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Pablo Guerrero has the makings of a future baseball superstar. The Down East Wood Ducks first baseman/outfielder has the genes; he’s the son of Hall of Famer Vladimir Guerrero and the brother of current Toronto Blue Jays All-Star Vlad Guerrero Jr.
And he has a jumpstart. At just 18 years old, he’s already in his second professional season.
What he doesn’t have is a walk-up song. And that’s the challenge facing “Sugar” Shane Aube as he goes through his pregame routine in Kinston’s Grainger Stadium press box on August 22.
“Believe it or not, you run into some players that are so serious that they don’t care about that,” said Aube, who’s in his second season as the Wood Ducks public address announcer. “What I do for those guys is, I’ve got files and files from all the teams I do.”
As Aube clicks through folders on his laptop, the playlist names speak to what it’s like being the voice of much of eastern North Carolina: Wood Ducks 2023, Wood Ducks 2024, University of Mount Olive baseball, Rosewood High School softball, Parrott Academy baseball.
All of the jobs matter. But this one—calling professional baseball games—this is the one he dreamt of while listening to Phil Rizzuto call New York Yankees games as a kid.
And it’s coming to an end.
After the 2024 season, the Wood Ducks will leave to become the Hub City Spartanburgers in Spartanburg, S.C. As Aube calibrated his playlist for the matchup with the Delmarva Shorebirds, there were 10 games left in this lame Ducks season.
Ten more nights of queuing the walk-up songs to each player’s exact specifications. Ten more nights of punctuating strikeouts with the chorus of NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye.” Ten more nights of ensuring local law firms and gun shops get their money’s worth for sponsoring a cleanup hitter’s at-bats or a starting pitcher’s pickoffs.
“These companies pay for that, so I’ve gotta hit it,” Aube says. “HIT IT, BABY!”
The last game of Grainger Stadium’s history as a minor league baseball ballpark is scheduled for Sunday at 1 p.m. But the Down East Wood Ducks’ fate was sealed in November 2020.
From 1903 to 2020, Major League Baseball (MLB) and Minor League Baseball (MiLB) were separate entities working together under a contract called the Professional Baseball Agreement.
The agreement set the terms for allocating and paying players, scheduling games, maintaining facilities, placing teams, and travel. It guaranteed that there’d be at least 160 minor league teams, each affiliated with an MLB club.
Every 10 years, the agreement was renegotiated. MLB negotiators started the 2020 negotiations by proposing a reduction in the number of teams, from 162 to 120. The controversy around that plan created some strange political alliances, according to Scott Bush, CEO of the Society for American Baseball Research.
“You had [U.S. Sen.] Bernie Sanders [I-Vt.] and [U.S. Sen.] Chuck Grassley [R-Iowa] both saying there’s no way we’re going to allow Major League Baseball to eliminate minor league baseball teams,” Bush said. Members of Congress threatened to levy new taxes on MLB and revoke its antitrust exemption if minor league teams were eliminated.
But once COVID-19 incapacitated the country and occupied lawmakers’ attention, Bush said, MLB had a freer hand. Talks stalled, with the number of teams a crucial sticking point. The 2020 minor league season was canceled, the agreement expired with no new deal, and MLB took over direct management of all teams in November 2020.
When the minor leagues returned in 2021, there were only 120 teams. The Wood Ducks survived, Bush said, because they were owned by their MLB parent, the Texas Rangers. Most of the teams that lost affiliations were locally owned and played in short-season leagues at the lowest levels of minor league baseball. Many have kept playing as independents or in developmental leagues for college players or MLB draft prospects, although at least seven went out of business entirely.
But the reprieve for the Wood Ducks was only temporary. As it took over the minor leagues, MLB made other policy changes that would lead directly to their departure.
The first was raising standards for stadiums. A major revision to facilities rules–the first in 25 years–mandated secure parking areas for players and team staff, separate bathroom and changing facilities for female staff and umpires, bigger locker rooms, and more. MLB gave teams until 2025 to meet the new standards.
