-and-a-half-year-old win drought. But this hasn’t been his finest season.

Russell has remained the quicker of the two Mercedes drivers, leading their qualifying head-to-head 10-4. He’s also 7-4 up on Hamilton in races, and both have been classified.

Hamilton has been open about his struggles, even as the Mercedes car has improved, admitting that it feels like it is on more of a knife-edge compared to what Russell has reported. This is partly because Hamilton’s driving style hasn’t quite gelled with this generation of cars, leading to more time to adjust and adapt. As Hamilton put it at Spa, “I just keep trying to drive the way I want to drive, but then I realize it doesn’t always work.”

But Silverstone was an emphatic reminder of Hamilton’s enduring quality and class. He made the most of the tricky conditions to win on merit, capitalizing on Red Bull’s struggles and McLaren’s strategy miscue. He will want to harness more of those displays through the second half to sign off from his time at Mercedes on a high.

Photo:

(Rudy Carezzevoli/Getty Images)

Nico Hülkenberg made the most of his full-time return in 2023 to show he’d lost none of his edge in his years away from F1. But this season has made it unthinkable that he was ever without a seat.

Haas never expected to be a regular points-scorer this year, owing to the late development of its car and the off-season changes. But with a car that’s actually raceable, not chewing through its tires, Hülkenberg has flourished, going under the radar as one of this year’s most impressive performers.

Hülkenberg has scored 22 of Haas’s 27 points, including two sixth-place finishes. He’s also finished 11th on five occasions and, remarkably, reached Q3 more times than he’s gone out in either Q2 or Q1, fighting higher up the grid than he or Haas should be. See Hülkenberg’s last-lap pass on Sergio Pérez (who did have damage) in Austria to grab P6.

Sauber and Audi may have missed out on Carlos Sainz, their top target for next year, but the first half of this season shows that by already signing Hülkenberg, they’ll have a quality driver ready for the start of the factory program in 2026.

Photo:

(BENJAMIN CREMEL/AFP via Getty Images)

Yuki Tsunoda enters the summer break with a contract for next year (announced in June) and outperforming his RB teammate, veteran Daniel Ricciardo.

He started the season strong, securing the team’s first points in Australia with an eighth-place finish, which was later upgraded to seventh after Fernando Alonso’s penalty. Those six points pushed RB ahead of Haas for sixth in the constructor standings. RB remains ahead of Haas during the summer break, partly thanks to Tsunoda scoring 22 out of the team’s 34 points.

Tsunoda has advanced to Q3 eight times this season and secured seven-point finishes, the highest being P7 at Melbourne and Miami. Between the Australian GP and Monaco at the end of May, Tsunoda finished in the top 10 in five of those six races. He is one of the stronger drivers out of the midfield this year but has made mistakes. Take the Canadian GP, for example. He was in points contention before he locked up and spun, eventually ending the race P14.

Photo:

(Rudy Carezzevoli/Getty Images)

Williams’ 2024 is very different from last season, and yet Alex Albon still has managed to squeeze four Q3 appearances and two top 10 finishes, amounting to four points, out of the FW45. This trend continues from 2023, when Albon continued to put together high-level performances and extract the maximum out of the car. He’s out-qualified teammate Logan Sargeant, 14-0.

Some of his races have been affected by no fault of his own, like the wheel nut issue and penalty at Imola and Carlos Sainz spinning in Canada. During that latter race, Albon pulled off an impressive double overtake on Daniel Ricciardo and Esteban Ocon, and he was in the fight for points before the Ferrari driver spun and made contact with Albon.

One big moment, though, that’ll stand out from the first half of the year is what happened in Australia. The heavy crash in practice resulted in significant damage. Because Williams didn’t have a spare chassis at that race, it had to withdraw the car. And the team opted to give the remaining car to Albon, leaving Logan Sargeant on the sidelines.

Albon can extract the maximum from the car, even under pressure from higher-performing competitors. But what he needs to be a consistent top-10 contender and compete alongside the top teams is just that—that type of car.

