With MLB announcing baseball is coming back next week, I dug out an old story about a Rocky Mount baseball team. All I can say is thank goodness we now have the Carolina Mudcats (and several other minor league teams within a short drive).
I remember wanting to go see a minor league baseball game in Rocky Mount when I was kid. I knew very little about the Rocky Mount Pines, a team that played one season in the Class A Carolina League in 1980.
I was 11. It might have been best that I couldn’t get to a game. The team finished 24-114-1 — yes, they had a tie — and are largely considered to have suffered the worst minor league season of all time.
It was a shame, really. Rocky Mount had a nice history of minor league baseball in a collection of teams, most notably the Rocky Mount Leafs. In addition, Hall of Famer Buck Leonard, star of the Negro Leagues, was born and lived in Rocky Mount. The team played in a great old ballpark, Rocky Mount Municipal Stadium.
There used to be a great high school tournament played there, RMSH and American Legion Post 58 used it as a home field. I enjoyed covering games, and the locker room was covered with great old photos of past players who came through. It appeared in the movie “Bull Durham” and was torn down in 1987.
Hal Fichman was the manager and Lou Haneles was the owner of the Pines. They had worked together before in two other leagues..
It was a disaster. In the end, the Carolina League had to offer financial support just so the league could finish the season. At one point, the team lost 18 games in a row and 36 of 38.
It was reported the team left town in September 1980, leaving unpaid bills of $7,000. They went bankrupt and almost folded multiple times during the season.
According to a Sports Illustrated story done at the time, the players made $325 a month.
You can read more at Fangraphs, by clicking here.
Yes, indeed. Thanks for this story. There once were many local baseball teams throughout North Carolina. Playwright Paul Green played for a semi-pro team early in his career that paid him more than he gotpriming tobacco. In the 1940s, the American Legion rivalry between Henderson (my hometown) and Oxford sometimes grew so heated that the umpires needed police protection.