KINSTON, N.C. — When it was time to get the infield ready at the Down East Wood Ducks homefield, it was all hands on deck for the team’s front office staff. Even the marketing manager and the sales team were out there helping spread new bags of red clay.
Spring is here. Opening day for the Minor League Baseball team in Kinston is coming up. The Wood Ducks will start the season at home with a three-game series against the Kannapolis Cannon Ballers.
All of North Carolina’s 10 minor league teams are getting ready for opening day. The storied Durham Bulls start their season at home Friday night against the Norfolk Tides. The Charlotte Knights are also starting at home Friday, going up against the Memphis Redbirds.
The fans, too, are getting ready for opening day. These minor league teams are more than just proving ground for would-be major league players. They’re community hubs and gathering places. Tickets can be cheaper than going to a movie theater.
“I can come out to a game. I have seats down right behind home plate. And I can see 50 people, 100 people in a night that I know, I recognize, I say hi, I call them by name. And it's fun to do that,” Kannapolis Mayor Darrell Hinnant said in a recent interview.
“It's like a village. It's like, you know, we've said to ourselves, we are exploding in growth in the community. We don't expect to be a big city, we want to maintain that small-town charm. This ball stadium allows us to do that,” he said.
Walking around Durham during baseball season, people wearing Durham Bulls hats and T-shirts can outnumber those wearing Duke gear.
“Not to sound cheesy or cliche with this, but our overall goal is to bring our community together,” Durham Bulls general manager Tyler Parsons said. He said the Durham Bulls Athletic Park also hosts college games, concerts, festivals, weddings and other events.
Parsons joined the team as GM this year, but he’s spent his career in baseball. He was most recently with the Lansing Lugnuts in Michigan.
The Durham Bulls won the Triple-A national championship last year.
“This is the most iconic minor league baseball franchise in the land,” he said. Plus, the weather in Durham is better than Michigan.
“Whatever we can do to utilize this facility to bring the community together, to have a good time, to share some laughs, that’s what we’re here for,” he said.
During a recent city council meeting, Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer reminisced: “I got married in 1998 and my wedding party spent Thirsty Thursday having fun before my wedding at the Tourist game, so it just makes a lot of memories for a lot of people.”
“We don’t have a lot of opportunities for families to do activities in our city. We have a lot of adult activities. But I think this is a really important one that resonates with a lot of people in our community,” she said as the council considered funding for the Asheville Tourists baseball team.
The Kannapolis Cannon Ballers moved from a small ballpark outside of town into the heart of the growing city two years ago. As part of a massive plan to rebuild their downtown, Kannapolis city leaders built a new $50 million ballpark just off Main Street.
Kannapolis was once dominated by a massive textile mill. Cannon Mills shut down in 2003, taking with it much of the economic energy in the city just north of Charlotte. But in the 20 years since, the city has created a biotech park, attracted new employers and set about to build back its once-vibrant downtown strip.
The mayor said the ballpark was a key part of bringing life back to Main Street.
“This ballpark has made it possible for all these businesses to be downtown. You know, you hear stories about big boxes, big boxes are going to eliminate small-town businesses and all that kind of stuff. We have 35 small businesses right here in our downtown that are thriving downtown,” Hinnant said.
“They're thriving because of what this ballpark did for us. It became that anchor,” he said.
Matt Millward, general manager for the Cannon Ballers, is in his fourth season with the team. He’s watched the community grow around the new ballpark.
“Building a new ballpark, usually that first year you have that honeymoon phase and then your goal is to keep the attendance at that level, you usually see a little bit of a decline as time goes on,” he said.
“With us it’s so unique because the trend is going the opposite way. The first year we had a tremendous year, last year far exceeded our expectations,” Millward said. “To see this completely take over a town, revitalize a city, county, an entire community, it’s been truly remarkable.”
The growth in Kannapolis is visible from home plate. There’s a new building going up alongside the ballpark, with a brewery on the first floor and apartments above, complete with balconies overlooking the field.
The mayor said city council members, along with consultants, looked to places like Durham and Greenville, South Carolina, to get inspiration for a minor league ballpark as a centerpiece of downtown life.
Two years ago Major League Baseball announced new facility requirements for ballparks. In Durham, that meant doubling the size of the locker rooms, adding locker rooms for women, a new batting tunnel and other upgrades, Parsons said.
The work at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park is expected to be done in time for opening day.
But not every team has had such an easy time doing the upgrades. The Asheville Tourists said the team needed help from the city and the county to do an estimated $56 million in renovations. The team said this could be its last season if it can’t get help paying for the upgrades.
Both the Asheville City Council and the Buncombe County Commission voted in recent weeks to help the team pay for the renovations at McCormick Field.
Asheville City Council member Maggie Ullman said she wasn’t sold at first that ballpark renovations were a good use of public money.
“We have a long list of needs and, just to be real, is baseball a top priority? There are a lot of people really concerned about that,” she said in a recent council meeting.
“We do have so many challenges in our community, but we can’t only focus on the problems. We need to invest in the good things too or they’ll tarnish,” Ullman said. “Right now, 75% of the people who come to this space are us. It’s like one of the only places I can think of that is so locally focused.”
Jon Clemmons grew up in Swansboro, North Carolina, a small coastal town. He remembers coming to Grainger Stadium as a child to watch baseball games.
The ballpark, opened in 1949, is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year. The Kinston Indians played here from 1987 to 2011. The park was without a team for six years until the Rangers moved a new franchise to Kinston, naming the team the Down East Wood Ducks.
Clemmons was up in Asheville working as an assistant general manager for the Tourists when the call came to come back east.
“The eastern part of the state was home to me, and I joined my boss at the time, Wade Howell, who's our VP and we more or less started this franchise here in Kinston,” Clemmons said.
“Growing up, when I was 8 or 9, I would come to games when the Kinston Indians were here. And that's really where my love for minor league baseball and professional baseball started,” he said.
“It's a small niche market. I think we're one of the smallest markets in minor league baseball. So we heavily rely on surrounding communities in order to fill the seats,” Clemmons said.
In Asheville, the ballpark will mark 100 years next year. McCormick Field first opened in 1924, with wooden bleachers and the Tourists playing in the South Atlantic Association.
McCormick Field has hosted some big names. The New York Yankees hosted an exhibition game there, with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig on the field, according to Minor League Baseball’s official history of the ballpark. In 1948, the Brooklyn Dodgers and Jackie Robinson played on the field.
The wooden bleachers were replaced before the 1993 season, expanding the capacity to 4,000 in the ballpark, MiLB said. They kept the field intact and the historic layout, but added a new clubhouse, bigger restrooms and more modern concession stands.
Brian DeWine bought the Asheville Tourists in 2010, moving his growing family to Asheville.
“The No. 1 reason the team is here is to add to the quality of life for our community. This ballpark does not belong to one person, it belongs to the community that gathers in this place,” DeWine said, speaking to the Asheville City Council recently.
“Although baseball is a game of numbers, the most important part of the game cannot be measured in numbers,” he said. “At the ballpark, we cannot measure the number of friends we reunite with, the first dates that occur, the family bonding moments or the lives that are enriched.”