Hagerstown Municipal Stadium
(Redirected from Municipal Stadium (Hagerstown))
Hagerstown Municipal Stadium in Hagerstown, MD, was the home of Hagerstown affiliated baseball from 1930 through 2019. After that and the Coronavirus pandemic-canceled 2020 season, MLB's 2021 Minor League Reorganization eliminated the Hagerstown Suns of the South Atlantic League.
HMS also hosted some Negro Leagues baseball in the 1930s and 1940s.
Demolished in 2022, the playpen's demise was somewhat ironic given that the city lost affiliated ball because of it. An indoor sports facility will replace "The Hag" - even as the Maryland Stadium Authority works on a new downtown stadium that has a commitment from the independent Atlantic League for a 2023 team. The stadium debut has been pushed to 2024, but no word yet on whether the team will be delayed or will play its first season elsewhere.
The small, old ballpark had long kept the Suns' parent Washington Nationals unhappily waiting out Suns options that included moving, selling, and trying to get the city to build or upgrade. Built in only six weeks, it even had a manual scoreboard.
Without professional ball from 1955 through 1981, it landed A-ball when the Carolina League moved the franchise of the 1980 Rocky Mount Pines - possibly the worst pro baseball team ever. In 1989, the Baltimore Orioles' Eastern League farm club bumped that franchise - then also a Birds' affiliate - to Frederick, MD. When big-league expansion dominoed it to Bowie, MD, in 1993 the Myrtle Beach Hurricanes blew in.
Willie Mays made his Organized Baseball debut with the Trenton Giants in an Interstate League game at The Hag on June 24, 1950, although he had played professionally in the Negro Leagues as early as 1946.
Its largest Affiliated Era-crowd ever, 6,758, saw a 2011 Stephen Strasburg rehabilitation start. No 2017 Tim Tebow crowd topped that, but his four-game visit with the Columbia Fireflies drew 1,754 more than attended that season's first 23 Suns' home games combined.
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