{"id":193294,"date":"2025-10-06T12:22:19","date_gmt":"2025-10-06T12:22:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/193294\/"},"modified":"2025-10-06T12:22:19","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T12:22:19","slug":"can-raleigh-finally-shag-a-major-league-baseball-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/193294\/","title":{"rendered":"Can Raleigh Finally Shag A Major League Baseball Team?"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Raleigh<\/a> is mentioned as a serious contender for a Major League Baseball expansion franchise, the reaction is often a mix of disdain and disbelief.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople say, \u2018Really? Raleigh?\u2019\u201d said Wayne McDonnell of Concord, who taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill<\/a> and is an associate professor of the practice in sports industry management at Georgetown University. \u201cFunny thing is, when you start laying everything out, they go, \u2018It makes total sense.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

MLB last expanded 27 years ago but is nearly certain to select two new teams by 2029, when Commissioner Rob Manfred retires. For seven years, a growing coalition of advocates has built a case for Raleigh.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The pioneer is the MLB Raleigh<\/a> campaign, conceived at a downtown bar in 2018 when two friends, Lou Pascucci and Ryan Foose, were watching a game and saw a clip about expansion contenders.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u201cHe and I were like, \u2018Why is Raleigh never listed?\u2019\u201d Pascucci told The Assembly. They dug into the demographic and economic data that could determine success\u2014including population within an hour\u2019s drive, media market size, and median income\u2014\u201cand Raleigh looked amazing in all of them,\u201d Pascucci said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Lou Pascucci talks to Dwight Nipper near the former site of Raleigh\u2019s minor league baseball stadium. (Tyler Northrup for The Assembly)<\/p>\n

Pascucci, Foose, and another fan, Will Gadd, founded MLB Raleigh to amplify the conversation. The campaign has been using meetups, media appearances, and a website full of data to raise awareness. They\u2019ve also sold merchandise, including a ball cap with the Raleigh area code \u201c919\u201d embedded in a home plate logo, to support local youth baseball.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mayor Janet Cowell, Gov. Josh Stein<\/a> and former Gov. Roy Cooper<\/a> have expressed support. Most importantly, Carolina Hurricanes owner Tom Dundon, whose net worth is estimated at $1.5 billion, says he\u2019s committed to landing a team. Raleigh is now on nearly every pundit\u2019s short list.<\/p>\n

But if the MLB team owners, who will determine the location of the new franchises, want to see proof of concept, Raleigh has a challenge. Because of unfortunate timing, changing economics, personal preferences, and the game\u2019s own rules, there has been no professional baseball, on any level, in Raleigh for 54 years. It\u2019s the largest U.S. city without pro ball within 20 miles of its center.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When the stats are aggregated, when the ledger sheets are opened, when the politicians are heard, the hardest question to answer might be the intangible: Is Raleigh truly a Major League Baseball town?<\/p>\n

When Yaz Roamed Raleigh<\/p>\n

Raleigh does have a rich, though distant, history with pro baseball.<\/p>\n

No trace remains of its first home for minor league ball, League Park, built in 1912 on the south side of New Bern Avenue in East Raleigh, at the end of a streetcar line. The spot where future Detroit Tigers Hall of Fame first baseman Hank Greenberg stretched for throws in the dog days of 1930 is now the backyard of a house on Tarboro Road.<\/p>\n

But the stadium had a good run. Raleigh had a minor league team for five seasons starting in 1913, and for 12 years after World War I, nicknamed the Red Birds, Nats, and then the name that stuck: Capitals. League Park got lights in 1931\u2013four years before the major leagues held their first night game at Crosley Field in Cincinnati.<\/p>\n

Lifelong Raleigh resident Marshall Wyatt, 75, remembers a League Park story told by his father, Edgar: \u201cThey\u2019d get a nickel together, and they\u2019d get on the streetcar. When the driver got there he\u2019d take a break, and the streetcar would just sit there for 20 or 30 minutes. My dad and his buddies would crawl out and climb onto the roof of the streetcar, and they could see over the fence into the ballpark.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Depression was the first test of Raleigh\u2019s connection to the game, after the Capitals folded in 1932. \u201cA lot of minor league teams shut down,\u201d said baseball historian J. Chris Holaday, who teaches writing at Duke University. \u201cDurham shut down for two years. Raleigh shut down for 14.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"The 1913 Raleigh Capitals minor league baseball team. The team folded in 1932. (Courtesy of the State Archives of North Carolina)<\/p>\n

