Burgers To Play As Pastimes and Sluggers To Honor Duncan Park’s 100 Years

As the 2026 Minor League Baseball season draws closer, the Hub City Spartanburgers revealed their second of three alternate identities on Monday morning in a press conference held at Spartanburg’s historic Duncan Park stadium. Why hold the reveal outside on damp grass behind home plate of an old stadium on a cold February morning, you might ask?

The answer is simple. Duncan Park, now home to the Spartanburg High School Vikings baseball team as well as American Legion Post 28, has been as much a part of history in this city as the revolutionary war, which the Spartanburgers’ first alt-indentity (The Spartan Regiment) pays homage to.

The crumbling concrete and termite-eaten wooden facade of the covered grandstand, the plywood-covered old pressbox atop the roof behind the plate, the rows of fenced off seats behind the mix of old wooden box seats from Shibe Park/Connie Mack Stadium and modern plastic ballpark chairs, and the moss-covered backstop netting may not appear much to the eye of modern beholders – especially ones that are not from Spartanburg. But, if structures could tell stories, Duncan Park Stadium would have days on end worth of tales of times long past.

The storied ballpark opened its gates on July 8, 1926 – making this season its centennial anniversary. Over that time, plenty of baseball legends and teams from each level of the sport have graced the old dirt and grass diamond on Spartanburg’s south side.

The baseball history of the Hub City goes back even farther, starting in 1907 with the formation of a minor league team called the Spartans, who played at Wofford College’s ballpark through the 1912 season before having to fold as their league reorganized, leaving Spartanburg without MiLB for 6 years. In 1919, the sport made its return with the creation of the Pioneers, who like their predecessor played at Wofford Park. Following the 1921 season, the team name changed once again, going back to the Spartans, winning the city’s first South Atlantic League championship in 1925 before moving to the newly-constructed Duncan Park Stadium.

League re-structuring once again forced Spartanburg to be without a team following the 1929 season, and despite bringing a new one in from Anderson for 1930, the league folded due to the Great Depression, leaving Sparkle City sans a professional baseball team for the next 7 years. In 1938, the Spartans returned under a new affiliation with the Cleveland Indians and lasted two more seasons. After another seven-year hiatus, the Spartanburg Peaches were born, playing games in Duncan Park until their league went under in 1956. Seven seasons later, the longest-lasting minor league partnership for the town began with the Spartanburg Phillies. They played at the ballpark until 1994, when the team moved to Kannapolis, NC to become the Intimidators (now the Cannonballers).

In between minor league teams, Duncan Park has also been home to the American Legion World Series in 1936 – where Spartanburg’s post 28 team defeated Los Angeles in game 5 before a record crowd of 21,000 fans, some of which were sitting on the stadium roof, for the championship. Two years later, Post 28 once again hosted the Legion Ball World Series. In 1937, the New York Yankees, featuring such god-like names in baseball lore as Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio played an exhibition game in the park on their way back up from Spring Training. If those names don’t pique your interest enough, during the Phillies’ tenure, Hall of Famers such as Ryne Sandberg, Tom Glavine, Chipper Jones, and Mariano Rivera once dug their spikes into the historic dirt in the ballpark.

Spartanburg also holds a storied Negro League baseball history, having supported the Sluggers until the early 1950s. The Sluggers, like the Spartans, began long before Duncan Park opened its gates. Over their tenure, they brought huge crowds to watch the likes of Satchel Paige, Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby, and Hank Aaron make their mark on the hallowed grounds.

In addition to its minor league, Negro League, and semi-pro past, the storied ballpark has hosted Wofford College baseball, with the Terriers calling it their home field full time from 1996-2004 when Russell C King Field opened on the school’s campus. USC Upstate has also played games there in the past prior to the opening of Cleveland S Harley Park back in 2004. In the span since MiLB left, there have been three Coastal Plain League summer collegiate wood bat teams to call Duncan Park home including the Crickets, Stingers, and the first iteration of the Spartanburgers back in 2021.

Monday morning, the Hub City Spartanburgers paid homage to that entire century worth of history by unveiling the Spartanburg Pastimes – an alternate identity the team intends to play as six times during the 2026 season coinciding with a promo giveaway and theme night that honors a different era/team from Duncan Park’s past each time.

“Everything we do with the Spartanburgers is community-focused”, said Hub City Media Relations Manager Ian Unsworth. “We are driven by a mission to smile and make memories for all that come here. So with our alternate identities, we are always looking to honor Spartanburg’s past, present, and future.”

The name most certainly does that, honoring both the sport of baseball and its history as America’s pastime while also creating a way to honor each of the specific teams that have called Spartanburg home over the last 100 years, which according to the front office staff, was the goal from the beginning with this name.

“It is really important that we show how we want to give back to the community and honor its history ”, said Spartanburgers General Manager Tyson Jeffers. “We are fortunate that the timing of this worked out to be the 100th birthday of Duncan Park Stadium and to be able to use our platform to share these stories with those who have never set foot in here as well as bring back memories while creating new ones for those who have been here. This is the one identity that is going to help us share the stories of all of the eras of baseball that played here at Duncan Park.”

The name was born out of a want to honor, teach, and display the history of baseball in Spartanburg and the challenges that attempting to do so presented.

“We started developing this about a year and a half in advance”, said Jeffers. “We asked ourselves how we truly showcase not only the different eras but the history with just one identity. It would be impossible given how many teams we have had and there would be legal challenges – some teams would not let us use their name nor would the Rangers {who the Spartanburgers are affiliated with} like us calling ourselves the Phillies. So, that is why we leaned into trying to come up with a name that encompasses everything – both the history here and the history of baseball in general. So we went with Pastimes, as baseball is both America’s Pastime and Spartanburg’s”

The team uniform will feature a cream jersey and pants with the team name on the chest in burgundy in an old-timey font, the HC logo inside the outline of South Carolina on the sleeve, as well as a burgundy cap with a stylized S, which was also carefully planned to ensure it reflects times gone by.

“We wanted to celebrate history and bring awareness to the different eras of baseball and Duncan Park Stadium. We really leaned into tradition with an old-school look with the cream jerseys and the burgundy cap with the S representing Spartanburg and we hope that it is something our community and our fans can rally around”, Jeffers stated.

Hub City will wear these uniforms in addition to two games as the Sluggers – one around Juneteenth and another for a designated game against the Greenville Drive in which the visitors will play as their former negro league team – the Black Spinners. The team will have one more 2026 alternate identity that will be unveiled later on.

The first game with the new look will be April the 7th against the Drive, where the ‘Burgers will honor the collegiate wood bat teams that have played in Spartanburg. There will be one game each month during the season in which Hub City will don the temporary identity, and yes, for anyone curious, merchandise is already available in the team store as well as online.