Russell E. Diethrick, Jr. Park

Russell E. Diethrick Park
Location	Jamestown, NY United States 42.11277; -79.218552
Building chronology
Built	1941
Tenants
Jamestown Jammers
Capacity
4,200

Russell E. Diethrick, Jr. Park in Jamestown, NY, was the home of Jamestown affiliated baseball from 1941 through 2014. After that, the Jamestown Jammers of the New York-Pennsylvania League moved to Granville, WV, where they became the West Virginia Black Bears.

Opened in 1941 as Jamestown Municipal Stadium, its first professional team was the Jamestown Falcons of the Pennsylvania-Ontario-New York (PONY) League - which later became the NYPL.

That franchise folded in 1957. A successor team, the Jamestown Expos moved to Burlington, Vermont in 1994, but the Niagara Falls Rapids immediately stepped in as the Jammers. Five of the league's teams - more than a third - moved that year, but only Jamestown both lost and gained a team.

Diethrick remains home to the Jamestown Community College Jayhawks plus past and future editions of the Babe Ruth League World Series. The 2023 13-15-Year-Old BRLWS, to be played from August 12th through 19th, will be its 19th since 1980. The stadium sits on the JCC campus and in fact was known as College Park for 20 years before taking the Diethrick name.

Russell Diethrick, as Jamestown Parks and Recreation director, landed the first of the BRL tournaments and later became a Babe Ruth regional director. He joined Jamestown Savings Bank as community development officer in 1994.

The city renamed the ballpark in Diethrick's honor in 1997, both for helping land the Rapids and making the place a Babe Ruth League tournaments stalwart.

Professional baseball may be gone from Diethrick, but Chatauqua County has another claim to baseball history - one saluted in the nickname of the amateur team that plays there now, the Jamestown Tarp Skunks. The county is not only the home of this stadium but the birthplace of MLB pitcher Howard Ehmke. After retiring from the Philadelphia Athletics while holding the record for strikeouts in a single World Series game, 13, Ehmke invented the infield baseball tarp. He sold the first to the A's, then built a manufacturing company that continues making tarps and other textile-related products to this day.