Every year as spring starts to hit in Spartanburg, I always start to get excited about the beginning of baseball season being just around the corner. No matter what the Braves have done in the offseason the kid inside of me still wants to believe that this will be the year that they bring home the next World Series Championship. We all want to say that we’re tired of baseball, that the game needs to be changed, etc, etc, but once spring comes back around, baseball comes right along with it and we welcome it like an old friend we haven’t seen all winter. There is just something about baseball that we can never turn our back on it, it’s like a link to our past that we just never want to let go of. I was reminded of this fact the other day when I took in a baseball game at the Inman Mills Park, a game between SCA and Chester High School. With no real rooting bias towards either school, I was able to just stand there and take in the pageantry of the game. If you have never been to Inman Mills Park, it was a stadium built for the Inman Mills baseball team to play in during the old Industrial Leagues. Its current configuration dates back to around 1948 and includes covered concrete stands, dugouts, an old school scoreboard (the type where you still have to hang the scores) and its most unique feature, an outfield fence that borders a cow pasture. Yep, that’s what I said, its outfield fence borders a cow pasture. In fact Travis, who was at the game with me, commented “I hope those cows don’t take offense to all those cow-skinned baseballs being hit into their pasture.” While the comment was funny, the idea of a baseball field being next to a cow pasture is something that no design architect would recommend when building a new baseball park these days, and that is a fact that I hate. While the game was going on you could see the cows wandering in the pasture but as the sun began to go down you could only see a silhouette of the cows in the last bit of sunlight on top of the hill, like they were trying to take in the last little bit of the game themselves. I then began to think about how much I miss taking in a Spartanburg Phillies game at Duncan Park. I know there is a stadium in Greenville that we can go and watch games at, and it is a really nice modern stadium, but there is just something I miss about being able to see a game at Duncan Park. I can remember as a kid sitting in the general admission seats along the third baseline rooting on the Spartanburg Phillies like they were a big league team, and I guess as a kid to me they were. I can still remember getting to throw out the first pitch on my sixth birthday and getting the autograph of a young up-and-coming catching prospect of the Phillies, some kid named Mike Lieberthal, who ended up starting for the Philadelphia Phillies for twelve years and was a two-time MLB All-Star. It was a tradition in Spartanburg for people to make a trip out to Duncan Park at least once a summer and take in the history of the stadium and watch some good young prospects play their hearts out for our local team. Duncan Park never had the nicest facilities or the most modern technology but what it did have were stories. It was a place where a dad could take his son and tell him stories of games he had once saw there when he was a kid, sitting in the exact same stadium. When it comes to baseball we all seem to debate on ideas of how we should fix it or not but the one thing that we can all agree on is that it’s the history that always draws us back to the game. When thinking about baseball I am often reminded of the line from Field of Dreams, “This game is a part of our past Ray, it reminds us of all that once was good and it could be again.” While we move into more modern and fancier stadiums, we must remember and not forget it’s the history and ambiance of these older stadiums that still bring us back. Anyone want to go catch a game?
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JamesBoiling Springs native, lover of sports and food. 15x SC Press Association Award Winner. I do some sports writing and radio every now and then. Archives
April 2020
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