In mid-June, the Down East Wood Ducks were sitting in first place in the Class A Carolina League’s North Division. As early as 2025, the Texas Rangers farm team will be in Spartanburg.
Officials in Spartanburg announced May 23 that minor league baseball will return to the city after a near 30-year absence and will be playing in a new 3,500-seat ballpark. At the same time city and county officials in Spartanburg were making that announcement, the Texas Rangers announced the sale of the Kinston, N.C.-based Wood Ducks to Diamond Baseball Holdings. The team is expected to be renamed as part of the move.
Allen Smith, chief executive officer of OneSpartanburg, said the announcement of the private and public partnership bringing the team, new ballpark, business, entertainment and residential development – estimated at northward of $250 million – to the city’s near Westside was the product of years of work to realize a new vision for Spartanburg’s downtown.
“Over the years I’ve heard so many people use the expression you know, we’re just on the cusp,” Smith said. “But I think that for a couple of years now we have been beyond the cusp of recognizing some real evolution for downtown. If there was any doubt, this project confirms it.”
While the return of minor league baseball to the city for the first time since the Spartanburg Phillies departed for Kannapolis, North Carolina, following the 1994 season made headlines, Smith said it is only one element in the 2017 vision plan local leaders began enacting almost immediately and have watched come together piece by piece over the last six years.
Local leaders are now on the second stage, or “version 2.0,” of that plan, which is due to be completed by 2026 and consolidates [a] list of recommendations for economic development in the city.
“When we get through this one in 2026, we will have had almost 10 years of data-driven economic development strategy,” Smith said. “Of the 50 recommendations, seven will be impacted by this project.”
That list includes more single-family homes and office space on 16 acres in an area that has long been a target for both residential and business growth. The two go hand in hand with new white-collar jobs and homes for the people who work there – all overlooking or at least neighboring a new city-owned minor-league ballpark, Smith said.
“The new stadium will deliver an economic boost to downtown Spartanburg and the surrounding areas, and create a hub of family friendly entertainment in our home county,” Spartanburg County Council Chairman Manning Lynch said in a release when the deal was announced. “I am excited and proud to watch this much anticipated project come to life.”
Both differences and similarities exist between the Spartanburg project and the one in Greenville that featured privately developed and owned Fluor Field and the arrival of the South Atlantic League’s Greenville Drive, a Class A affiliate of the Boston Red Sox. That project sparked the revitalization of the city’s West End.
“For decades now, I think we’ve admired and respected what Greenville has built,” Smith said. “But there’s a differentiator with this project and some others because this is essentially a fully funded master plan. It’s a project that will be fully populated in a three-to-five- or six-year period.
“In other communities, the ballpark was built and then that attracted maybe the multifamily homes or class-A office space and then restaurant, retail and event spaces. This is all sort of turnkey.”
