Gary Price and Steven Seymour stood on the silver metal concourse, staring at the field through the drizzle, sipping steaming hot chocolate they had just purchased at the shaved ice truck.

From left, Steven Seymour and Gary Price sip hot chocolate on a cool opening night in Marion. Photo by Chad Osborne.

Like everyone else at this high school stadium, the best friends since childhood were bundled in coats and caps. Some others wrapped themselves in blankets and ducked under umbrellas to hide from the threatening clouds.

“It’s great to have baseball back in Marion,” Price said.

Baseball? In these conditions?

On Memorial Day, Marion’s newest summer baseball team, the Hungry Mothers, took the field for its inaugural home game at Hurricane Stadium on the campus of Marion Senior High School. The team name, Hungry Mothers, is a fun nod to the nearby Hungry Mother State Park, located about 5 miles from the ballpark.

The Mothers, as some fans are already affectionately calling them, are a collegiate wood bat team, meaning most of their players compete on college teams where aluminum bats are used. The team is independent from a league for its first season and will play a 40-game schedule in 2025, primarily against teams from North Carolina that also carry amusing nicknames like Corn Dogs, Wampus Cats, Bigfoots and Swamp Donkeys.

At Marion’s home opener, the Hungry Mothers hosted the Carolina Disco Turkeys. The two teams had already squared off against each other two nights earlier on the Turkeys’ turfed home field in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Marion won that game 11-4, although the team managed only five hits. Pitchers for both teams combined to walk 31 batters. The first game in Marion’s existence took about four hours to play.

“I think it was one of the longest nine-inning games I’ve ever been a part of,” Marion head coach Steven McMillian recalled a couple of nights later.

The Memorial Day game was different in many ways, from the play on the field to the excitement in the air, neither of which could be dampened by the cold rain and chilly temperatures. 

“We’re tough old birds,” said Price. “We don’t care [about the weather]. We used to run and play in weather like this, so we’ll come out here and watch a good ballgame.”

Carolina’s Disco Turkeys, in their brilliant peacock blue uniforms, jumped ahead in the first inning, scoring four runs before the Hungry Mothers had a chance to bat. But no one in the crowd of nearly 500 people seemed to mind much.

“We’re just glad to have another opportunity for Marion, because Marion is such a great home place,” Seymour, 56, said as the game slipped into the bottom of the second inning. “We’ve grown up. We’ve seen the good and the bad, and this is definitely a good thing for us.”

As the umpire called a strike below, Price took a sip of hot chocolate from a white Styrofoam cup and said, “We could be watching some of the stars of tomorrow here.”

* * *

Hungry Mothers mascot Molly Dew makes the rounds at Hurricane Stadium. Molly takes her name from Hungry Mother State Park’s Molly’s Knob and Marion’s connection to Mountain Dew. Photo by Chad Osborne.

If that line rings familiar, it likely means you know a little about Marion’s place in baseball history. In 1965, Major League Baseball’s New York Mets placed a minor league affiliate team here as a place to start the development of future players.

Bob Garnett, a banker in town, served as president of Marion Baseball. One of his many roles with the team included sitting behind a microphone for most home games as the ballpark’s public address announcer. 

“Welcome to Marion Stadium, home of the Mets,” Garnett would say, “where the stars of tomorrow shine tonight.” 

Most anyone who attended those games in the ’60s and ’70s still remembers Garnett’s famous line. It even made an appearance in a July 1966 New York Times article. “I think everyone in Marion took that [line] to heart, which was lovely,” said Times reporter Robert Lipsyte in a 2021 phone conversation, decades after he’d visited Marion to report on New York’s Baby Mets.

No matter who you talked with at the Hungry Mothers’ opening night at the Marion stadium — young people and those who were a bit older — the name Nolan Ryan would often come up. 

This plaque honoring Nolan Ryan and the Marion Mets rests in the brick sidewalks of downtown Marion. Photo by Chad Osborne.

