After playing their first two games on the tour at
Meiji Jingu Stadium in Tokyo, the All-American tour headed north. They took an overnight train ride to Aomori at the northern tip of Honshu, then took a ferry across the Tsugaru Strait to the city of Hakodate on the island of Hokkaido. The US team beat the Japanese team 5-2 there on November 8th with Earl Averill hitting his third home run of the tour. After the game, the teams took the ferry back to Honshu and caught a train for Sendai where they would play a game the following day.
The ballpark that the Eagles now play in, Miyagi Baseball Stadium, would not open until 1950. The ballpark in Sendai in 1934 was on the west side of the city (the current stadium is on the east side of the city) and was called Yagiyama Ball Field. The US team once again beat their Japanese hosts soundly by a score of 7-0. They would hit five home runs in the game including two from Babe Ruth, his first two home runs on Japanese soil. After the game, the teams returned to Tokyo where they would play another game at Jingu Stadium the following day.
I'm not exactly sure when Yagiyama Ball Field was torn down. Hyojogawara Stadium, located a few miles to the northeast of Yagiyama Ball Field, opened in 1937 so it's likely the field met it's demise around that time. The Yagiyama Zoo (officially the "Sendai City Yagiyama Zoological Park") opened on this site in 1965. In 2002, the Zoo put up a statue of Babe Ruth to commemorate the MLB All Stars having played in Sendai. The statue is located where Ruth's first home that day landed in the right field stands.
I visited the zoo during my 2019 trip to Japan and took some photos of the statue:
And of the plaque for it:
The statue is fairly easy to find if you visit the zoo as it appears on their map. If you look on the left side of it over by the flamingo, you'll see the where the statue is:
My source for information for this post was drawn largely from Rob Fitts' excellent book
Banzai Babe Ruth.