With an eye on better days, and using funds from the New Deal\u2019s Works Progress Administration, in 1938 the city built a larger stadium, Devereux Meadow, atop an old playground. Wedged between Peace, West, and Dawson streets just north of downtown, it had the quirky dimensions of many street-squeezed urban ballparks of the era.<\/p>\n

When the Carolina League restarted after World War II, the Capitals were reborn and joined high school and American Legion teams as tenants at Devereux. The next 15 years were the golden age of pro baseball in Raleigh.<\/p>\n

Wyatt spent many days and nights at Devereux as a boy, as did Dwight Nipper, 77, another lifelong Raleigh resident. Nipper recalls being there when a game was paused in the third inning so Carl Yastrzemski, perhaps the greatest Capital ever, could receive the league\u2019s Player of the Year award for 1959.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But moments like those and the park\u2019s lyrical name were about all that was elegant about Devereux Meadow. Bleachers down the right-field line flanked a wooden grandstand with a tin roof. The expanse behind home plate, to every pitcher\u2019s delight, was spacious, a final resting place for many foul balls. Pop-ups beyond the catcher\u2019s reach would clang on the roof. \u201cThe frame and the restrooms, the dugouts, the whole park was painted dark green,\u201d Nipper said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI actually think the lack of baseball has created a pent-up demand.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lou Pascucci, co-founder of MLB Raleigh<\/p>\n

A batter might glimpse Raleigh\u2019s modest skyline to the south over the wooden center-field fence, plus the Cotton Mill and a huge Philco-Bendix sign on a low hill. He also would see that fence\u2019s distance marker, a forbidding 420 feet.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To the left was something more inviting\u2014a two-story left-field wall with double rows of ads for such midcentury Southern icons as RC Cola and Jesse Jones sausage. Like the Green Monster that Yaz would later patrol at Boston\u2019s Fenway Park, the wall was tall but tantalizing, just 315 to 325 feet away (accounts vary) at the foul pole. Behind it was Dawson Street, later named Downtown Boulevard and now Capital Boulevard, where homers often fell.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Raleigh won league titles in 1946 and 1947, and the large crowds in that era might have seen umpire Lou Bello giving hecklers as good as he got, or Durham Bulls player-manager Willie Duke appraising an ump\u2019s visual acuity by dumping dirt over home plate.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Caps-Bulls \u201cwas a super rivalry, like State-Carolina,\u201d Nipper said. \u201cI remember how the fans got into it. We didn\u2019t fight, but, I mean, we got into it.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Wyatt and Nipper were watching the autumn of pro ball in Raleigh.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe heyday was the early \u201950s,\u201d Holaday said. \u201cThe team invested heavily in a lot of veteran players, including Crash Davis,\u201d a former major leaguer from Gastonia who loosely inspired Kevin Costner\u2019s movie character in the 1988 baseball classic \u201cBull Durham.\u201d Jackie Robinson and Ted Williams played in exhibition games at Devereux that decade. The Caps finished first in the 1948, 1952, 1953, and 1959 regular seasons but lost each time in the playoffs.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Ads line the outfield fence of Devereux Meadow in the 1950s. The ballpark was never elegant and eventually fell into disrepair. (Courtesy of the State Archives of North Carolina)<\/p>\n

All the while, televised big league games kept more fans at home. Attendance fell from more than 2,000 per game in 1946 to less than 500\u2014barely one in 10 seats filled\u2014in the early \u201960s. Years later, the Meadow was \u201coften as quiet as a sanctuary,\u201d News & Observer sportswriter A.J. Carr wrote in 1971.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The franchise held on through the \u201960s as the Caps became the Mets, Senators, Cardinals, and Pirates before merging with the rival Bulls for four seasons beginning in 1968. They split home games between Devereux and Durham Athletic Park, bowing out as the last-place Raleigh-Durham Triangles.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Under gathering storm clouds from Hurricane Beth on a Sunday afternoon, August 15, 1971, just 205 souls watched the last minor league game in Raleigh, a 2-0 win over Lynchburg.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Devereux, which for a while continued to host Legion and high school baseball and football games, slowly crumbled. Saplings poked through the bleachers, and kudzu hid the restrooms. Rocks and glass were hazards on the field. A homeless man fell asleep in the scorer\u2019s booth on a frigid night in February 1978 and never woke up. In 1979, the city demolished what was left and put up a parking lot for garbage trucks.<\/p>\n

