Bowman Gray Stadium to host baseball this weekend
from www.ballparkdigest.com
A unique NASCAR/football venue is being pressed into service as a ballpark, as venerable Bowman Gray Stadium will host baseball for the first time, as the Carolina Disco Turkeys will play a holiday series there.
It is a little surprising that this weekend sees the first baseball played at the historic venue. Bowman Gray Stadium is the current home to Winston-Salem State University football NASCAR, college football games, NFL preseason games, boxing matches (Joe Louis memorably appeared in a four-round exhibition) and live entertainment (Bob Hope, Doris Day) but never baseball.
Bowman Gray Stadium is certainly a unique multiuse facility, opening in 1937 (yes, it was a Works Progress Administration project) designed for college football as home of Wake Forest. Trotter horse racing was added within a few years, followed by midget car racing. Asphalt was laid on the quarter-mile racetrack in 1947, adding stock-car racing to the mix. On May 18, 1949 the first NASCAR race was held here, and you’ll still find weekly races on the docket.
So a little history will be made when the Carolina Disco Turkeys host the Uwharrie Wampus Cats on July 2-3 and the Winston-Salem Moravians on July 4. All three are summer-collegiate teams.
“We’ve been especially waiting for these games all season,” said Disco Turkeys team president and co-owner Greg Sullivan via press release. “We recently had a gigantic turf pitcher’s mound to college specifications delivered to us and the netting backstop came in. It’s all real now and we can’t wait to get the players in there coming up. We’re still expecting a lot of home runs to right field with the short porch, but we can’t stress enough how excited we are to be playing in this historic venue and doing something that hasn’t been done in our city. This will be the place to watch a baseball game in North Carolina this year.”
There will, of course, be concessions to the horseshoe configuration, per the Winston-Salem Journal:
Home plate will be in the vicinity of Turn One, meaning the right-field wall will be only about 215 feet from home plate, according to Robert Mulhern, the venue manager of Bowman Gray Stadium.
“We recently had a gigantic turf pitcher’s mound to college specifications delivered to us and the netting backstop came in,” team president Greg Sullivan said. “It’s all real now, and we can’t wait to get the players in there. We’re still expecting a lot of home runs to right field with the short porch…”