California fire destroys baseball stadium featured in ‘A League of Their Own’

A California baseball stadium featured in the Hollywood blockbuster “A League of Their Own” was destroyed by a fire late Thursday, officials said.

The Jay Littleton Ballpark, in Ontario, California, went up in flames about 11:30 p.m. and is a “a total loss,” city spokesperson Dan Bell said.

The cause of the fire is not known, but investigators are on scene, he said Friday, adding that the stadium’s grandstand was wooden and likely burned very quickly.

Losing the ballpark, which was designated a historic landmark in the city in 2003 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2021, is “devastating,” Bell said.

“This is a place where a lot of kids in town, through generations … have played Little League here, and all the way up, higher levels of baseball were played here, even at one point, a little bit of professional ball was played here. So this is a legendary field, not just in Ontario, but in the region and the country.”

According to a website devoted to the ballpark, the stadium’s grandstand was completed in 1937.  In 1947, the Ontario Orioles made the stadium its home for one season. The field had one of the largest field dimensions, 402 feet from home plate to center field, seven feet deeper than Dodger Stadium.

It was a Hollwyood favorite, too. Notbale films shot at the stadium include the Tom Hanks, Geena Davis and Madonna 1992 film, “A League of Their Own,” as well as 1988’s  “Eight Men Out” featuring John Cusack and Charlie Sheen. “The Babe Ruth Story” was also filmed there.

“If you look up and down the street, you have baseball lovers everywhere,” Ontario Eastern League president Aaron Matthiesen told NBC Los Angeles, adding that some were in tears. “This ballpark has been the heart of Ontario, the historic ballpark, the place to play for our kids. They’re not going to get a chance to play in it anymore.”

Matthiesen described conditions at the park in recent years as “dilapidated” with a rise in the number of unhoused people living there, but said there were signs of improvement at the baseball field.