About the Oldtime Baseball Game
The Oldtime Baseball Game is a celebration of our national pastime, played each year at beautiful St. Peter’s Field on Sherman Street in North Cambridge. From its humble beginnings in 1994, the game has grown considerably over the years, yet has remained loyal to its mission of offering a glimpse of what it was like in the old days, when hundreds of fans would turn out to root for their “town” team in various local semipro leagues.
What makes the Oldtime Baseball Game so special is our dazzling collection of flannel uniforms that represent virtually every era in baseball history. Used just once a year for the Oldtime Baseball Game, and then returned to storage by our friends at Royal White Laundry of Somerville, the uniforms include such long-ago teams as the Boston Braves, St. Louis Browns and Brooklyn Dodgers. Teams from the old Negro Leagues are represented by the Kansas City Monarchs, Homestead Grays and Baltimore Elite Giants. Cuba is represented by the legendary Cienfuegos Elephantes. We even have a uniform from a team that never actually existed: The New York Knights, for whom Robert Redford’s Roy Hobbs character played in “The Natural.”
Players from the game are chosen from colleges and universities from the Boston area, with an occasional high school player or retired big-leaguer added to the mix. Over the years, former Red Sox pitchers Oil Can Boyd and Jim Corsi have played in the game, as has former New York Yankee Mike Pagliarulo. More than 25 participants in the Oldtime Baseball Game have gone on to play professional baseball, including former Northeastern University star Carlos Pena of Haverhill, the first representative of our game to play Major League Baseball. Pena now plays for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.
But the Oldtime Baseball Game is, and always will be, a charity event. Since we work so hard each year to gather more than 1,000 people to watch our game, it just makes sense to use the event to raise money for a worthy cause.