Even with no major league team, NC is home to baseball history

A major-league baseball game at Fort Bragg on Sunday will evoke memories of other days and games, when North Carolinians got a glimpse of the Babe, or Ted Williams’ graceful swing or Yogi Berra in pinstripes.

It’s also a reminder of what North Carolina has meant to Major League Baseball, of how kids grew up playing ball under a hot summer sun on baseball fields in Hertford and Tarboro and Williamston, dreaming of one day making it to the big leagues.

North Carolina doesn’t have a major-league team, and Sunday’s game between the Atlanta Braves and Miami Marlins will be the first major-league regular-season game played in the state. But North Carolina has had more than 400 natives reach the big leagues, including Josh Hamilton and Chris Archer, Jim “Catfish” Hunter and Enos “Country” Slaughter, Gaylord Perry and Hoyt Wilhelm.

Some, like Hunter, Slaughter and Perry, reached the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Others played a single game and never played again.

Archibald Graham of Fayetteville made one appearance, on June 29, 1905, playing the outfield for the New York Giants. That was lost to history before the movie “Field of Dreams,” when the story of “Moonlight” Graham and his lone game was finally told – “Ol’ John McGraw pointed a bony finger in my direction …”

The game Sunday at Fort Bragg will be played in a temporary 12,500-seat park built out of an old golf course, scheduled as part of the Fourth of July celebration but also as an appreciation for the men and women serving their country, at Fort Bragg and in all the armed services.

There were other times, and other places, that have given North Carolina a brush with the big leagues:

Yankees come to Chapel Hill

The voice carried through the cramped clubhouse like a thunderbolt – “We’re here and we’re going to play, so get ready to take the field.”

When George Steinbrenner spoke, his voice usually was heard above the rest, and the New York Yankees complied to The Boss. So it was April 3, 1979, when the Yankees played an exhibition game at North Carolina’s Boshamer Stadium.

Steinbrenner’s daughter, Jenny, was attending UNC at the time and Steinbrenner brought his Yanks to Chapel Hill in 1977, ’79 and ’81 for games. In the 1979 game, the field was wet from rains, causing some pregame grousing in the clubhouse, and Reggie Jackson and Thurman Munson missed the game for personal reasons.

But Berra was the first-base coach for the Yanks, needling Lou Piniella, who had a slippery bat slip out of his hands on a few swings. Tommy John grabbed an open seat among reporters, telling them of how he was once recruited to play basketball at N.C. State by Everett Case as an Indiana teenager, and about the radical arm surgery he had a few years before that saved his baseball career.

Ed Figueroa, coming off a 20-win season in 1978, was the Yankees starter and allowed a two-run homer to UNC’s Jim Rouse.

Rouse, from Wilmington, then called it “probably the biggest thrill I’ve ever had” in baseball.

Red Sox play the Raleigh Caps

Raleigh’s Devereaux Meadow is long gone, but the minor-league ballpark once sat where Peace Street meets Downtown Boulevard, across the street from Finch’s, which soon will be a part of Raleigh’s past.

On April 11, 1958, more than 3,000 fans filled Devereaux Meadow, home of the Raleigh Caps minor-league team, to see the Boston Red Sox play a team of Red Sox minor leaguers. And, of course, to see Williams.

Called “The Thumper” in the News & Observer story, Williams didn’t start but didn’t disappoint. Pinch-hitting in the third inning, he ripped a single over second base to drive in Frank Malzone, then spent the rest of the game doing wind sprints.

But it wasn’t all about the Red Sox that day. Minor league pitcher Ron Judson, a 6-foot-4, 200-pound right-hander, struck out the side in the fourth, fanning Jimmy Piersall, Gene Stephens and Jackie Jensen.

Judson never made it to the majors. That April day in ’58 was a thrill for him.

The Caps were Boston’s Carolina League affiliate. A year later, the Caps’ star player would win the league’s batting crown on his way to Fenway Park and the bigs: Carl Yastrzemski.

George Herman Ruth Jr. becomes “Babe”

It has become a part of baseball lore that George Herman Ruth Jr. hit his first professional home run and acquired a nickname during a stay in Fayetteville in March 1914.

The Baltimore Orioles, then a minor-league team, were holding spring training in Fayetteville. Ruth, then 19, was said to be making his first trip away from Baltimore, his hometown.

The Orioles owner, Jack Dunn, has become Ruth’s legal guardian and – as legend has it – Ruth was being called “Dunn’s new babe” by the players.

On March 7, 1914, in an intrasquad game at the Fayetteville fairgrounds, Ruth hit a towering shot that many of the fans at the game called the longest home run any had seen.

The Orioles played several major league teams in exhibition games that spring, beating the powerful Philadelphia Athletics. Ruth is said to have left Fayetteville believing he could play against the best. And, many believe, with a nickname.

Players highlighted in Hall of Fame

A walk through the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame in Raleigh brings the state’s baseball past into closer focus.

The hall of fame placards list such major leaguers as Mike Caldwell, Luke Appling, Rick Ferrell and Smokey Burgess along with Hunter, Perry and Wilhelm. It’s an impressive display.

According to the hall, more than 70 North Carolina towns and cities have had professional baseball teams, said to be second only to Texas. Some were major-league pipelines, like the Durham Bulls, the Triple-A affilate for the Tampa Bay Rays, which began in 1902 as the Durham Tobacconists.

Among the hall’s other displays is a Homestead Grays jersey once worn by Walter “Buck” Leonard in the days when Major League Baseball was an all-white sport. Leonard, called the “Black Lou Gehrig” of the Negro Leagues, was from Rocky Mount and starred at first base in the 1930s and ’40s, playing 17 years for the Grays.

In 1972, Leonard was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. There are seven from North Carolina: Leonard, Appling, Hunter, Perry, Ferrell, Slaughter and Wilhelm.

A plaque in the hall notes baseball “crosses class, ethnic and racial lines.” It also creates memories. It may do it again Sunday.

This story was originally published July 1, 2016 at 8:58 PM with the headline "Even with no major league team, NC is home to baseball history."