He is easily the Marion Mets’ most famous alumnus. On Main Street in Marion’s downtown section, a small plaque honors Ryan, resting in the brick along a sidewalk. 

The tall right-hander from Alvin, Texas, arrived in Marion in early June 1965. Garnett picked him up from the bus stop, and for years, he told the story of the lanky pitcher looking so frail that Garnett worried Ryan’s luggage “would break his arm in two.” Ryan’s stop in Marion was the beginning of a long baseball career, one that didn’t end until he retired from the major leagues at age 46. He still holds the record for the most career strikeouts, with 5,714, and no-hitters, with seven.

Many of Marion’s new Hungry Mothers cite Ryan’s legacy as one reason they chose to play baseball this summer in Marion.

“When you go out there you have a feeling that somebody great has been here before you,” said Carter Sayers, a Marion native and rising sophomore pitcher at Emory & Henry University. “You’re in the presence of a lot of history on this field.”

Though Ryan is Marion’s most famous former player, several others got their start here during the team’s 12-year affiliation with the New York Mets. One was Jim Bibby, who spent much of his life in Lynchburg and played professionally for a handful of teams. He and Ryan were teammates on Marion’s 1965 team. Other Major League alumni include Mike Jorgensen, Tom Foli, John Milner, Alex Trevino, Jody Davis and Jim McAndrew, who, along with Ryan, was part of New York’s 1969 Miracle Mets.

Most players, of course, never made it to the big leagues. Many moved on to other professions. They became coaches, teachers, architects, neuroscientists, actors, priests, circus trainers, bankers, broadcasters and so forth.

Former major league catcher Birdie Tebbetts coached the Marion Mets in 1967, a year after managing the Cleveland Indians in the majors. That got the attention of Life Magazine, which sent a writer and photographer to Marion to document what they called “A big leaguer in the boondocks.”

In addition to the Mets, Marion hosted another Appalachian League team briefly in the summer of 1955. When Welch Miners team officials decided they could no longer take on more debt to save the team in the small coal-mining West Virginia town, Marion offered to be the Miners’ new home. The team became known as the Marion Athletics and played out the season in the town’s then brand-new ballpark, Marion Stadium, now called Hurricane Stadium. Semi-pro baseball has a history in Marion, too. The Cuckoos played on the grounds of the Southwestern Virginia Mental Health Institute in the 1930s and ’40s, and the Marion Bucks played on the same field in the 1950s. 

Marion’s rich baseball history played a significant role in landing the Hungry Mothers, nearly 50 years after the Mets abruptly left town in 1976 for reasons no one seems to remember.

Other Southwest Virginia towns were attractive potential locations for the Hungry Mothers. Greg Sullivan and Terry Hindle, the team’s managing partners, who have working connections to North Carolina-based collegiate wood bat teams, found Marion, a town of about 5,600 people, to be the most alluring. 

“We went through the area with a fine-tooth comb,” Hindle said a week before Marion’s home opener, “and we found that a combination of things, the support from the local community and the history of baseball here, were a good combination. There’s a passion here.

“When you start hearing that the New York Mets had a rookie ball team here for all of those years, to me, that was the icing on the cake. It’s definitely a point of pride for this area.”

The team was officially introduced to the community on March 20 at a late-morning press conference in the Marion Senior High auditorium. Hindle, Sullivan and others involved in the process announced the team name, colors — red, black and white — and logos, one of which is a cartoonish, left-handed swinging mother bear with a baseball bat resting on her shoulder, snarling and ready to pounce on a fastball. At the announcement, Hindle said his group intended to keep the team in Marion “for the long haul.”

“We decided to make an investment into this community and into this team, and it’s something that as an organization we didn’t take lightly,” he said later, in mid-May. “We did a lot of homework and figured out this is where we wanted to be.”

