Kingsport Is A Baseball Town
Kingsport, Tennessee is a baseball town. Always has been.
“My entire life, we’ve always had a minor league team in Kingsport,” said Pat Shull, Kingsport mayor. “We see it as sort of having a feather in your cap, something you can brag on.”
There’s been a baseball team in Kingsport since 1921, according to Baseball-Reference; the town is on the cusp of its 100th baseball anniversary. The parent club has changed often: The team in Kingsport has been affiliated with the Dodgers, the Senators, the White Sox, the Giants, the Orioles, the Pirates, the Royals, and the Braves. But since 1979, they’ve been the Kingsport Mets.
Shull isn’t just putting on a show of fandom to burnish his mayoral credentials. “I’m a longtime baseball fan,” he said. His brother Mickey, he said, was a Kingsport Pirates bat boy back in the ‘60s, and used to bring home broken bats. Shull saw his first game around age six. “Baseball has always been my favorite sport.”
Kingsport is full of long-time baseball fans. Clay Ramsey, a Milligan College student, started going to games with his father in 2009. Darrell Ceciliani quickly became his favorite player. Thaddeus Noto, who remembers seeing both the Giants and the Mets play at the Polo Grounds, has gone to Kingsport Mets games since 1997, when his step-son Josh Lawson became the assistant general manager. Jason Clinker used to go to a few games a year, but in the last few years, he started going to a few games a week. He ran down Jarred Kelenic’s first home run—sorry Mets fans—gave him the ball, and got a picture.
Kingsport is a baseball town full of baseball fans—but it may not be for long. MLB’s minor league contraction plan, first reported by Baseball America in November, targets the Kingsport Mets for elimination. It would also eliminate the other four teams in the area: the Bristol Pirates, the Elizabethton Twins, the Johnson City Cardinals, and the Greeneville Reds. In fact, if MLB’s plan becomes official, the entire Appalachian League will cease to exist.
For fans, that’s a hard pill to swallow. “It’s kind of like taking part of a family and pulling it apart,” said Darrell Shepherd, who moved to Kingsport five years ago. He and his son Kenley started attending games obsessively. Shepherd says they’ve missed only a game or two in five years.
Kingsport is a small town and the Mets play in a small stadium, so it’s not too difficult, if you try, to get to know the players. Kenley, Shepherd said, immediately became friendly with Ricardo Cespedes and Gregorix Estevez. Both players moved on; most don’t spend all that long at rookie ball. But they stayed in touch. Now Kenley, who’s played baseball since he was three, calls Ricardo from travel baseball tournaments to talk about how he played.
And when Kenley heard the news about contraction?
“He got pretty upset,” Shepherd said. “Almost to tears.”
So far, most coverage of MLB’s contraction plan has focused on logistics, and to be fair, there are a lot of logistics involved. What does this mean for the Padres? How will it impact Adley Rutschman’s development? Which teams will move where, and who will need to change affiliations?
But beyond the who, what, when, where, and why, there’s an emotional story that hasn’t been fully explored. Behind the faceless headline “MLB targets 42 teams for contraction” are 42 cities that will be devastated. Children in 42 cities, who regard ballplayers as strange combinations of gods and older brothers, won’t have baseball to watch anymore. Fans who’ve watched baseball for decades will suddenly lose the opportunity. Thousands upon thousands of fans who haven’t gotten into baseball yet, but would have one day, now won’t even have the chance.
Imagine if, one day, MLB announced that your favorite team would cease to exist. Imagine the emotional turmoil of thousands of people who have devoted years to a ballclub, only to see it suddenly vanish. Imagine learning only after-the-fact that you may have seen your last pitch; that sitting in the stands with a hot dog on a warm summer night and watching your favorite team on the field may never happen again. Imagine having to tell your children. Imagine all that, and you’ll have some idea what MLB’s plan will do to cities and towns with minor league teams. The pain fans of the Seattle Supersonics, their team more than a decade defunct, still feel? Multiply it by 42.
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There may not be a bigger Kingsport Mets fan than Alicia Starnes. She started going to games in 1985, when her cousin, Mark Willoughby, was on the team. She hasn’t stopped.
“At one time I was going to just about all of them, even the away games,” she said. “I was almost like everyone’s little cousin.”
