The Complete Archive

The day will begin at 9:00 AM with a Major League Baseball Play Ball clinic for area youth. An official commemoration of the Centennial will follow the clinic at 11:00 AM. Finally, to conclude the day the Spartanburg Peaches and the Greenwood Flying Monkeys of the summer collegiate wooden bat Blue Ridge League will play a regular season game at 1:00 PM.

And boy, have we been busy getting ready for it...

…and a sure sign of that fact is the giveaway at the Hub City Spartanburgers Fifth Third Park in downtown Spartanburg on Sunday, June 28th.

Summer has arrived at Duncan Park Stadium: American Legion Post 28’s baseball season is well underway. This year the Post will sponsor both a Junior (players born on or after January 1, 2009) and a Senior team (players born on or after January 1, 2007), and as usual its home games will be played at the historic ballpark which opened in July 1926.

Members of The Friends of Duncan Park and supporters of area youth gathered at the ballpark on Thursday, April 23rd, to spruce up the stadium as part of the warmup for the July celebration of its 100th anniversary.

On Saturday, April 18th, several dozen area youth took the field at Duncan Park Stadium for a clinic sponsored by Major League Baseball (MLB), the Youth Sports Bureau (YSB), and Palmetto Baseball Prospects (PBP). Once again the sound of bats against balls and gloves hard-thumped by throws to first filled the air.

On the morning of Monday, February 9th, the Hub City Spartanburgers held a press launch at Duncan Park Stadium for their upcoming Pastimes series of alternate identity promotions which will be a headline feature of the 2026 baseball season at Fifth Third Park. Each of the six games which make up the series will commemorate a different era or classification of hardball played at the old ballpark over the last 100 years. Spartanburgers General Manager Tyson Jeffers, Spartanburg Mayor Jerome Rice, Negro Leagues historian Luther Norman, and I were invited to make brief remarks at the event. Mine follow below.

Beginning this week the Spartanburg County Headquarters Library will host “100 Years of Duncan Park Stadium,” a new exhibition curated by Brad Steinecke, the Assistant Director of Local History in the Kennedy Room. This 19-panel display features a couple of cases containing memorabilia and ephemera from the Library’s archive of items commemorating the history of this grand old stadium. The exhibition is located on the lower level of the Library in the AT&T Exhibition Gallery and will be on display January 20—March 4, 2026.

Did he make a stop in the Hub City on his way to The Show? Did the man who broke Babe Ruth’s home run record and became the greatest Braves player of all time set foot on the Sparkle City diamond? As is true of many issues in pre-integration Black baseball, the answer to this question is a probably reliable “Yes!” but it’s hard to provide the documentation to prove that it is so.