It would have cost $5.5 million to make all of the needed upgrades to city-owned Grainger Stadium, said Bill Ellis, who was Kinston’s parks and recreation director from 1984 to 2017. The city and the team improvised where they could; an RV Ellis owns became the female-only changing facility, for example. But full compliance would come at a high price for a city that already had spent $1.9 million on renovations in 2016 to draw the Wood Ducks there in the first place.
While the clock ticked on the facility mandate, changes in who owns teams and where they’re placed began to reshape the minors. The Professional Baseball Agreement had put limits on how many teams a single entity could own and on how geographically close two minor league teams can be. When that agreement lapsed, so did those limitations.
That opened the door, Bush said, for the 2021 founding of Diamond Baseball Holdings (DBH). DBH is a subsidiary of Silver Lake, a Silicon Valley private equity firm, and Endeavor, a Los Angeles-based media and talent agency.
DBH has since bought 35 minor league teams, including the Wood Ducks in May 2023.
Team staff began hearing rumors the Texas Rangers would sell in early 2022, according to assistant general manager Janell Fitch, who’s spent a quarter-century working in the minors, much of it in Kinston. While the sale itself wasn’t a surprise, the team’s relocation was.
“None of us saw that coming,” she said.
The day DBH announced the Wood Ducks purchase, Spartanburg-area media reported that the franchise would move to a new 3,500-seat stadium that will be the centerpiece of a $425 million retail and entertainment project.
Under the old agreement, Bush said, “that would have never been allowed” because nearby Greenville already had a team within the 25-mile limit specified in the PBA.
But it happened, and everything that led to it—the higher facility standards, the lowered barriers to ownership consolidation and geographic competition—was due to COVID, Bush and local observers agree.
“The pandemic killed minor league baseball in Kinston,” said Bryan Hanks, former sports editor of The Kinston Free Press and Wood Ducks PA announcer. “There’s no nice way to say it.”
August 22
Down East Wood Ducks 1, Delmarva Shorebirds 0
Bottom of the 2nd inning
Migos’ “Is You Ready” played as Wood Ducks leadoff hitter Pablo Guerrero walked to the plate. He popped out to first base, and the next two batters went down in order.
On the Grainger Stadium concourse, Fitch and marketing coordinator Maddie Meehan brainstormed ways to find batboys for the remaining nine games. Summer staff and interns started school this week, and the Wood Ducks were short-handed. Facebook ads seem like a good bet.
Filling in for the Shorebirds game was team general manager Jon Clemmons.
“He wouldn’t tell you, but he’s in heaven,” Fitch said.
Kinston last faced the end of minor league baseball 13 years ago. The Kinston Indians left town in 2011 to replace a franchise in Zebulon that was on its way to Florida.
The Indians departed at the nadir of a decades-long decline for Kinston. From 1990 to 2010, the city’s population dropped from 25,295 to 21,677. Textile manufacturing and tobacco farming, two Lenoir County mainstays, shriveled in the 1990s and early 2000s, and the ’08 recession sped the downward slide.
The local economy bottomed out in 2011, according to an analysis of 2000-2022 U.S. Census data by East Carolina University economics professor Jonathan Lee. That year was the worst for employment and fourth-worst for real income per capita in that period in Lenoir County, where Kinston is the county seat.
After the Indians left, Ellis, the former parks and rec director, did everything he could to keep Grainger Stadium in good shape. He helped start the Freedom Classic, an annual series between the teams at the Air Force and Naval academies. He booked concerts and other college matchups.
“I knew once the Indians left that if we didn’t do stuff at the stadium, it would get into disrepair,” Ellis said. “We did it to attract people to Kinston and to bring people to the stadium.”
He and other city leaders worked to recruit a new minor league baseball team. The arrival of the Wood Ducks in 2016 overlapped with a broader Kinston renaissance.
Fitch had worked in the Indians’ front office from 2008-11. When she left the Carolina Mudcats to join the Wood Ducks in 2016, she returned to a city transformed. Mother Earth Brewing, just a brewery and taproom when she left in 2011, had expanded to include a retro-hip motor lodge and a distillery. Celebrity chef Vivian Howard had opened a second downtown restaurant and become an Emmy- and James Beard- nominated star.