Once they chose Marion, Hindle and Sullivan contacted Amanda Livingston, Smyth County’s director of tourism, in the fall of 2024.

“I would say I was a facilitator and people connector,” Livingston said. “They were interested in expanding, and they felt like Southwest Virginia was a great market. I 100% agree. Smyth County and Marion love baseball. We just have an innate love of baseball, and I think they rightly guessed, and it has been proven true, that there is a hunger for this type of family entertainment.”

Livingston connected Hindle and Sullivan with members of Smyth County’s board of supervisors and school board. Talks began between the entities in December and wrapped in January, recalled board of supervisors Vice Chair Mike Sturgill, who also works with the county’s school board. The talks involved Marion Senior High School administrators to discuss using the field, which is also home to the school’s varsity and junior varsity baseball teams.

Once there was an agreement to allow the new team to play on the field, a number of improvements had to be made to the ballpark that was built and opened in the mid-1950s.

For one, the crumbling painted red cinderblock outfield wall that stretched from the left field foul pole to extreme center field was demolished. A black chain-link fence replaced it. That was the easy part. Perhaps the most difficult chore was resurfacing the infield dirt and resodding the infield and outfield grass. 

Marion Stadium is a multipurpose facility that also houses a football field for the high school’s Scarlett Hurricanes. In the fall, the football field runs through baseball’s right field and into the infield between first and second base.

“They basically took a bulldozer, cut it off, regraded, and hauled in several truckloads,” Sturgill said of the baseball field reconstruction.

“The county and the town of Marion put in some money” for the project, said Smyth County Administrator Shawn Utt. Also, “a lot of the work was donated.”

Marion Senior High School varsity baseball coach Kevin Terry and a group of his ballplayers took on the responsibility of replacing the grass. They received the first truckloads of grass on March 14. 

“This stuff here,” Terry said in mid-April, pointing to the new sod, “comes in rolls of 2 feet by 3 feet … and we put 17 pallets [loads] down.” He and a friend began working on the field on the morning of March 14, starting at about 7 a.m. When the day’s final school bell rang, his young volunteers trekked to the field to help. Terry and some of his senior players worked until about 1 a.m. Saturday. “We got the entire infield done — the diamond area — that night,” the coach said.

After a bit of sleep, they returned around 10 a.m. and worked until 5 p.m. to carefully place rolls of sod — around 2,000 square feet, Terry noted — in the outfield.

Coaches and players on the Marion Senior High School varsity baseball team volunteered to resod the entire field at Hurricane Stadium in preparation for the Hungry Mothers’ season. Photo courtesy of Kevin Terry.

School board superintendent Dennis Carter said the town and county’s new baseball venture is a “win, win, win.”

Among those wins was the opportunity for economic development — “it gets some folks into Smyth County and the town of Marion,” Carter said — and a chance to make much-needed improvements to the Marion baseball complex.

The third win is giving students who recently graduated from Smyth County schools an opportunity to play once again in front of a home crowd while honing their baseball skills.

“It’s going to be a good opportunity. It’s going to be fun,” Sayers, the 2024 Marion Senior High graduate, said before the team’s first practice. “There will be a lot of people in the stands who watched you play in high school, and they’re going to watch you come back and play for this team as well. To be able to pitch off this mound again is going to be pretty neat. I’m looking forward to getting started.”

* * *

Coach Steven McMillian, right, in gray hoodie and red shorts, addresses his team at their first practice at Hurricane Field on May 24. Photo by Chad Osborne.

Hungry Mothers players and coaches met in person for the first time at 6 p.m. May 23 at Hurricane Stadium, only 25 hours before their first official game in Winston-Salem. Not everyone was there yet. Some players were still with their college teams. 

“Tonight, we’re going to get together, throw some bullpens,” McMillian said as players got acquainted, “see what kind of arms we have” — that’s baseball coach-speak for pitchers — “take some in and out to just to see what position guys we have, and then we’re going to go hit in the cages just to kind of have an idea.”

