Macon, GA

Park # 36

What I Remember

I remember a face lift. Thirty years ago today was a homecoming of sorts for me. It was at Luther Williams Field in Macon that I began my short career in minor league baseball and where I began to appreciate what minor league baseball is all about.

The park opened in 1929 and thus was already a very old stadium when I worked there in the summer of 1986. But in the years between then and when we arrived on a Wednesday evening in 1991 the old park had gotten a new facade and a fresh coat of paint. It really looked nice and it felt like the classic ballpark that it was and is.

The other thing that had changed was that the team switched affiliations from the Pittsburgh Pirates to the Atlanta Braves and the new relationship with the area’s professional team helped at the ticket office; I recall a good crowd for a Wednesday night game that evening as the Braves played Myrtle Beach.

The Game(s)

Macon Braves 5 Myrtle Beach Hurricanes 2

The Box (Click on the arrows to see more images)

I’m not sure what caused us to stop keeping score of this one in the middle of the game but it may be that we kept score on a notepad for one part of the game and on the scorecard for the other part…I vaguely recall that this was the case but can’t find the notepad. It was a sign of the times that I couldn’t find an account of this game in newspaper clippings, in those days teams in the South Atlantic League often didn’t get much in the way of media coverage. I did find a story about this stop, though. I have added the weekly column I wrote for our hometown newspaper, The Valley News, which focused that week on Macon.

The Trip

We were originally planning to come to Macon in June and were planning to drive all the way to Florida on this drive but after three straight days and nights in the minivan we were ready for a shorter drive and rearranged the schedule a bit so we could stop here after about five hours on this Wednesday.

As a side note, affiliated baseball left Macon in 2002 and has not returned. However, the old park is still there and is now home to the Macon Bacon of the collegiate Coastal Plain League. If you ever want to get a sense for what minor league history really feels like book yourself a flight to Atlanta, rent a car and drive down to Macon..it is only about an hour and a half from the airport. The next day you can continue on to Savannah (another two hours and change) and its historic Grayson Stadium to see the Savannah Bananas then drive back to Atlanta…you could get it all done in a weekend and there isn’t a better pair of stops, anywhere in the sport, to breathe in baseball’s glorious past.

Luther Williams Field was the subject of the first video I created last summer during my Low Mileage Tour project. It is embedded below and can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsbTcoG6LEQ