The 35-Mile Rule<\/p>\n

No one knew it, but as Devereux fell, the window was closing for pro baseball in Raleigh for more than 40 years.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 1980, Miles Wolff, who grew up in Greensboro and worked in minor league jobs around the South during the \u201970s, scouted several cities looking for a team to buy. Those were \u201cnot great times for minor league baseball,\u201d said Allan Simpson of Durham, who founded the publication Baseball America. \u201cYou could get a franchise by just assuming the debts of the previous owner.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wolff got his for $2,417, choosing to resurrect the Bulls in Durham, where the ballpark still stood. \u201cIt was pretty run down,\u201d Simpson said, \u201cbut it was there\u201d\u2014while Raleigh had no place to play. The Bulls under Wolff quickly became a leader in the renaissance of minor league baseball nationwide.<\/p>\n

Raleigh\u2019s best shot came in the late 1980s. Tom McCormick, who was city attorney for 40 years, and his friend and fellow lawyer Clyde Holt III started a group called Friends of Raleigh Baseball and began going to baseball\u2019s national winter meetings to scout the possibilities.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Dwight Nipper recalls attending games at Raleigh\u2019s Devereux Meadow stadium, which was demolished in 1979. (Tyler Northrup for The Assembly)<\/p>\n

McCormick helped secure a referendum on $3.5 million in bonds to build a stadium, and voters approved it in October 1987. Days before the vote, Kinston Indians owner Stuart Revo expressed interest in moving his Carolina League team to Raleigh, and in compensating Wolff for attendance losses. \u201cWe had discussions,\u201d Wolff, 81, told The Assembly. \u201cI didn\u2019t like it, but it was going to be tough to fight, to keep baseball out of Raleigh.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Raleigh\u2019s City Council rejected Revo, favoring a plan by advertising executive Steve Bryant and former major leaguer Barry Foote to bring a higher-level, Class AA team. It was a consequential decision.<\/p>\n

At that time, baseball\u2019s rules wouldn\u2019t allow a new team in a city whose corporate limits were within 10 miles of an existing team\u2019s city.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI took a close look at the rule, and it talks about building a stadium within the city limits,\u201d McCormick said. \u201cSo it occurred to me that, maybe if we built it outside the city limits \u2026 \u201d The minor leagues\u2019 general counsel agreed with his interpretation. A site beside North Carolina State University\u2019s Carter-Finley Stadium was then outside the city, and it was available.<\/p>\n

\"\"Outside the Durham Bulls Athletic Park in April 2025. (Cliff Hollis for The Assembly)<\/p>\n

But Wake County was crucial to the Bulls. About a third of their fan base was there, \u201cand we were Class A,\u201d Wolff said. \u201cI thought we\u2019d get buried.\u201d So in 1988, Wolff persuaded his fellow team owners to change the rule by prohibiting a new team whose home plate would be within 35 miles of another team\u2019s home plate. Wolff also wouldn\u2019t grant the Raleigh group a waiver.<\/p>\n

Bryant and Foote had bought a team in Columbus, Georgia, and in 1991 they renamed it the Carolina Mudcats and moved it to Zebulon, just outside the 35-mile limit\u2014and 21 miles east of downtown Raleigh. The Bulls, meanwhile, helped lead the rebirth of downtown Durham after Wolff agreed to sell them in May 1990 to Jim Goodmon Sr., president of Capitol Broadcasting Company. The city of Durham, fearing the Bulls might move, found the money to build a new downtown stadium, Durham Bulls Athletic Park, which opened in 1995, and in 1998 the franchise moved up to Class AAA, the highest level of minor league ball.<\/p>\n

There were other proposals in Raleigh, including one in 1991 to build a baseball stadium as part of a huge sports and entertainment complex around Carter-Finley. None ever came to fruition, and the territorial rule remained a hurdle.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cRaleigh has paid the price for something that was established in 1988, and was probably outdated by 1998,\u201d said Ron Morris, former sports journalist and author of No Bull: The Real Story of the Durham Bulls and the Rebirth of a Team and a City.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen (people) think of Raleigh: \u2018What do you mean, Raleigh? What\u2019s there?\u2019 I think we need some sort of a tag. Maybe \u2018Tech City.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Michael Walden, professor emeritus at NC State<\/p>\n

Finally, 10 years ago, Dan Thomson, a commercial real estate broker based in Raleigh, began pushing a plan that would have skirted the territorial rule. The idea was to field a team in the independent Atlantic League<\/a>, an official MLB Partner League not bound by the rule, with a talent level comparable to the high minor leagues. The league has teams from New York to North Carolina, including the High Point Rockers and the Gastonia Ghost Peppers.<\/p>\n

