Hunter Wright Stadium

Hunter Wright Stadium
Location	Kingsport, TN
Tenants
Kingsport Mets

Hunter Wright Stadium in Kingsport, TN, was the home of Kingsport affiliated baseball from 1995 through 2019. After that and the Coronavirus pandemic-canceled 2020 season, MLB's 2021 Minor League Reorganization made the Rookie-Advanced Appalachian League a collegiate wood-bat circuit.

Efforts to build a new downtown ballpark were gaining steam when Kingsport appeared on the list of farm teams MLB wanted to cut after the 2020 season.

The ballpark is named for Hunter Wright, the five-term mayor whose administration built it. It opened with the 1995 Hokie-Smokey Classic between the University of Tennessee and Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

Kingsport's tourism bureau claims Long Island iced tea originated not on New York's Long Island but on the one in the nearby Holston River; the then-Kingsport Mets supported that by playing a 2018 game as the Long Island Iced Teas.

They played at Dobyns-Bennett High School's J. Fred Johnson Stadium from 1969 through 1994 - except 1983, which they played in the then-Gulf Coast League to allow a ballpark renovation.

Early Kingsport teams went by Indians or Cherokees, but they used their parent club's moniker from 1957 through 2019, which was the norm in the Appy league. The K-Mets played their 2017 opener as the "Kingsport Spirit", keying a day-long celebration of the centennial of the city's second and current charter.