In the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, baseball was key to community building – and racial integration – in Pond Gap.

“The best games were the pick-up games,” says Pond Gap Neighborhood Association President David Williams. “There would be a bucket of ice for people to keep their drinks cold. Everyone pitched in to prepare the field, and the games would bring everyone together.”

Then there was the famous “basket catch,” Williams says, where a towering home run landed in a neighbor’s laundry basket as she was hanging up her clothes on a line to dry.

At 2:30 p.m. on Monday, June 26, 2023, Mayor Kincannon and members of City Council joined Pond Gap residents in officially unveiling signs that designate Home Run Alley, an honorary name for a section of Sutherland Avenue between Jade and Renford roads.

Williams, a lifelong Pond Gap resident and an enthusiastic historian of all things Pond Gap, has researched the players, the baseball field, the neighborhood’s history and the airport that once existed near the field. He has put up banners that celebrate the neighborhood’s baseball legacy. One reads: “Pond Gap – More Than a Game! – The Way to Treat One Another!”

Home plate at the old field, Williams says, was south of Sutherland, with the field orientated to face northward. Right field was roughly where Dead End BBQ is now, and the Red Onion sits approximately where center field was. Williams’ great-grandfather’s house marked left field.

The sign unveiling ceremony was held at the intersection of Sutherland Avenue and Hollywood Road, next to the University of Tennessee RecSports Fields.