Thomson, now 51, pitched the idea to developers, council members, city officials, potential investors, and Atlantic League leaders.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He got a civil engineer to look at the Devereux site and found that it wouldn\u2019t work. \u201cSo I go on this massive escapade of searching for land,\u201d he told The Assembly, and John Kane, who was redeveloping the North Hills area, mentioned a possible site there.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThen, all of a sudden, my phone rings, and it\u2019s an architect from Populous,\u201d a global firm that designed the new Yankee Stadium and the Mets\u2019 Citi Field, \u201cand they were gracious enough to do some stadium renderings.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Thomson then looked into a crucial piece: funding. He checked municipal bond rates and looked at the Raleigh-Wake interlocal fund, which takes applications for money from a hospitality tax to fund capital projects involving culture, sports, and tourism.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There were a lot of projects in line ahead of him, and then COVID hit. He shelved the idea.<\/p>\n

Edge Over Charlotte<\/p>\n

Advocates for a Raleigh MLB team know about its losing streak, but \u201cI actually think the lack of baseball has created a pent-up demand,\u201d Pascucci said. They also argue that Raleigh in 2025 would be unrecognizable to a time traveler from 1971, and that the team would be a regional and even statewide draw. North Carolina is the largest state without an MLB team.<\/p>\n

Pascucci noted that the population within an hour\u2019s drive of Raleigh is larger than that of all other expansion contenders, and even five current MLB markets: Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Kansas City.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Lou Pascucci, co-founder of MLB Raleigh, and Dwight Nipper near the few structures left of the old Devereux Meadow baseball stadium. (Tyler Northrup for The Assembly)<\/p>\n

Manfred has said that, ideally, one new team would be in the East and one in the West. ESPN last year<\/a> named Charlotte<\/a>, Montreal, Nashville, Orlando, and Raleigh as the eastern contenders, but The Athletic in August narrowed the list <\/a>to Nashville, Orlando, and Raleigh, saying Raleigh had more momentum and political support than Charlotte. A senior MLB writer for The Athletic, Stephen Nesbitt, has since trimmed it to Raleigh and Nashville<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In August, Michael Walden, an economic consultant and professor emeritus at NC State,\u00a0 independently did a feasibility and impact study<\/a> of the contenders that further fortified Raleigh\u2019s case. His data give Raleigh a slight edge over Charlotte, he told The Assembly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Walden said Raleigh\u2019s standout assets include anticipated growth, distance from an existing franchise, a prospective owner, and only a small overlap with the schedules of other popular area sports. Charlotte residents came out a little ahead in average weekly earnings, adjusted for cost of living ($1,060 to $1,015, with Nashville at $987) and media market size (Charlotte is 21st in the country, Raleigh 22nd, and Nashville 26th).\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"A view of the bleachers and a utility shed at Devereux Meadow in 1947. (Courtesy of the State Archives of North Carolina)<\/p>\n

Another Raleigh asset is the number of transplants who have brought their team loyalties and love of the game to North Carolina. Of the 12 most common states of origin<\/a> for recent transplants, nine\u2014California, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas\u2014have a total of 18 MLB teams. The same phenomenon helped to sustain the Hurricanes in their early years.<\/p>\n

As for the Durham Bulls, Goodmon has said<\/a> that by agreement with MLB, the Bulls cannot block a major league team in Raleigh. Pascucci notes that other Triple-A teams have thrived in MLB markets, including Atlanta, Boston, Houston, and Minnesota.<\/p>\n

Walden did mention one potential drawback. \u201cI\u2019d call it an image issue,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen you think of Nashville, everyone knows Nashville: \u2018Oh, Music City.\u2019 Raleigh is actually bigger than Nashville and is projected to grow faster. \u2026 When they think of Raleigh: \u2018What do you mean, Raleigh? What\u2019s there?\u2019 I think we need some sort of a tag. Maybe \u2018Tech City.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Raleigh\u2019s biggest asset, analysts say, is having a principal owner lined up.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When Dundon, with other investors, reached a tentative agreement this summer to buy the NBA\u2019s Portland Trail Blazers, many Raleigh enthusiasts thought he had taken his eye off the ball. But sports talk and podcast veteran Joe Ovies says the contrary is probably true: \u201cHe\u2019s trying to tell Major League Baseball, \u2018I can put together a legitimate ownership group. I can do this.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Eric Frederick has been a reporter, editor, and news audience strategist in North Carolina for more than four decades.<\/p>\n

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