The Wakeman Red Caps were perhaps one of the area’s best semi-pro baseball teams during the 1930s and 40s, and they first played night baseball under lights installed at Wakeman Field on July 24, 1935. The field, no longer extant, was bounded by Hyde, Clark, Pleasant, and Townsend (Ohio Route 303) streets. That game was played only two months after Franklin D. Roosevelt switched on lights at Crosley Field for the Cincinnati Reds. The Red Caps were part of the Wakeman Baseball Club, an organization founded in 1889 and sponsored by Charles S. Clark, Sr., and others. For aspiring local baseball players, playing night baseball for the Red Caps was a great honor. Wakeman Field annually hosted Abe Sapersteins’s Ethiopian Clowns, an African-American traveling baseball team, and also saw appearances by Tom Manning, Satchel Paige, John Gisbon, Al Schacht, Jesse Owens, and other sports greats.