Inside Avon Park’s extraordinary baseball legacy – from Babe Ruth to Hal McRae
Long before spring training became synonymous with Florida’s coastline, before televised games and million-dollar contracts, baseball found a home in a little town along the railroad tracks in Highlands County.
The legends came here: Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Dizzy Dean, Frankie Frisch.
Generations later, another young man would grow up only a few blocks away, dreaming of following them. His name was Hal McRae.
Today, visitors can stand where all of them once stood.
The newly opened Baseball Museum wing at the Avon Park Historical Society’s Museum and Depot, doesn’t simply display baseball memorabilia. It tells the remarkable story of how one small Florida town became one of the state’s most unlikely baseball capitals, and how that passion continues nearly a century later.
More Than a Game
In the late 1920s, the St. Louis Cardinals selected Avon Park as their spring training home after businessman Charles R. Head convinced Cardinals owner Sam Breadon that the community could support Major League Baseball. A new ballpark, then known as Cardinal Field and later renamed Charles R. Head Field became the center of town life.
That made Avon Park the birthplace of the Farm League for the major leagues. The pro teams stayed at Hotel Jacaranda.
Excitement reached its peak in March 1928, when the New York Yankees arrived for an exhibition game. Before the first pitch, local residents presented Babe Ruth with a custom gift-bat measuring more than four feet long.
Then came the swing still talked about nearly 100 years later.
Ruth launched a towering home run beyond the outfield and onto a nearby road now known as Ruth Street. The name remains one of Florida’s most unusual historical landmarks.
“It still amazes people,” said museum committee chairman Dr. Ron Sevigny. “Most visitors have no idea that so much Major League Baseball happened in such a small town.”
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