“I would’ve never walked around downtown before, but I moved back and you could walk to bars or restaurants,” said Fitch.
She moved into an apartment across the street from the Mother Earth Motor Lodge, which is one of two hallmark revitalization projects that directly benefited from the Wood Ducks’ arrival. Since opening in 2017, the motor lodge has been the go-to lodging option for the Wood Ducks’ opponents.
The second of those efforts is the smART Kinston City Project, through which a nonprofit organization renovated 60 vacant houses in the historic Mitchelltown neighborhood. Today, they provide rent-controlled housing for artists and artisans. But when the first homes opened in 2017, Fitch said, Wood Ducks players lived there.
The Wood Ducks’ performance only added to the sense of Kinston as a city on the rise. That 2017 season, when the team went from 9.5 games out of the playoffs in late July to a share of the Carolina League title, is still the highlight of Hanks’ 22 years covering and following baseball in Kinston. (After the two Division Series concluded, the championship series with the Lynchburg Hillcats was canceled because of the approaching Hurricane Irma.)
“There were probably 300 or 400 fans who made the drive to Buies Creek for the [division] championship game,” said Hanks. “2017 puts a smile on my face when I think about professional baseball in Kinston.”
That was Fitch’s favorite of her more than 10 years with the Indians and Wood Ducks. “Everybody was excited for baseball to be back,” she said. “That was my first [championship] ring.”
While the Wood Ducks haven’t replicated that championship season, they’ve won three division titles in six seasons and turned a profit.
But enthusiasm for the team fell after the pandemic and has never really recovered. In 2021, attendance was down 14 percent from 2019, and the team is drawing a little more than 1,300 fans per game to the 4,100-seat stadium.
Ellis sees two causes: inflation-driven reduction in locals’ disposable income and the sale of the team to DBH, along with the rumors that preceded it.
Wood Ducks 1, Shorebirds 0
Top 4th
Delmarva designated hitter Vance Honeycutt, one of the heroes of the University of North Carolina’s 2024 College World Series team, made his professional debut August 22. After walking in the first inning, he lined out to leftfield in the fourth, his first official at-bat. Teammate Ryan Stafford followed him with a popup to shortstop.
“That’s F-6,” longtime Wood Ducks and Indians season ticket holder Lynda Sadler said as she marked the second out in her scorebook. A Craven County resident, Sadler has always loved keeping score, even at youth games her husband Bill coached decades ago.
The scorecards and scorebooks “just stack up in a bookcase,” she said.
“I can go in the attic, I can pull out a scorecard for a youth game or a Babe Ruth game here at Grainger Stadium,” Bill said, “and with a little bit of thought, it puts you right back in the game.”
“You can almost watch the game [again],” Lynda agreed. “Well, I can.”
When they depart, the Wood Ducks will leave 66 nights of open dates on Grainger Stadium’s 2025 calendar. They’ll also put a hole in the local economy, but the size of it is difficult to discern.
Some jobs will disappear. The Wood Ducks employ six to eight people full-time, Fitch said, with seasonal workers and interns swelling the staff to roughly 50 people during the season. DBH has encouraged full-time employees to apply for positions elsewhere in the company, Fitch added, but most of the available positions so far have been entry-level–not appealing for a 26-year veteran of minor league ball.
DBH didn’t respond to questions about the future of the franchise’s Kinston-based employees.
The city and state will also lose tax revenue on tickets, concessions, and merchandise, as well as on income and hotel rooms. Ellis estimates the direct economic effect of the team at $2 million to $3 million a year. And then there are the losses that can’t be measured. Minor league baseball may not have put Kinston on the map, but it did put the city in the agate pages of newspaper sports sections across the country.
“Imagine,” said Hanks, who now hosts a local radio show and works for Lenoir County, “little 20,000-population Kinston being mentioned in USA Today when it was the paper of record for the United States.”
