There are some things that were made for each other — peanut butter and jelly, solid-colored shirts and plaid shorts, and Kinston and baseball.
Without the boys of summer, this place just isn’t the same. The hustle and bustle of a busy downtown during the evening spring and summer hours is gone. The smell of hotdogs and hamburgers no longer fills the downtown air. The crack of the bat, heard from blocks away, is a distant memory. Friday night fireworks have become Friday night flameouts.
This city wasn’t built on baseball, but baseball helped build this city. Now, like the roadways that surround it, Grainger Stadium — once a mini-city in its own — is like a ghost town.
It’s been just two years since Grainger Stadium, which opened in 1949, hasn’t hosted an opening day. But it seems more like two decades.
Nearly all of the 4,100 seats in the house that John J. Rowland built would be full on opening day, but they didn’t stay full. That’s why they’re all now empty.
We took our beloved Indians and our favorite summer pastime for granted. We felt the lowest ticket and concession prices in the Carolina League would always be there at our convenience, yet it never seemed convenient to go. Now, the Indians are in Zebulon, and go by the Carolina Mudcats. Our famously-coined K-Tribe are now the C-Cats, or C-Mud, or Mudflaps, none of which have nearly as nice a ring to it.
The Mudcats were 3-1 through Monday’s games and led the Carolina League Southern Division. The last time they were the Indians, they almost — almost — left the town that had known professional baseball for all but a handful of years since 1921 as champions.
It would have been fitting had the Indians won the Carolina League title on their way out. But it’s almost hard not to ignore karma — Kinstonians didn’t appreciate the team enough to give ownership a reason to keep it here therefore the baseball gods left them wondering what might have been.
Grainger Stadium is empty. It’s lonely. It’s a house without a home. It’s too nice of a venue to be left to chaos — if left unattended, it will fall apart.
The City of Kinston was in negotiations with country music sensation Scotty McCreery about performing a concert at the historic venue, which has been the home to major league all-stars C.C. Sabathia, Manny Ramirez, Jim Thome, and others, but those negotiations have now fallen through.
While that’s a good way to put the old ballpark to use, what it really needs is to be a field of dreams again. A field where young 18- to 22-year-olds still have aspirations of reaching the big leagues. A field where there is baseball again.
This town needs baseball, desperately. Hopefully, baseball will once again need Kinston. And soon.
Ryan Herman’s column appears in The Free Press on Wednesdays. Reach him at 252-559-1073 or Ryan.Herman@Kinston.com. Follow him on Twitter: @KFPSports.