John Steigerwald: Celebrating the 50th anniversary of a 59,000-seat mistake

Thursday was the 50th anniversary of a really bad idea.

Three Rivers Stadium opened July 16, 1970, and I was there. It was a spectacular debut, even though the Pirates lost to the Cincinnati Reds, 3-2.

After having watched baseball in dingy old Forbes Field, with its view-destroying pillars and cramped seats, Three Rivers had an other-worldly feel to it.

Plastic everywhere, artificial turf and an electronic scoreboard.

But nothing about the stadium was more stunning than the Pirates’ uniforms. They had warmed up in the uniforms I had seen all of my life and the old timers had seen for 50 years, but when they came out for the national anthem, they were wearing their double-knits.

No buttons, form fitting. Something never seen on a baseball field until that night. In a few years, every team would be wearing them, and they got uglier by the year.

I don’t remember anybody being anything but thrilled by the experience. I couldn’t imagine ever missing Forbes Field.

My friends and I probably went to 120 games there in those first 2½ seasons, and we saw the Pirates win three consecutive division championships and a World Series. Remember, home games were not televised.

I loved the place.

But by 1974, I was calling it a dump. Not because it had gotten old. It was still as shiny as when it opened. In 1974, I took a job doing radio play-by-play for the Wichita Aeros of the American Association, the Chicago Cubs’ Triple A affiliate. Home games were played at Lawrence Stadium, a 30-year-old downtown ballpark.

It was called a stadium, but it was a ballpark. Not a cookie cutter bowl made for football. As I traveled around the Midwest to places such as Tulsa, Okla.; Evansville, Ind.; Omaha, Neb.; and Des Moines, Iowa, and called games in old ballparks that would be filled to capacity with 6,000 to 10,000 fans, I realized what a bad place for baseball Three Rivers Stadium was.

The next two seasons, I worked for teams in the Texas League and International League. While the Pirates and other teams such as the Philadelphia Phillies, Reds, St. Louis Cardinals and N.Y. Mets were playing in football stadiums, I was experiencing baseball in baseball parks.

Playing in a baseball dump was terrible for the Pirates. A crowd of 30,000 rattled around in Three Rivers Stadium. And, on the rare occasions when they drew a decent crowd, it was a nightmare getting out of the parking lots after the game.

Stadium access almost made Yogi Berra’s, “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s always too crowded” observation make sense.

Too many empty seats created a negative atmosphere, and small crowds begat more small crowds. Not exactly what’s now referred to as a good “game experience.”

And think about what a bad idea it was.

The Pirates would play 81 games there, plus postseason. The Steelers would play nine, counting two exhibition games. Postseason was not in the Steelers’ vocabulary at the time.

And they designed it for football.

At the time the stadium was built, the Pirates were one of the best organizations in MLB. The team that opened the stadium that day had three future Hall of Famers on the roster. You may have noticed the statues of Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell and Bill Mazeroski outside PNC Park. Notice I didn’t say PNC Stadium.

The Steelers were an embarrassment to to the city. They had three winning seasons in the previous 20 years, and the attendance for their last two games in 1969, when they finished 1-13, was 24,990 and 21,067.

With no local TV.

And the Pirates had gone along with the idea of making their new home a football stadium.

Imagine the crowds the Pirates of the ‘70s would draw at PNC Park. They won division championships in 1970, ‘71, ‘72, ‘74, ‘75 and ‘79 and World Series in ‘71 and ‘79. And they did it with offense. Lots of offense. The Lumber Company.

When I came back to Pittsburgh to work, I was criticized for referring to Three Rivers as a dump before it was 10 years old.

The first sentence of my column a few days after former Mayor Sophie Masloff was ridiculed for saying Pittsburgh needed to build a baseball park and name it after Roberto Clemente was, “Sophie For President.”

Sophie was right. Too bad PNC Park was 30 years too late.