McMillian has a long history coaching baseball, 26 years to be exact, but this is his first venture into skippering a collegiate summer league team. The Mount Airy, North Carolina, native is currently the head coach at Southwest Virginia Community College in Cedar Bluff, and before that, he was an assistant baseball coach at Emory & Henry. He also runs his own travel ball organization.

“I’m just excited about the newness and the opportunity to be a part of something here,” he said before formally talking to his players as a group for the first time. “When I came here to the opening day ceremony [announcement at Marion Senior High], I was blown away by the love and what the town of Marion wants to do for this team.”

Moments later, McMillian instructed the 22 players to have a seat along the third-base line. He introduced himself and his wife, Candice, and urged the ballplayers to curb their language around his young son, who was sitting nearby. Many nodded in respect to his wishes. He briefly talked about what was to happen in the rest of the night and Saturday. McMillian told them when to arrive at the ballpark the next day — “We’re leaving around 2-ish,” he said — how meals would be handled, and when batting practice would take place once they arrived in Winston-Salem for their date with the Disco Turkeys.

“Any questions?” he asked. One player asked when they would receive their uniforms. 

“They’re supposed to get those to us tomorrow,” he answered. “You get two jerseys, one hat and two pairs of pants.”

McMillian also explained the evening’s hour-and-a-half practice. “We’ll throw some pens and hit the [batting] cages,” he said.

It all was running smoothly until the coach noticed something missing: There were no baseballs to be found. Thankfully, one of his assistant coaches had a few boxes of balls.

“Being a part of a new program, there’s always kinks to everything you do,” McMillian said. “But, we’ll try to get this thing rolling in the right direction.” 

The next night’s 11-4 victory over the Disco Turkeys did a lot to move things in a positive direction for the Hungry Mothers.

* * *

Catcher Owen Repass of Wytheville runs onto the field during player introductions. Photo by Chad Osborne.

Hours before the much-anticipated Memorial Day home opener, rain poured in spurts in Marion. It rained. It stopped. It rained and stopped again. A common question posed on the Hungry Mothers’ Facebook page throughout the morning was various forms of, “Is the game still on for tonight?”

Eager fans got their answer shortly after noon when the team’s social media manager posted: “Game is still on for tonight! The field is being prepped for tonight’s opener at 6:30.”

When the Hurricane Stadium gates swung open at 5:30 p.m., the parking lot was already filling up. And the vehicles kept coming, windshield wipers swishing back and forth.

Remember the famous line from “Field of Dreams”? If you build it, they will come. 

Hungry Mothers players await the umpire’s call of “play ball!” Photo by Chad Osborne.

Inside the ballpark, fans grabbed hot dogs, popcorn and nachos at the concession stand, which was run by the Marion Senior High School band boosters. (Word around the ballpark said the hot dog chili was delicious.) Some plunked down in lawn and camping chairs. Many flocked to the long, covered area along the third-base line.

But not Carole Rosenbaum. “I’m going to sit up there,” she said, pointing to the small open-air metal bleachers behind home plate. Rosenbaum, 82, is a Marion resident and lifelong baseball fan with a gnarly collection of baseballs autographed by scores of Marion Mets players, including Nolan Ryan. In her collection, too, are nearly a half-dozen broken bats from Mets games she attended as a child and teenager and a couple of decades-old worn gloves that she and her father used when having a catch at their home. 

“It’s so exciting to have baseball back here,” said a beaming Rosenbaum, clad in a navy-blue rain jacket, as she made her way through the crowd, past the souvenir table and into the bleachers minutes before the pre-game festivities began on the field. 

Smyth County native and renowned Hank Williams Jr. tribute artist Arnold Davidson sang — as himself, not Hank — a warm rendition of the national anthem as the crowd stood and teams lined up along the first- and third-base lines. Throwing out the ceremonial first pitches were Utt, the county administrator; board of supervisors member Mike Sturgill; and Carter, the outgoing school board superintendent and only lefty in the group. Each, it appeared, threw strikes.