Photo:

(BENJAMIN CREMEL/AFP via Getty Images)

Culture

Lost Grounds: Bradford Park Avenue – the forgotten England international venue

Published

24 hours ago

August 7, 2024

Press Room

Lost Grounds: Bradford Park Avenue – the forgotten England international venue

Once an integral part of the towns and cities they called home, dozens of the nation’s Football League grounds have disappeared over the past 30 or so years. All took with them a wealth of memories for generations of supporters.

But what happened next? The Athletic has travelled the country to find out, taking in an array of housing estates, retail parks and even the odd hospital along the way.

Kicking off our four-part series, running each Tuesday in August, is perhaps the most poignant of the lot, Bradford Park Avenue. Home to a League club for 62 years and county cricket for more than a century, Park Avenue sits forgotten and forlorn, with one of its few visitors in the past decade being an archaeological dig…

Looking up at a row of turnstiles that once led to a football ground where England played an international match, it is as if time has stood still.

Painted high on the wall is ‘5/-’, indicating an admission price of five shillings in old money. Another couple of bricked-up entrances can be found around the corner, along with a giant rusting iron gate topped with spikes to deter anyone trying to get in for free.

A gents’ toilet block can also clearly be seen towards the back of a banking where supporters last stood more than 50 years ago, while a stroll inside reveals two massively overgrown terraces and a crumbling perimeter wall staring out over the bumpy remains of a pitch once graced by greats such as Stanley Matthews and Len Shackleton.

(Richard Sutcliffe/The Athletic)

Also buried amid the shrubbery that has been allowed to run wild are two floodlight pylon bases, plus a mountain of sporting memories. Welcome to Park Avenue, Bradford, the forgotten home of the former Football League club who went by the same name that is now the ghostly preserve of Mother Nature.

In an age when the demolition crews seem to move in almost the moment the gates close for the final time at great sporting cathedrals such as Highbury, Roker Park and White Hart Lane, this one-time sporting mecca really is a throwback.

Not only does the cricket ground where Yorkshire played for more than a century until 1996 remain, albeit in a semi-derelict state, but enough survives on the adjacent football side — the two sports shared a main stand, designed by leading architect Archibald Leitch — to leave supporters of a certain vintage misty-eyed.

Cricket at Bradford Park Avenue in the summer of 1949 (S&G/Getty Images)

Park Avenue was always regarded locally as superior to Valley Parade, the home of Bradford City — once of the Premier League and now of League Two. For a start, it had cover for 14,000 and a capacity of 37,000. The railway station and tram spur that could be found where the ornate Grand Mosque now stands just across Horton Park Avenue meant thousands of fans could also be ferried to and from the area in hardly any time at all.

Then there was the corner pavilion, nicknamed the ‘Dolls’ House’ by visitors. This charming two-storey building served a similar purpose to Fulham’s Craven Cottage, housing the football club’s dressing rooms and committee room with officials able to watch matches from an upstairs balcony.

This, though, could not save it as Bradford’s fortunes declined markedly as the Swinging Sixties morphed into the next decade.

Voted out of the League in 1970, the club stumbled on in the Northern Premier League for another four years before folding amid debts of £57,652 ($73,580 in today’s exchange rates). By then, the football ground had been sold to a property developer, with Avenue playing their final season across the city at Valley Parade.

Bradford Park Avenue, as seen in 1955 (George W. Hales/Getty Images)

A restrictive covenant that dictated the land could only be used for sport and recreation pursuits meant the football ground ended up being left to wither and die, even after the local council stepped in to purchase the site with grandiose plans to build a sports complex.

By 1980, Leitch’s ornate main stand had become so unsafe it had to be demolished. The news sparked a wave of nostalgia across the city, as hundreds of fans streamed to the old ground for one last look.

A pensioner was even helped onto the weed-infested Canterbury Avenue End and left, leaning unsteadily on a rusting crash barrier, to stare silently over what must have felt like an unkempt grave.

Tim Clapham, a supporter since 1963 and now the club historian, was among those making one last pilgrimage before the wrecking ball claimed not only the 4,000-seat main stand and its distinctive three gables, but also the Dolls House and the Horton Park End roof.

