Baseball is Back in Hagerstown!
Yes, you read that right. After many years of absence, Hagerstown has finally rejoined the ranks of cities with a professional baseball team, which kicked off its inaugural season play on April 25th.
A warm, Western Maryland welcome to the Hagerstown Flying Boxcars!
The Boxcars play in the Atlantic League of Professional Baseball (ALPB), and independent league covering the Mid-Atlantic and Southern regions of the United States. The league has been around since 1998, and its play is considered on-par with Triple-A minor league baseball (the highest level of minor league play managed through the MLB farm system). While there is no “direct” relationship with MLB (i.e. players move up and down through the MLB farm system from Single-A ball to Triple-A ball before going to the big leagues, etc.), there is a partnership between the ALPB and MLB, and many of the players in the Atlantic League have either come up through the major league farm system or have some experience “in the show”.[1] Players are played a monthly salary ($3,000/month max), and some may even be offered contracts in the majors, so this isn’t some local pick-up game.
Hagerstown has also built a brand-new, 3,500 seat, state-of-the-art, multi-use baseball stadium, located right in the downtown Arts & Entertainment District to house the new team, and fans are excitedly waiting for home games to start (beginning on May 4th). Ten teams will battle it out in two divisions over the course of a 126-game season, after which the top contenders will slug it out in a best-of-five championship series in the fall.
As for Hagerstown’s team name (the Flying Boxcars), this honors Fairchild Aircraft’s (a former local aviation manufacturer from 1931-1984) production of the C-119 cargo aircraft plane (nicknamed the “flying boxcar”) at the plant. The team’s mascot is “Stryker”, a buff aviation pilot who’s ready for action.
The team is new, the players are new, the venue is new, and the fans will be new. Why not come out and see what It’s all about? What could be more all-American than a summer night at the ballpark, watching a game under the lights, hot dog in hand, cheering on your favorite team? There are loads of promotions scheduled throughout the summer for home games, and single tickets go for as low as $12.
For game schedules and other information, visit the team’s website by clicking here.
Buy me some peanuts and “Cracker Jacks”, because baseball is back in town!
[1] Wikipedia contributors, “Atlantic League of Professional Baseball,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Atlantic_League_of_Professional_Baseball&oldid=1217921308 (accessed April 25, 2024).