Death in the Family

BY KEVIN KERNAN

There has been another death in the family.

Our Baseball Family.

Affiliated minor league baseball is about to leave Kinston, North Carolina, after generations of professional games at Grainger Stadium. The Kinston Down East Wood Ducks, a Texas Rangers Class A League affiliate, will play their final game Sunday against the Augusta GreenJackets.

If you are in the area, catch the last game. Tickets are available for $19.

That’s it, the end of the line for affiliated baseball at Grainger Stadium, which saw its first pro game in 1949. Another sad chapter to grassroots baseball under commissioner Rob Manfred.

The purging of the minor leagues continues in different ways.

Manfred & his minions continue to downsize minor league baseball. This franchise will leave Kinston, once a tobacco hub that has proudly re-invented itself recently, to move to Spartanburg, South Carolina to become the Hub City Spartanburgers.

To keep their team, it would have cost the city of Kinston $5.5 million to make the MLB mandated changes to the ballpark, which has been a fine ballpark. That was too high a price for a city that spent $1.9 million in 2016 on renovations, according to a compelling article in The Assembly, written by Jimmy Ryals. The Rangers sold the club to Diamond Baseball Holdings, a subsidiary of Silver Lake, a Silicon Valley private equity firm that has purchased 35 minor league teams.

The day after the sale was announced a year ago, Spartanburg media outlets reported that the Kinston ballclub would move to Spartanburg and a new 3,500 seat stadium that is the centerpiece of a $425 million retail and entertainment complex.

C ya, Kinston.

Maybe they will find a new team in a college summer league, something that the once proud Appalachian League had to do to survive when Manfred cut that league to shreds as minor league baseball went from 160 teams to 120.

New rules allowed this to happen. The Professional Baseball Agreement was changed in 2020. Under the earlier minor league agreement Spartanburg would not be eligible to have a team because Greenville already had a team within the 25-mile radius.

As we have all learned the last few years, goal posts can be moved in football, baseball, and life.

I’m not blaming Diamond Baseball Holdings, there are some good baseball people there, they have a business to run and the people of Spartanburg are happy. What I don’t like is that MLB does not respect the baseball loyalty Kinston showed the game through the decades as players like CC Sabathia came through Kinston. Howard Johnson managed there in 2017.

There were rough times and years of no baseball, but Kinston found a way. Now there is no way out through affiliated baseball. Kinston will have to become creative.

No one knows the beating heart of minor league baseball in America better than author Gaylon H. White, a learned man I have dubbed the Shelby Foote of minor league baseball. Shelby was the star of the Ken Burns 1990 series The Civil War.

I reached out to White on Saturday to talk about this latest death in the baseball family.

White has authored many baseball books, dealing with life in the minor leagues. He is a historian of that unique baseball way of life and loves the game and its characters immensely.

“And in doing so, they pissed on history – if you want to know the truth – and pissed on tradition…’’

“What this reminds me of is what they have done to one league, a very historical league, the Appalachian League,’’ White told BallNine. “The Appalachian League is a league that produced Darryl Strawberry, Kirby Puckett, Cal Ripken Jr. and Ron Guidry, who played in that league for Johnson City, just a great league.’’

It certainly was a great league in a great Appalachian setting and also produced such stars as Greg Maddux, Nolan Ryan, Eddie Murray and David Wright.

“I went to the Appalachian League All-Star Game this year in Johnson City (Tennessee) with my grandson, it’s one of these (college) leagues now where it is the first time kids have played with a wood bat. It’s not that it’s a bad league, it’s the fact that they ruined a great league,’’ White explained.

Hope you are proud of yourself, baseball.

“And in doing so, they pissed on history – if you want to know the truth – and pissed on tradition because if you look at the Appalachian League, the Mets had a franchise in Kingsport, the Cardinals had been in Johnson City for years and prior to that it was the Yankees. The Twins were in a town called Elizabethton, just a little small town and the ballpark right by the river, just neat stuff. Bristol had a farm team.

