Miller Huggins Field, St. Petersburg, Fla.

Miller Huggins Field

The water tower that dominates Huggins Field, Dec-2019.

Modest facilities lining the right field line. The lake is beyond right field.

A quick look from behind the plate.

Quick Facts:

Location: Crescent Lake Park, 5 Street at 13 Avenue North, St. Petersburg, Fla. (map it using Google Maps)
Opened: 1925 as Crescent Lake Field
Additional names: Miller Huggins Field (1931), Huggins-Stengel Baseball Complex (1963)
Home team: Spring training, New York Yankees (1925-42, 1946-61), New York Mets (1962-87), Baltimore Orioles (1992-95), Tampa Bay Rays (2023); St. Petersburg HS Green Devils, Pinellas County Athletic Conference
Capacity: Unknown

The New York Yankees moved their spring training from New Orleans to St. Petersburg in 1925 at the urging of manager Miller Huggins, supposedly because he was looking to remove temptations from his slugger, Babe Ruth. Teams such as the St. Louis Browns had already trained in the city, first at Coffee Pot Park a mile to the northeast and then at the downtown St. Petersburg Athletic Park. The field here originally had no fences, and reportedly alligators would come up from the lake (beyond right field, 500 feet from home plate) and sun themselves in the deep outfield. An outfield wall was built in short order. While that wall is gone, the fences remain at the original dimensions: 340 feet down the left-field line and a whopping 430 feet to right.

Come 1947, when the Athletic Park site had been rebuilt into Al Lang Field, that stadium became the primary site for spring training games. However, this park, named Miller Huggins Field in 1931 following the death of the Yankees’ manager, continued to be used as a “back field” for another fifty years. With the arrival of the Mets (with former Yankees manager Casey Stengel at the helm) in 1962, the Yankees relocated their spring operations to Fort Lauderdale. During those years, the St. Louis Cardinals, with whom the Mets shared Al Lang Field, used back fields off 62 Avenue Northeast, while the Mets primarily used this facility, which was renamed the Huggins-Stengel Baseball Complex.

The Mets moved across the state to Port St. Lucie in 1988, but Huggins-Stengel got another Major League hurrah when the Orioles spent a few seasons here in the 1990s, again using this park as a back field while playing games downtown. And in 2023, when the Tampa Bay Rays training complex in Charlotte County was recovering from damage inflicted by Hurricane Ian the previous September, the Crescent Lake facility received upgrades so that the Rays, who play their home games a mile and a half away, could hold outdoor workouts.

There was apparently never a stadium structure here; the area behind home plate is occupied by a water tower, precluding any such installation. Today, fans line up along a short wall on the first-base side to watch the St. Petersburg High School Green Devils, much as they did to watch the Yankees work out nearly a century ago.

Game	Date	Conference	Level	Result
69	Thu 15-Apr-2021	PCAC	HS	ST PETERSBURG 9, Tarpon Springs 0
99	Mon 15-Apr-2022	Nonconference	HS	ST PETERSBURG 3, Clearwater Central Catholic 1

Return to the Stadiums page
Return to Charlie’s home page
Send us feedback