The Most Grammatically Correct Scoreboard in Minor League Baseball

There’s much minutiae involved in a Minor League Baseball game that many fans never notice and most never think about. At Duncan Park Stadium one of its most important components was the cadre of ballpark employees that ensured the dependable operation of the facilities. Among these was a core group of local educators who supplemented their meager teacher salaries by working at the ballpark during their summer break and who were responsible as teachers for what one of them called “the scoreboard that was most grammatically correct” of any Minor League scoreboard.

Many of the mainstay summer employees at Duncan Park were teachers in Spartanburg County School District Seven. Among these was Sam Morgan King, a Greenville native who had played baseball himself, first for Greenville High School and then for Wofford College, which at the time actually played at Duncan Park Stadium. Morgan had been a pretty good second baseman and worked at the ballpark as the keeper of the scoreboard. At McCracken Junior High School he was a coach and a popular 7th grade Language Arts teacher known for both his causticly ironic sense of humor and his love for his young students. Later he became supervisor of Spartanburg County Adult Education.

Morgan’s job at Duncan Park was to man the scoreboard, initially at a time before the City fathers or the Phillies executives were willing to pony up the funds necessary for a fully electronic signboard. He at first operated a toggle-switch display. Next he handled individual numbers manually to update the count, the score, and a few other relevant details as the game progressed inning by inning. For accuracy he depended on updates from official scorer Dan Smith, who watched the play develop with binoculars from a trailer down the right field line.

Morgan’s duties could be difficult. For one thing, it might be “hotter than 40 hells” on the field and in the press box during July and August. For another, if the pitcher was working fast or the hits were coming quickly, juggling the numbers on the board could be nerve-wracking. Since he also had to update batting averages with a calculator during games, it was a struggle to keep current even after the new Daktronics scoreboard was finally installed. 

Still, there were advantages, among them getting to observe future MLB players like Cliff Floyd, George Bell, and Ryne Sandberg as they roamed the outfield grass or the dirt of the infield. One night, too, Julia Roberts and Kiefer Sutherland showed up when she was filming Sleeping with the Enemy in Spartanburg at Converse College. Knuckleball ace and broadcaster Phil Niekro attended one game, and when Morganna the Kissing Bandit performed at a Phillies game, she kissed Morgan right on the top of his prematurely balding head. Libby Armstrong, who came to virtually every home game the Phillies played for many years in her wheelchair and who won an award as the team’s most loyal fan, was one of his stadium favorites. 

Morgan passed on to the great ballfield of dreams in the sky in 2018; his obituary included his favorite quotation from Groucho Marx: “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” Morgan’s friends recall his own cleverness, warmth, and good humor in Groucho’s words. 

Another McCracken Junior High veteran who served at Duncan Park was Dan Smith, mathematics teacher extraordinaire. A Vietnam veteran as well, as were many colleagues of his generation, Dan, like Morgan King, was a rarely observed presence in the stadium. His station was in a trailer down the right field baseline or above the grandstand in the wooden press box, where his skills as a statistician were invaluable in his role as Official Scorer. Dan learned to keep score from his father, who had kept the books for Textile League teams, and was recommended for the Duncan Park job by the coach at Wofford College.

Dan began to go to games at Duncan Park during the glory days of the Phillies under their legendary GM Pat Williams, and he spent a decade as Official Scorer in the 1980s and ‘90s. “It was a thrill,” Dan says, “to watch big league players who made it from Duncan Park.” He even subscribed to Baseball America and tried to follow them as their careers progressed. Among his favorite minor leaguers at Duncan Park was Craig Biggio, who played for the rival Asheville Tourists in 1987 and had a 20-year career with the Houston Astros at catcher, 2nd base, and the outfield. Dan says proudly today that he predicted Biggio would make The Show. He also watched the umpires, many of whom later spent years in AAA baseball waiting for a chance to officiate in the big leagues. Among his most-favored men in blue behind the plate was Wally Bell, who like himself taught during the off-season. 

The third stadium staffer who worked during the offseason at McCracken was Chip Rivers, a wrestling coach and PE teacher who was to become a school administrator. Chip possessed a wry sense of humor like Morgan’s, was the son of Spartanburg Herald-Journal Editor Rudy Rivers, and played a mean game of poker. In his position at Gate Operations he greeted fans as they entered the stadium, and he spent the nine innings of each game carefully observing the pageant of humanity that spread out below the concourse and out in the bleachers. 

As wrestling coach at Spartanburg High School, Chip always spoke up on behalf of his grapplers, whose sport he thought was under-appreciated. They worked hard for him, and he rightly believed that they deserved both more attention and more support from school administrators and booster clubs. At Duncan Park he appreciated the fans too and would go the extra mile for them, helping to look out for wheelchair-bound superfan Libby Armstrong during games and earning well-deserved gifts of appreciation from fans like the six-foot-seven-inch fan from Beaumont who would bring bundles of vegetables to the stadium staff in the summer.

Chip didn’t miss much at the stadium. One summer there was a Spartanburg pitcher who had “serious mental issues,” he told me. “He was paranoid and used to come to the ballpark in a trunk.”

The most visible of all the junior high school employees working at Duncan Park was Jeanie Lomax, now Jeanie Bolton, who variously worked souvenirs and concessions. A retiree today, Jeanie in the 1980s was nimble and full of energy as she sprinted up and down the grandstand steps, sped along the concourse, and hustled through the box seats to deliver the food and drink orders of the fans holding the more expensive tickets.

Jeanie remembers Julia Roberts and Kiefer Sutherland snuggling in their seats and also Saturday Night Live and Groundhog Day star Bill Murray, who often still appears unexpectedly at Major and Minor League baseball fields around the country. Today Murray is even Co-Owner and Director of Fun for the Charleston Riverdogs. Jeanie reminded me too that former District 7 teachers Kay and Bill Chidester also worked at Duncan Park, Kay as Concessions Manager and Bill as her right hand man. Bill later became Associate Executive Director at the Charles Lea Center and a Career Counselor/Academic Advisor at Spartanburg Community College.

Just like to takes a village to raise a child, it takes a team of civilians to support a baseball team, and this fact was even truer thirty-five years ago before Minor League stadiums had all the bells and whistles that they do today. The success of the baseball-loving, hard-working stadium crew at Duncan Park who made the games a happy time for the many fans who used to go there can be measured today in the many fond memories of those same fans.