Starnes’ grandfather, called Doc, used to host players back when the Mets placed their players with host families. When Doc died in 2002, Alicia took over his hosting duties.
Hosting minor league players is a unique endeavor, especially at rookie level, many players’ first stop. Some players—the first-round picks, the bonus babies—are already on their way to becoming household names. Some will never be more than footnotes in baseball history. At the same time, most players are around 18 years old, with all the quirks and issues that entails.
For instance, Starnes remembers a dispute with Daniel Murphy that got out of hand. Murphy was a Florida Gator fan; Starnes roots for the Tennessee Vols. And Murphy couldn’t stop insulting her team.
“The more he talked, the madder I got,” she said.
Finally, she’d had enough. “I don’t care if you sleep in the barn, you sleep outside with the dog,” she told Murphy. “You’re not sleeping at my house.”
But Lozier also said that she’s rarely seen bonuses or high draft picks go to players’ heads.
“It rarely ever seemed to actually sink in to them that they were millionaires,” she said.
Starnes has gotten along well with most players. Josh Thole called her “grandma.” She keeps in touch with Butch Huskey on Facebook. David Wright ate at her house all the time. That was part of an arrangement with Lozier, who hosted Wright: Lozier and Starnes would take turns cooking enormous meals, and feeding both of their groups of players.
Lozier, who hosted players for years, has her own host-family horror stories. She remembers one player walking through her house naked after a shower; she quickly put a stop to it.
Once, a player who lived with Lozier got involved with a girl who hung out around the ballpark. “If I was saying it for print, I’d say she was very loose, morally,” Lozier said. Outfielder Bailey Chancey, who stole 30 bases that 1996 season and roomed with the player in the relationship, took the problem into his own hands. He moved his bed outside the door to their room, to prevent any unauthorized visits.
But like Starnes, the vast majority of the players Lozier hosted were respectful and polite. David Wright, she said, was a “wonderful young man.” Al Shirley, the Mets’ first-round pick in 1991, couldn’t cook a meal to save his life—so Preston Wilson would come to the house, cook for Shirley and himself, and try to convince Lozier that Shirley had done the cooking.
Players raved about the food Lozier prepared for them. Raúl Casanova, who played for Kingsport in 1991 and 1992, later told her that he missed her ham. Ross Peeples, who pitched for Kingsport in 2000 and lived with Starnes, specifically mentioned Lozier’s southern, home-cooked meals.
Starnes worked hard to make Peeples feel at home, even after he’d moved on. Peeples is from Georgia, and In 2001, and when he was playing for Brooklyn, he called Starnes to catch up, and mentioned that in Brooklyn, for the first time in his life, he couldn’t find Mountain Dew anywhere. Starnes shipped him some.
Brian Cole, the hyped outfield prospect who died in a car accident in 2000, stayed with Lozier in 1998. “He was homesick,” she said. One day, a few days before the season ended, Cole went out to his car and brought back a bag of gym clothes that had sat in his trunk since Spring Training. Lozier washed them twice.
Brandon Copeland, an outfielder from Topeka, came to Kingsport in 1997, and stayed with Starnes and Doc. He fell in love with the town.
“The humbleness and the space and everything about the town,” Copeland said. “As you go up to the different levels, they don’t have that.”
Lozier put on get-togethers and potlucks. Tony Johnson was an outfielder, and his host mom brought the players together every week for Taco Tuesday. Copeland even got rides to games from his host family.
“That’s really unlike anything that happens, other than when you’re under your parents’ roof,” he said.
Denny Harriger flew to Kingsport the day after he graduated high school. There had been a teacher’s strike, so graduation was late. He flew in June 24th, 1987, about ten days after the rest of the team. His host parents, Rick and Sandra Spivey, lived on a golf course, and left their doors unlocked. Rick, a lawyer, would later own the team. Even then, Harriger was struck by how welcoming his hosts were—even to the point of foolishness.
“They didn’t know me from Adam,” he said. “I could have been some crack dealer or something. Of course, I wasn’t.”
In his first season, Harriger, away from home for the first time, got homesick. “I didn’t want to stick around and play baseball,” he said, “which was my dream since I was five.”
But then, he started adjusting to the town—and loving it.
“I loved that city. It just felt like a home,” he said. “The higher you go, the cities get a little bit bigger.”
