Photograph Courtesy Peter Outerbridge
There was no reason to "widen" the playing field for baseball. Buffalo already had a relatively new "baseball only" stadium built just 13 years earlier called
Offerman Stadium. Not only was Offerman a proper "baseball stadium" but it was the state of the art concrete and steel ballpark in the Triple-A (Class AA) International League. Offerman quickly sparked a movement of 7 other International League cities away from wooden baseball parks and to more "permanent concrete & steel facilities" which occurred 2-4 years after Offerman Stadium's completion. Thus... Grover Cleveland Memorial Stadium (or whatever it was called at that moment as the stadium changed names many times before it debuted as Civic and finally War Memorial Stadium) was built so that the stands were really close to the action on the playing field of an NFL game... a parallel grandstand and a long thin playing field.