“That was the league that Ron Necciai pitched in in 1952 and struck out 27 in a nine-inning game, the only time that has been done in history,’’ White said. “The Appalachian League was the league that produced Steve Dalkowski. The first team he played for was Kingsport and they were part of the Orioles organization. Here is a league that had this wonderful history and the accountants, the lawyers, whoever it is that is calling the shots, flushed everything down the toilet for what it is now; and I can’t even tell you the nicknames of the teams now. Other than the All-Star Game I have never been to a game now.’’

History, clearly, means nothing to these people running baseball.

“It’s mindless,’’ White said.

“The other thing is that North Carolina at one time, boy, I think it had the most minor league teams in the country, at one point, going back aways. Almost every town in North Carolina had a minor league team. North Carolina itself has a great tradition in minor league baseball but not too many towns left.

“Here’s the thing. Baseball has announced that they are going to be playing a game at Bristol Motor Speedway this next year,’’ White said. “The Reds and the Braves are going to play in 2025, now clearly, they are doing that to set an attendance record. College football did that with Virginia Tech and Tennessee. Kind of bring back one game what the LA Coliseum used to be like. No business at all playing baseball in the LA Coliseum or the Bristol Motor Speedway.

“What they ought to be doing is what they did at Rickwood Field, going back to these classical ballparks – and there are a few left, not many – and celebrating our past. If they could do that rather than just dig up all the roots, replant some of the roots in some of these towns. There is a little ballpark in Alpine, Texas that Sports Illustrated once called the most beautiful ballpark in the world, Kokernot Field.

“Rather than uprooting teams like Kinston, we ought to be cultivating the roots of baseball.’’

That is such a wonderful point and makes so much sense, except that baseball doesn’t make much sense now; especially with the history of the game being uprooted daily by Manfred’s rule changes, such as making stolen bases child’s play now.

You have to know history to appreciate history. It’s that simple.

Manfred should put a call into Gaylon H. White tomorrow – I have his number if you need it, Commish. White’s latest book is Coach of a Lifetime, the story of Lewis Cook Jr., legendary high school football coach. I have read it, it is fantastic and is filled with much more than football lessons, there are life lessons as well – how to raise fine young men using football as guidepost. Roger Goodell should call White, too.

Kinston has undergone a revival of sorts thanks to celebrity chef Vivian Howard who owns two restaurants in town. Food, baseball and family is not a bad way to promote a North Carolina town. There also is Mother Earth Brewing. So add beer, too.

Now the long-affiliated baseball team has been uprooted to South Carolina.

Historic Grainger Stadium is a fine place to see a ballgame. It is the Carolina League’s second oldest ballpark. These are the kind parks ballpark chasers want to visit. It has a seating capacity of 4,100. In 1908 Kinston saw its first pro game in the Eastern Carolina League. It has been a Pittsburgh affiliate, also Montreal, for a terrible 38-93 season, and Cleveland. The Kinston Indians had a 25-year run.

White then gets to the heart of the matter and someone needs to show this quote to Manfred.

“They have got to get back to the grass roots,’’ White said, passion building in his voice. “In all of the books that I have done, one thing I realized is that these people still love baseball. But they can’t connect with it now. Baseball reminds them of their childhood, when the towns they lived in had civic pride and the competitiveness they had with nearby communities and baseball gave them all of that. It gave them a sense of belonging to something larger.

“That’s the beauty of minor league baseball. There just is no commitment to minor league baseball at the highest level.

“And the individual teams, you used to let players play in the minor leagues and if the team was in the pennant race, they would let them stay there until the end of the season to help the team win the pennant and then bring ‘em up. None of that now.

“Minor league teams are where you send somebody for rehab now.’’

The pure romanticism of minor league baseball has been destroyed.

It certainly has been documented here at BallNine that the teaching that was once done at the minor league level, a staple of the game, is not done anymore.

And when it comes to the college leagues, it’s hard for those roots to be planted in fertile soil, whereas with affiliated teams you remember the young stars who showed up to play in your town and how they grew as players, that was all part of the deal.

When affiliated teams prospered in a small town, fans are affiliated with those players their entire careers.

There needs to be a level of commitment from both sides.

Kinston, North Carolina, and its people have given so much to minor league baseball and now for this to happen, it is another terrible death in our baseball family.