Harriger came back to Kingsport in 1988 and had a spectacular season. He went 7-2, pitched two complete games, and put up a 2.14 E.R.A. Kingsport went 47-26, beat the Bristol Pirates in a one-game playoff to win their division, and beat the Burlington Indians on the road to win the championship. Harriger pitched the championship game. The next day, in a peculiar if illustrative demonstration of what it’s like to be an 18-year-old professional baseball player, with the season over, he flew back home to his parents.
“These kids come in and we try to make it a home for them,” said Lora McCoy, a longtime fan. “And on top of that, when their parents come in, we try to make them feel at home.”
McCoy remembers Wilmer Flores, who played for Kingsport in 2008 at age 16, crying from homesickness. She also remembers the entire community taking him in.
“They become part of your family,” she said. “It’s just amazing. They’ll always consider Kingsport part of their family as well.”
When Edgar Alfonzo, Edgardo’s brother, managed the Kingsport Mets in 2000, McCoy introduced his wife Sharon to Pal’s, a Tennessee restaurant chain famous for its sweet tea. McCoy and John Moorehouse, a longtime sports reporter for the Kingsport Times-News, once went out to play pool with Mike Jacobs and Forrest Lawson, teammates on the 2000 team. McCoy was always going to their games, so they made a bet: if McCoy and Moorehouse won, Lawson and Jacobs would come to one of her softball games. Sure enough, McCoy and Moorehouse won. Lawson and Jacobs showed up at her softball game a few days later.
Even the people who are just fans, who aren’t hosts or friends of hosts but just sit in the bleachers to watch baseball, try to do their part. Ramsey said he meets players’ parents in the stands, and has built up relationships with them. In 2016, Ian Strom was a third baseman for Kingsport, and Ramsey met his parents in the bleachers.
“I knew when they were here because of their accent, being from Massachusetts,” he said.
Mark Davis is an almost obsessive Kingsport Mets fan: he says he’s been to 804 games since 2000. He runs the “Kingsport Mets Dugout” fan page, and live-tweets games; before COVID shut down the 2020 season, he was hoping to get into video coverage as well.
“I’ll have parents of players message me wanting to know how their son is doing,” he said. In fact, when we talked in May, he said that he’d talked to Nate Peden’s mother just the other day. Peden, a 13th-round pick in 2017, played for Kingsport in 2018 and 2019.
“Being able to bond with them, being there to support them, that’s what it’s all about,” he said.
Charles Vientos and his family went to Kingsport in August 2018, to watch his son Mark play. Baseball Prospectus ranked Mark Vientos the Mets’ sixth-best prospect going into the 2020 season.
“Great fans,” Charles said. “Local people that are really nice.”
Charles remembers landing in Georgia, then driving to Tennessee and being amazed by the scenery. At one point, uncertain of how to get to the stadium, they stopped for directions at a gas station, and Charles was again struck by how friendly everyone was. With Charles in the stands, Mark hit two home runs. A young fan in attendance found one, and brought it to Charles; after the game, Charles had Mark give the child a bat.
“You know the metaphor, ‘it takes a village,’” Copeland said. “Kingsport is a village.”
***
Hunter Wright Stadium, where the Kingsport Mets play, is a ballpark, but it’s also a community itself.
“I’ve watched kids grow up there, chasing the foul balls,” Starnes said. “I’ve watched people age and pass away.”
“I know at least a couple of couples that met working up there and got married,” Moorehouse said.
Anything can happen at the stadium. McCoy, who works for the Times-News, remembers being at a game in August 2019 with several higher-ups, among them the circulation manager and the publisher. She turned around, and there was Terry Collins.
“He was so frickin’ nice,” she said.
Shull, the mayor, has two dogs: a German Shepherd “that behaves like a Corgi,” and another that’s four different types. He regularly brings his dogs to the dog park across from the stadium. As the dogs play, he can see the Mets practicing on the field.
“I get out and watch a number of games every year,” said Congressman Phil Roe, who represents the first district of Tennessee. The district houses four Appalachian League teams, including the Kingsport Mets, with a fifth just across the Virginia state line. “It’s a great evening out. It’s not expensive, and they’ve got all kinds of stuff for your kids to do. A regular person who works at a regular job can still watch baseball.”