Jacob Nester (on the pitcher’s mound) is the answer to the trivia question: Who threw the first pitch for the home team when summer baseball returned to Marion? The umpire called Nester’s pitch a strike. Photo by Chad Osborne.

The game got underway moments later when Hungry Mothers’ right-handed pitcher Jacob Nester of Carroll County fired a fastball to the plate for a called strike, much to the delight of his chirping teammates in the third base-side and the home crowd, despite the rain, wind and 56-degree temperature.

From there, however, the Mothers struggled. On top of their four-run first inning, the Disco Turkeys piled on another run in the second, two more in the third and one in the fifth. If you’re keeping score, that’s a 7-0 advantage.

Despite the score, and the on-again, off-again drizzle, Marion’s crowd hung in there with each pitch. You couldn’t have found a more delighted fan than Betsy Shearin, whose son, Daniel Shearin, plays first base for Marion. Betsy Shearin lives in Independence but grew up in Marion. She met with family members at the game, including her brothers, Norman and Don Barker, who played baseball for Marion Senior High.

“To be able to come here and watch him [Daniel] play is such a big deal,” said Shearin, wearing a white sweatshirt — she made it herself — with the Hungry Mothers’ mamma bear logo on the front and Daniel’s jersey number, 32, in red on the back. “We’re just baseball through and through.”

Norman Barker wished “Marion would do a little bit better tonight,” getting a chuckle from his family, “but it’s just exciting to have it back into the community.”

As the game reached the top of the sixth, Steve Foster, Greg Rashad, Frankie Newman and Phillip McElraft, who grew up together in Marion, talked and joked as the Disco Turkeys loaded the bases. 

Allan Creasy was working in the concession stand when a foul ball landed nearby. The Marion Senior High School student briefly left his post behind the counter, darting out to grab the ball before anyone else. He later got it autographed. By who? “No. 13,” he said. Photo by Chad Osborne.

Newman and Rashad have purchased season tickets for the Hungry Mothers and proudly wore their passes on lanyards around their necks.

“I don’t know how many games I’ll get to, but I want to support them all I can,” said Newman, who lives in Christiansburg.

Rashad chimed in. “It’s back. Baseball is back in Marion,” he said with great enthusiasm and a New York Mets cap resting on his head. “It’s about time! It’s good to be back watching the game. You can’t beat this.”

And then …

CRACK!

It might have been the loudest sound at the ballpark that night. It’s the sound a bat makes when perfectly colliding with a pitched ball. If it’s a batter on the team you’re rooting for, it may be the sweetest sound in baseball.

With one violent swing of the bat, a Disco Turkey hit a ball that appeared to be destined for the railroad tracks beyond center field. Maybe the moon.

“Oooooh,” said someone in the grandstand.

“Did it go over?” Rashad asked anyone who could answer.

“Robbie Smith with the grand slam,” PA announcer Kevin Schwartz confirmed. 

The home run blast put the game even further out of reach at 11-0 for Carolina.

“Do they have the 10-run rule in this league?” Newman joked. They all laughed.

Turns out, he was right. When Marion failed to close the gap through seven innings, the game was considered complete.

Disco Turkeys 13, Hungry Mothers 0.

“I’m going to be honest, the first home game was a little rough. You know, we’re still learning what we have,” McMillian said moments after the final out was recorded, as his players collected their bats and gloves from the dugout. “We made a few mistakes the first couple of innings. We didn’t start our first home game off very well, but we got great kids who are working hard. And we got great support from the crowd here tonight.”

The night’s results didn’t seem to matter to fans, who smiled all evening through the chill and rain and occasional blunders. Because after five decades of missing summer baseball in Marion, the fact that it was back — win or lose — was all that really mattered.