“Only the half-time scoreboard was left standing, with even the old social club sold to a local pig farmer,” Clapham says. “Such a sad time. So many turned up, hoping to take a keepsake, something to remember the ground by.

“Some wanted the ‘BFC’ letters etched on the middle gable of the stand, while others fancied the two coats of arms at either end. But, when they came down, these things were much bigger than they had looked. You’d have needed a truck to carry them away!”

As Bradford mourned for a second time the loss of a venue that had hosted not only an England versus Ireland international in 1909 but also what remains the fastest-ever Football League goal (four seconds, Jim Fryatt against Tranmere Rovers in 1964), cricket at least survived.

GO DEEPER

‘The noise will be deafening’ – An interview with the American who designed Everton’s new home

That was until 1996, when Yorkshire County Cricket Club opted to focus primarily on Headingley as their home with a small number of games every season also played in Scarborough. Others to lose their status as out-grounds were Middlesbrough, Harrogate and Hull, where part of the MKM Stadium now sits on the old Circle cricket ground as the dual home of Hull City and rugby league club Hull FC.

Park Avenue had become a shell of its former self long before that final County Championship match against Leicestershire in 1996.

(Richard Sutcliffe/The Athletic)

Just what anyone able to remember Park Avenue in its heyday would make of the old place in 2024 is anyone’s guess. The cricket square has, in recent years, been brought back to first-class standard, allowing Yorkshire’s second XI to return and play the odd match.

But the surroundings are in a sorry state. Where the grand-looking pavilion once stood until the late 1980s is now just a wasteland and where Fred Trueman, Ray Illingworth et al would plot the downfall of visiting batsmen now sits 10-foot bushes. Time is a formidable opponent when sports arenas are left to rot.

Just in front sit a few dilapidated rows of seats, a good number vandalised and all doing battle with the weeds gradually creeping through the concrete steps. It’s a similar story elsewhere, with fenced-off sections of crumbling terraces interspersed with banks of vegetation.

The only bright spot is a mural depicting England spin bowler — and local hero — Adil Rashid that was painted to mark the launch of the Hundred competition in 2021. Even that, though, is fading to add to the rundown feel of a ground once regarded as the jewel in Yorkshire’s cricketing crown.

(Richard Sutcliffe/The Athletic)

What remains of the old football ground is no less depressing, even allowing for how its abandoned state allowed an archaeological dig in 2015 that unearthed all manner of fascinating artefacts.

The haul, captured for posterity by the Breaking Ground art project, included boot studs, coins, marbles, goal hooks and even a nappy pin. The latter, it transpired, related to the elastic on goalkeeper Chick Farr’s shorts snapping during one match, forcing the trainer to perform an emergency repair. Farr never lived the episode down, regularly finding himself showered by pins when standing between the posts.

GO DEEPER

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Hopes of Bradford ever returning to their spiritual home ended when a cricket school (now a gym) was built on half of the old football pitch in 1988. A new Park Avenue club was formed in the same year and their home for almost three decades has been Horsfall Stadium, an athletics venue that sits a couple of miles away from this old ground.

(Richard Sutcliffe/The Athletic)

On the cricket side, however, grand plans were unveiled just a few years ago to bring Yorkshire back to their old stomping ground via an ambitious £5.5million revamp.

Stage one saw a state-of-the-art changing facility, outdoor nets and a score-hut open in 2017, with England and Yorkshire team-mates Joe Root, Jonny Bairstow and Rashid among those cutting the ribbon. The nets, built between what was the halfway line and roughly the penalty area of what remained of Avenue’s old pitch, were converted to an indoor facility last year.

The rest of the original scheme — a community pavilion with changing rooms that were to be located to the side of where the original stood, a restaurant catering for 250 diners, 1,000 seats for spectators and security fencing — never materialised. As a result, the mooted return of county cricket to the city of Bradford never became reality. Instead, York joined Leeds and Scarborough on the roster of Yorkshire’s home grounds.

That may be the final nail in the coffin for any hopes of bringing professional sport back to this corner of Bradford. Now, all that’s left behind is the ghostly presence of the past to go with the abandoned turnstiles and terraces that, for the past five decades, have been home to just the worms and the weeds.