When the news about MLB’s contraction plan came out, Roe didn’t like what he heard. Along with 106 other members of Congress, Roe sent a letter to MLB commissioner Rob Manfred opposing the plan. He also invited representatives from MLB to visit the district in person.
“Look, I want you guys to come to my district where I live,” Roe said he told MLB representatives. “Instead of having somebody tell you, I want you to go meet these people, look them in the eye, and go visit these parks. We can do it in a day. We can drive around, see every one of them. And tell us what we need to do to keep you here.” But before that meeting could happen, COVID shut down most of the country.
Like Shull, Roe is a big baseball fan. He remembers listening to Dizzy Deancalling games on the radio. He played a little bit of baseball, but could never seem to hit the fastball. His card collection, he said, numbers more than 1500 cards, all from 1962 and earlier, and includes five Mickey Mantle cards—his favorite player.
“I used to work in an old country store, and the guy would let me get either a drink or baseball cards,” he said. “I selected baseball cards at the end of the day.”
But baseball, he said, has changed, and not necessarily for the better.
“Baseball, and many professional sports, I think, have become too corporate, and have forgotten the fans,” he said.
If MLB’s plan to contract 42 teams goes through as it’s currently written, the effects will be fairly straightforward. Most importantly, minor league baseball will instantly shrink by more than 1000 players. Minor League players are scheduled to get a pay raise in 2021—minimum salary at rookie level will go from $290 to $400 a week—and MLB has described the contraction plan as a way to improve work conditions for minor league players. But critics disagree.
“In truth, as always, it’s designed to save money, lots of money,” wrote Bill Madden in the New York Daily News last November. In Forbes, Jerry Beach speculated that cutting more than 1000 minor league jobs could be “a particularly vindictive way to answer the criticisms that minor league players aren’t paid enough.”
“A sport that has billed itself as the national pastime for the better part of two centuries once again appears as if it is trying to yank the game away from a sizable part of its constituency during a national crisis of previously unimaginable proportions,” Beach continued. “Manfred has declared baseball must be a part of the healing process, whenever that begins. But how does taking the game away from some of its smallest and most vulnerable locales accomplish that objective?”
“Where I live, in the Appalachian League, this is the field of dreams,” Roe said. “That’s where we live. I mean, these are rookie league teams, and here’s corporate baseball thinking about doing away with a league that’s been there 110 years almost.”
Baseball, Roe said, cannot just be run as a business. Rather, it’s a hybrid: part private business, part public trust. MLB’s anti-trust exemption might lend some legal weight to the theory, but it’s ethically sound as well. It’s difficult to argue that ripping a team away from its fans and its longtime home is worth saving MLB owners a few million dollars.
Shull summed it up: “It’s hard to tell us that you need to save money when you can afford to spend that much money on a free agent.”
“We talk about it being America’s game, it really is,” Roe said. “As kids growing up, catching a ball in the dirt, throwing with your mom or dad or whomever, and then dreaming that hey, maybe one day I could be playing in the big leagues—well that doesn’t happen if you don’t have those opportunities out there.”
Roe read out a list of stars who had played in the Appalachian League: Jacob deGrom, Darryl Strawberry, Ron Guidry, Greg Maddux, Alan Trammell, Nolan Ryan, Eddie Murray, Kirby Puckett, Jim Thome, Cal Ripken Jr.
“People in New York don’t know about this, and think it’s a small thing, but it’s really the fabric of baseball. It truly is,” he said. “This is where a young kid, a young baseball player, can come out with these dreams. He can look at that Mets roster that I read off to you and think, ‘you know, maybe I can be one of those guys.’”
Kenley Shepherd wants to be one of those guys. So do thousands and thousands of kids in small towns all over the country, who dream of growing up to be just like the ballplayers they see on the field and around town. MLB’s contraction plan doesn’t just eliminate 42 teams. It eliminates 42 sources of joy and hope, 42 reasons to look forward to summer, 42 cities full of people who, without a team to root for, can simply give up on baseball. When 42 teams disappear, 42 cities will lose irreplaceable parts of their identities. Kingsport certainly will.
Roe paused. Then he continued.
“I would encourage them to remember their roots, where they came from, Major League Baseball,” he said. “It’s not all about just the bottom line. It’s about dreams and aspirations and opportunity. And I hope they remember that.”
