Nymeo Field at Harry Grove Stadium

Harry Grove Stadium
Location	Frederick, Maryland United States
Building chronology
Built	1990
Tenants
Frederick Keys 1990-present; Spire City Ghost Hounds 2023-present
Capacity
5,400

Nymeo Field at Harry Grove Stadium in Frederick, MD, was the home of Frederick affiliated baseball from 1990 through 2019. After that and the Coronavirus pandemic-canceled 2020 season, MLB's 2021 Minor League Reorganization eliminated the Frederick Keys of the Carolina League.

The Keys then joined the new amateur MLB Draft League, a summer-collegiate wood-bat circuit. Keys' ownership later acquired a 2023 slot in the independent Atlantic League. The new club began play on April 28th but its nickname wasn't to be announced until minutes before the June 23rd game with the York Revolution; until then, the nickname and logo were literally: ? The reveal had to wait another day, though, when that game was rained out before it could get underway. Just before the second game of the resulting June 24th twinbill, the Atlantic League team's brand was revealed: the Spire City Ghost Hounds.

Efforts continue to recover a big-league affiliation. Just before the 2023 campaign opened, the Maryland Stadium Authority approved a memorandum stating it will fund improvements to "The Grove" toward that end. The memo did not specify an amount of money.

Frederick's chances of recovering affiliated baseball appear mixed. Its stadium was better than most of the 42 others that lost a team and was competitive even among the 12 that were full-season franchises. However, that is only one of many factors.

Only MLB expansion would create new slots - four for each new parent - but in that scenario Frederick would need a nearby friend because any Professional Development League circuit would have to expand in pairs. It's theoretically possible a stadium could host two, as Frederick now is, but it seems unlikely MLB and/or parent teams would approve.

However, new facility standards included in the reorganization - to be phased in by 2025 - make it possible for one team, and thus stadium, to enter a Professional Development League singly.

Under the reorg, a parent club can rid its farm system of a non-compliant stadium simply by invoking that fact and withdrawing the farm team's Player Development License. In effect, a farm team's affiliation can be dropped unilaterally, which before the reorganization was possible only during the two-week period between two-year affiliation cycles or, in extreme cases, by the president of Minor League Baseball.

The parent can then "invite" anyone with access to a compliant stadium - including those hosting an independent or, theoretically, even collegiate team - in or near the league footprint to sign the vacated license. This should not be a hard sell; under this new system, MLB teams have issued 120 such invitation - every single one of which was accepted.

As a location, Frederick is viable for existing leagues in Low-A, High-A and possibly Double-A. However, the number of qualifying stadiums could actually increase if cities currently without a professional team try to get one by building anew to the new standards.

Opened in 1990, The Grove was named in a trade-out before the sale of stadium names became the norm. Harry Grove co-founded the city's first professional baseball club, the Frederick Hustlers, in 1915. (Nearby Baltimore had a 1975 tussle over the same nickname, when the American Basketball Association forced the incoming Memphis Sounds to drop "Baltimore Hustlers" for something with "fewer negative connotations" - after all, no coach has ever shouted "Hustle!" at an athlete.) The state, the city and the county had jointly committed $2.75 million to the project, and when costs overran that Grove's heirs covered the $250,000 shortfall.

The city approved actually selling rights in 2013, provided "Harry Grove" remained in the new moniker; Nymeo Federal Credit Union made the deal in 2015.

"Keys" salutes the Frederick County, MD, native whose battle-inspired poem "The Defence of Fort M'Henry" is somewhat better known as "The Star-Spangled Banner". Francis Scott Key's birthplace is actually now in Carroll County, which was created out of the counties of Baltimore and Fredrick in 1837.

"Ghost Hounds" references - according to the team quoted by The Frederick News-Post[1] - both an urban legend that the ghost of a dog roams the city at night and the fact Frederick is known as a hotspot of “haunted” attractions.