Over 100 marijuana plants once sprouted at Anaheim Stadium. The quirky 1976 event planted seeds of cultural change.
In 1976, Anaheim Stadium’s outfield got greener than usual—and not because of turf maintenance. Groundskeepers prepping for the California Angels’ Opening Day stumbled upon more than 100 marijuana plants growing amid the grass. The culprit? A concert by The Who that left behind more than ticket stubs and tinnitus. This bizarre episode in sports history doesn’t just entertain—it offers a striking snapshot of cannabis culture before legalization, corporate packaging, and state-by-state regulation became the norm.
Anaheim Stadium had just hosted the iconic British rock band as part of The Who By Numbers tour, drawing a crowd of around 55,000 fans. The show brought typical ’70s rock debauchery, and apparently, a wave of guerrilla gardeners. Whether thrown intentionally or accidentally, cannabis seeds were scattered across the field. Weeks later, small green plants sprouted in the outfield, prompting a stadium supervisor to quip, “We’ve got grass in the grass.”
The plants, according to estimates, numbered over 100, with some accounts like Far Out Magazine claiming as many as 500. Regardless, the discovery was swiftly handled. Groundskeepers yanked the plants before Opening Day, ensuring the Angels’ season wouldn’t start with an unintended weed sponsorship. The event was mostly treated as a curious footnote in stadium lore. Still, the image of a pro ballpark nurturing marijuana sprouts stuck around—a perfect metaphor for a generation’s shifting norms.
To understand how something like this could happen, it’s worth zooming in on the cultural context. In the 1970s, cannabis use was part of an informal, decentralized counterculture. Weed was mostly illegal, mostly unregulated, and almost always sold in sandwich baggies filled with stems, seeds, and dreams. You knew your plug more than your product, and nobody was worried about child-resistant containers or compliance codes.
What happened at Anaheim Stadium wasn’t some grand political statement. It was accidental activism—an unintentional yet vivid symbol of how normalized weed had become among certain communities, especially concertgoers raised on the psychedelic leftovers of the ’60s. The Who’s music was loud, raw, and rebellious, making their show a perfect setting for this kind of organic protest.
Cannabis in 1976 wasn’t about barcodes or branding. It was still countercultural contraband—a substance passed from hand to hand, grown in basements, forests, and closet corners. That seeds could find their way from a crowd to the outfield, and then bloom weeks later under stadium lights, says as much about the plant’s tenacity as it does about the moment in time.
This odd moment at Anaheim Stadium underscores the larger arc of cannabis’s journey: from outlaw hobby to mainstream topic. For the cannabis community, it’s a reminder of how far things have come. For sports historians, it’s an eyebrow-raising example of how stadiums often double as stages for broader social shifts. For everyone else, it’s just a damn good story—one where the punchline grows right out of the ground.
Ultimately, those “little plants in the outfield” weren’t just an accident of timing and biology. They were, in their own absurd way, a preview. A signal that cannabis culture was inching into public spaces, even if it took another four decades to fully bloom. From rogue seeds on a baseball field to nationwide legalization efforts, the journey has been more than botanical—it’s been cultural, unpredictable, and utterly weird in all the best ways.
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