January 25: Winnipeg Fastball/Baseball Landmark About To Be Torn Down

To be fair, it hasn’t really been a “stadium” in about a decade. It sat on the east side of McPhillips Street and been maintained by members of the Winnipeg Men’s Fastball League for the past dozen years. Still, there was a time when Charlie Krupp Stadium was a haven for adult softball players and kids learning baseball.

It was home to everything from international softball competitions and children’s baseball tournaments to the great Eddie Feigner (The King and His Court) and, of course, for many years, the highly-regarded Winnipeg Colonels fastball team.

Charlie Krupp was just nine when he and his family arrived in Canada from Russia in 1915. He had a solid career as a softball player in Winnipeg, but for the most part, he was an organizer. He put together baseball and softball leagues for adults and kids and his lifetime of hard work eventually got him inducted into the Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame.

This week, however, word came that the stadium named in his honour will soon cease to be.

Wayne Perfumo from Manitoba Lotteries, the guy who led the construction of the Upper Deck Sports Bar, had worked diligently to have the bar (read: the MLC) take over operation of the stadium for the benefit of the Winnipeg Men's Fastball League.

The WMFL would handle the maintenance, the Upper Deck Sports Bar would use some of its profits to rebuild the stands and the backstop and together the two groups would form a mutually beneficial partnership.

But league president Nathan Wiens, a tremendous Goldeyes fan who can always be found at the ballpark, recently learned that Perfumo had met with the City of Winnipeg and the city has decided to accept a proposal from the Winnipeg Nomads Football Club to take over the entire area. It will be a football complex now and, while that's not a bad thing under any circumstances, it does mean another piece of Winnipeg's sports history will soon be gone.

"I don't think the city wanted it there anymore and they haven't wanted it there for a long time," Wiens said. "It's very disappointing for us and for fastball and for history, I guess, but it's pretty obvious the city didn't want the ball field anymore."

Times change, people change, the city changes and we lose a bit of history every day. The fact that a bunch of kids will play football on that field certainly takes the sting out of losing it, but for those of us who were around to enjoy it, there was a time when Charlie Krupp Stadium was a vibrant and wonderful place.

It will be sad to see it go.