Minor league baseball also gave Kinstonians a first look at some great talent. Hall of Famer Fred McGriff played for the Kinston Blue Jays in 1983. The 2004 World Series MVP Manny Ramirez was a Kinston Indian in 1992. Before they won the 2007 and 2008 American League Cy Young Awards, respectively, C.C. Sabathia and Cliff Lee pitched for Kinston. Before Evan Carter and Leody Taveras won a World Series for the Rangers in 2023, they were division champions with the Wood Ducks.
“When you look at the people who’ve come through here, it just gives our youth the opportunity to see something they wouldn’t otherwise have,” Ellis said.
Shorebirds 2, Wood Ducks 1
Top 8th
Honeycutt walked, stole second and third, and scored on a throwing error by Wood Ducks pitcher Adonis Villavicencio.
In the clubhouse, Fitch counted the night’s ticket proceeds. Her office is full of memorabilia from her time with the Indians and Wood Ducks: a framed ticket stub from a 2023 World Series game the Rangers invited her to; a table full of bobbleheads, including a Bill Ellis doll given away at a 2018 game. The jewelry box containing her 2017 Carolina League championship ring is safely stored in a desk drawer.
“I’ve tried not to really think about this ending,” she said. “But today we did our last phone call with the [other] GMs in the Carolina League, and at the end they’re like, ‘All right, we’re not gonna do any more until October.’ And that was sad.”
If Ellis has his way, this intermission will be a short one. As chairman of the Historic Grainger Stadium Committee, he’s leading the effort to find a new tenant for the venerable ballpark.
Grainger offers the intimacy of a park built in baseball’s golden era, a playing surface that’s been voted best in the Carolina League, and modern comforts (a playground, a grandstand with its own concessions) courtesy of the renovation.
It’s unlikely the Wood Ducks’ replacement will be another MLB-affiliated club, given the new facility requirements. But Ellis is pursuing other options, including independent professional teams, semi-professional teams, and summer leagues for college players. He expects to find a team in time for the 2025 season.
Bush, who spent more than 10 years working for minor league teams and ownership groups before becoming SABR CEO, believes Kinston has reason to be optimistic.
“We’ve seen an initial groundswell of interest and energy for independent baseball and for collegiate wood bat summer leagues,” Bush said. “And I don’t see any reason why Kinston can’t be a part of that wave of energy moving forward. No doubt.”
One option is the Coastal Plain League, a wood-bat college summer league that fields 15 teams from Virginia to Georgia, including Greenville and Wilson. Bush and Hanks both cited the league as a possibility, and the Wilson-based Tobs may soon be in the market for a new home. In 2026, the Mudcats are leaving Zebulon for a new $69 million stadium being built in Wilson. Coastal Plain officials didn’t respond to a request for comment.
“Baseball is designed to break your heart,” former MLB Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti once wrote. Kinston’s lived it, once in 2011 and now again this season. Even after the Indians and the Wood Ducks and 40 years of baseball’s smaller daily bereavements, Ellis keeps courting the heartache, working behind the scenes to bring a new team to Grainger Stadium and cheering hard for the one that’s walking out the door.
“We’ve got 10 more nights,” he said during the August 22 game, “and we’ve got to come out and enjoy them while we can.”
Shorebirds 3, Wood Ducks 1
Bottom 9th
With two runners on and two outs, “La Vuelta” by Secreto el Famoso Biberon played as Wood Ducks right fielder Wady Mendez, the potential game-winning run, stepped to the plate.
Mendez hit a ground ball to Shorebirds second baseman Maikol Hernandez, who threw to first. The ball arrived well ahead of Mendez, who plowed over first baseman Elis Cuevas. Mendez argued with the first-base umpire. Other Wood Ducks lingered on the field. The Shorebirds jogged off, a victory in their pockets.
Aube queued up the opening bars of The Who’s “Who Are You” (his go-to for home losses), called out the score for posterity, and encouraged fans to come back for the Wood Ducks’ penultimate weekend of games.
“Time of game, two hours, forty minutes, and 1,052 people paid to see it,” he said. “Drive home safely, and as always: Go Woodies.”
Jimmy Ryals is a writer based in Raleigh. A Kinston native, his work has appeared in Slate, several eastern North Carolina newspapers, and little notes in his kids’ lunchboxes. You can see more of his writing here.