Tinker Field

Joe Tinker, born in 1880 and died in 1948, was an Orlando real estate developer and professional baseball player who, with the Chicago Cubs from 1906 to 1910, won four pennants and two World Series championships and formed a famous double-play combination with Johnny Evers and Frank Chance. After managing the minor league Columbus Senators until 1919, he moved to Orlando to manage the Orlando Tigers, and his real estate firm prospered during the 1920s Florida land boom. He promoted construction of a new baseball stadium to attract spring training to Orlando; construction began in December 1922, and Tinker Field was dedicated in April 1923. The all-wood stadium seated 1,500 and was said to be larger than Yankee Stadium, and the field, thought to have been used for baseball since 1914, had red Georgia clay and a Bermuda sod grass outfield. In 1963 the stadium was rebuilt using 1,000 seats from Griffith Stadium in Washington D.C., built in 1911. Spring training continued there until 1990, with home teams including the Cincinnati Reds from 1923 to 1933, the Brooklyn Dodgers from 1934 to 1935, and the Washington Senators and Minnesota Twins from 1936 to 1990. On March 6, 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “Integration Now” speech from the pitcher’s mound to about 2,000 people during his only visit to Orlando and his only speech in central Florida, while attending a Southern Christian Leadership Conference and appearing at a workshop at Shiloh Baptist Church and the rally there. That summer he participated in the St. Augustine Movement, which played a major role in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and that same year he received the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolence. The site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004 for its association with baseball and Joe Tinker, who had been inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1946. Thousands of baseball players trained there, including Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Harmon Killebrew, Rod Carew, Lou Gehrig, Warren Spahn, Hank Aaron, and Michael Jordan. In 2015, the baseball diamond and field were designated an Orlando Historic Landmark for their association with civil rights and their significance to major league and minor league baseball in Orlando.

Orlando, Florida · United States