North Carolina receives its major league call-up

It has never happened before, and it might never again after Sunday, when North Carolina hosts a Major League Baseball regular-season game for the first time. This, in baseball parlance, is the state’s call-up, its promotion to The Show.

It’s happening at Fort Bragg outside Fayetteville. Major League Baseball has built a field and a temporary stadium and put up lights for the Atlanta Braves and Miami Marlins, who play Sunday night in a military appreciation game that will be televised nationally on ESPN.

The game will be a spectacle, a historic event. And then it will be history.

But after Sunday’s game, North Carolina’s call-up will be over. What’s it like when your debut is also your finale? Few can better understand than those whose major league careers lasted exactly that long – just one game.

Nineteen North Carolina natives have experienced a one-game stop in the majors, followed by an abrupt ending. They couldn’t have known that would be it – that their first game in the majors would also turn out to be their last.

“It was surprising I didn’t get back to the big leagues,” Corey Lee, a former N.C. State pitcher, wrote in an email in response to a question about his lone major league pitching appearance.

Lee is now a pitching coach with the Czech Republic national team. Back then, in 1999, he was a rookie with the Texas Rangers. His first and only outing came in the 11th inning of a game against the New York Yankees on Aug. 24, 1999.

Lee retired the first batter. He walked Derek Jeter and gave up a single to Paul O’Neill. Lee recorded the second out. Then he gave up a three-run home run to Tino Martinez.

Not long after Lee was back in the minor leagues. He struggled with injuries, underwent surgery, became healthy, started pitching well again, but then opted for guaranteed money in Japan, where additional injuries required two shoulder surgeries.

“Never entered my mind I wouldn’t get back to the big leagues,” Lee wrote, “but after the surgeries, I never got healthy enough to pitch at a major league level. Giving up a home run wasn’t why I didn’t get back, I just didn’t pitch good enough for a few years …

“I don’t think about it a lot, there is nothing to be bitter about.”

Lee acknowledged his story might have been a “much better” if he’d only struck out Martinez instead of allowing a home run. Yet so it goes. That, it turned out, was his chance. His one game.

Moonlight Graham

In other sports action is fluid; one play flows into the next, a beginning and ending sometimes difficult to discern. Baseball is built on a series of individual ones: one pitch, one swing, one at-bat.

And now at Fort Bragg, one game unlike any other in state history. This is North Carolina’s “cup of coffee,” as the saying goes – it’s one game in the majors, there long enough to take a sip, acquire a taste.

Some of the 19 North Carolina natives to play in one major league game – and one game only – have names like Rufus Smith and Leo Moon and Woody Crowson and Turkey Tyson. The most illustrious member of their fraternity is Archibald Graham, better known by his nickname: Moonlight.

Immortalized in “Field of Dreams,” Graham is remembered in the movie for his wish to come to bat, just once, in a major league game and, in his fictional words, “to stare down a big league pitcher. To stare him down, and just as he goes into his windup, wink. Make him think you know something he doesn’t.”

It never happened in real life, though perhaps it’s fitting in some way that the first major league game in state history is coming to Graham’s hometown. He was born in Fayetteville, attended the University of North Carolina, and then in 1905 played one half-inning, in the outfield, for the New York Giants.

He never did bat. Which left him wondering, in the movie, if there might be “enough magic in the Moonlight” to make true his dream of standing in the batter’s box.

Not all dreams come true

Graham, whose brother Frank Porter Graham became the president of UNC and a U.S. senator, lived out his life in relative obscurity, becoming a small-town doctor in Chisholm, Minn. Then more than 80 years after his only major league appearance his story was brought to life in 1989 in “Field of Dreams.”

“His story is the classic tale of dreams not coming true but you still end up having success,” said Brett Friedlander, a North Carolina sports journalist who co-authored a book, “Chasing Moonlight” that chronicles Graham’s life. “It kind of shows you that even if your dream doesn’t come true, the world doesn’t come to an end – you can go on and accomplish other things.”

Graham has hometown company with his one-game major league career. Harry Hedgpeth was also born in Fayetteville and also attended UNC and also, like Graham, became a doctor after he made his first and only major league appearance, which came in 1913 with the Washington Senators.

He pitched an inning, allowed one hit but no runs and never again played in a major league game. Two years later, Hedgpeth “coached the baseball team at John Marshall High School in Richmond ... as ‘Dr. Harry Hedgpeth,’” John Thorn, the official Major League Baseball historian, wrote in an email.

Baseball has a unique connection with history that way. Somehow it makes sense that the game’s historian will know about an obscure player who faced four batters more than 100 years ago in his only major league appearance.

Graham, Hedpeth, Lee … they all comprise a small part of North Carolina baseball history as players from this state to have played in the big leagues – if only for the briefest possible time. Graham has become a part of folklore.

Lights will shine for one night

A couple of his baseball cards – replicas, made after his name became famous from “Field of Dreams” – sit under glass at the North Carolina Baseball Museum in Wilson. There are a couple of other mementos representing other players whose major league careers spanned but one game.

Turkey Tyson, the Elm City native who played in a 1944 game with the Philadelphia Phillies, has an autographed ball in the museum. It sits next to a black and white picture with a paragraph that tells of his exploits with the Durham Bulls and, later, in the Tobacco State League in 1949.

The museum features an autograph from Herb Cobb, of Pinetops. In 1929 he gave up four runs in one inning with the St. Louis Browns, never to pitch again in the majors.

A man working at the museum on Thursday was hopeful they’d soon be able to provide memorabilia from Sunday night’s game at Fort Bragg. It will instantly become another part of the state’s baseball history – North Carolina’s first game in the majors.

For one night lights will shine in the middle of the state on a major league game. Then those lights will dim and The Show – as the phrase went in “Bull Durham,” which holds another place in this state’s baseball past – will move on.

What will remain in its place, at Fort Bragg, will be a field and a recreational space. The baseball diamond will be converted into a softball field. Parts of the outfield will be used for other sports and activities. The legacy of what once took place there will live on in the gift of the land.

A dream that ends so quickly

It will live on in how people remember it. For some Fort Bragg residents, for some parents and their children, the game Sunday night will undoubtedly represent their first chance to see a major league game in person.

That was part of the idea behind it: not just to hold a military appreciation game, but to take it to an actual military base, to play it in front of the servicemen and servicewomen stationed there.

It’s only one game in a long season. Nine innings, maybe more, or perhaps a little less – but, in the case of some, the length of an entire major league career. That sort of experience can linger, living a dream that ends so quickly.

“The most unexpected way it has stayed with me,” Lee, the former N.C. State pitcher, wrote of his one game in the majors, “is now I can really relate with a kid who feels they have failed miserably.”

Lee described his story as a “Tommy Topper.” A player he’s coaching might feel bad about an error or a bad pitch. Well, Lee can tell him, imagine giving up a three-run home run against the Yankees and never pitching again in the major leagues.

Lee reached that point, though. He has his story, the good parts and bad, about his one game.

Now, on a grander scale, comes North Carolina’s one game. Its big league debut, and maybe, finale.

This story was originally published July 2, 2016 at 12:05 PM with the headline "North Carolina receives its major league call-up."