Fort Bragg Game: It Actually Happened

FORT BRAGG, N.C.—This was the kind of night that only existed in my dreams growing up.

Growing up in Fayetteville, N.C., the small city that abuts what is now the largest military installation in the United States, seeing professional baseball games in person was not a reality.

I could recreate a game; my brother and I had two baseball board games, the old Cadaco All-Star Baseball, with the circular cards and spinners (we had a Hall of Fame set), and Avalon Hill’s Statis-Pro Major League Baseball. (We had the 1978 and eventually the ’83 and ’86 sets.)

But seeing baseball in person? Well, Fayetteville didn’t have it, or even summer college baseball, or much of any baseball if you weren’t the one playing it, it seemed. So I’d make it up, drafting my own teams from those cards and creating teams like the “Fayetteville Dragons” or the “North State Pines” or others lost to my memory.

The only way major leaguers could play close to my home was if they played in my home—on my floor.

Sunday night, I didn’t have to make it up. The Marlins and Braves played at ad hoc Fort Bragg Stadium, a temporary field built in a span of four months on the military base where my mom used to work, teaching Greek to Green Berets and later working as a teacher in Fort Bragg’s school system.

It was a real game, with real major leaguers. Don Mattingly managed one team, with Barry Bonds on his coaching staff, Ichiro Suzuki on his roster and J.T. Realmuto hitting a home run in the ninth inning, after Fernando Rodney celebrated a scoreless inning with a dance on the field.

It was a real game, with Freddie Freeman lashing line drives for the Braves and Nick Markakis—the guy I last spoke to when he was pitching and hitting for Greece’s Olympic Team in 2004—patrolling right field.

A routine 5-2 Marlins victory over the last-place Braves was hardly routine, not with commissioner Rob Manfred and union head Tony Clark sitting together before the game just outside the ballpark discussing the gift Major League Baseball and the union paid for and gave to the Army as a July 4 dedication to the service of those in the armed forces.

“I’ve done a lot of special events in my time in the army, and this is the most unique, and most outrageous thing, I’ve seen,” said Staff Sgt. Timothy Jenkins of Fort Bragg, who is in his second year on the post. “It’s amazing, it’s really cool. For Major League Baseball to give so much back, it’s awesome, it’s really cool.”

Jenkins said he first caught wind that something could be coming to the base about a year ago, he said, “In operations meetings, we kind of started hearing about it.”

“It was more, ‘I’ll believe it when I see it kind of deal,’” he said. “They told us about it so long ago, and it was more of a, ‘Haha, we’ll see,’ kind of deal. I didn’t think it would be this big at all. I thought it would be like a scrimmage or exhibition. But this is way bigger than I thought it would be, or could be.”

The work that went into it was substantial, as groundskeepers from minor league stops around the Carolinas pitched in to help build the field on a decommissioned former Air Force golf course. The hard work of the facilities and operations groups that built the field and stadium from scratch was rewarded with a crowd of 12,582 of mostly military personnel, their families and Department of Defense employees, along with some dignitaries such as commissioner Manfred, MLB’s chief operations officer Joe Torre and more.

The fans clearly enjoyed being part of the special event, even after the pregame jump by paratroopers—a natural as the 82nd Airborne Division is based at Fort Bragg—had to be cancelled due to cloudy weather.

“I came here in December and they brought me here and said, ‘We’re going to build a field here.’ I came back two weeks ago and the field was here,” said former big league outfielder Phil Bradley, now a special assistant for player services with the MLBPA. “The structure was kind of here but everything wasn’t in place, and I come back today and it’s like, voila! Obviously a lot of work went into the whole project, but the last two weeks were like, wow.”

So it didn’t just seem like a dream to me.

It seemed that way to the people who work in the game too, and to guys like Christian Yelich, the Marlins outfielder who wound up with three  hits and an RBI. Yelich’s younger brother Cameron, just 20, serves in the Marines; in fact, he just returned to the States two days ago from a six-month tour of the Far East that included time in the Philippines, Korea and Japan.

“It will be a special night for me and my family,” Yelich said before the game. “The people who serve our country are the best our society has to offer.

“The field looks great, it’s going to be an unreal atmosphere . . . It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, something we’ll all remember for a long time.”

It was real major league baseball, providing lasting memories for the fans and a tangible gift to the Fort Bragg community. With the game now over, the structure of Fort Bragg Stadium will be dismantled, but the field will stay behind, part of a larger recreational facility for soldiers and their families on the base.

When they wake up, it won’t be gone. It wasn’t a dream. This game didn’t happen with a card set or on their bedroom floor.

It was real.

“This is completely different,” Bradley said. “This is like a back-yard neighborhood game where two teams are barnstorming coming into a neutral site in someone’s backyard. These people, this is their neighborhood. Everyone doesn’t get to attend this game, just the people in this neighborhood. I think they’re going to be really excited.”