by If you’re a baseball fan, or a movie fan, or a baseball movie fan, then you probably can figure out where we visited by the headline of this post.
For the rest of you, we took in a game of the famed Durham Bulls in Durham, N.C. Made famous by Ron Shelton and the 1988 movie Bull Durham that he wrote and directed, the Durham Bulls are a AAA minor league ball club today affiliated with the Tampa Bay Rays.
Atop the very tall left field wall in the Bulls’ home field stadium is a very large cutout sign of a snorting bull in a pasture, emblazoned with “HIT BULL WIN STEAK. HIT GRASS WIN SALAD.”
If a Durham Bull hits a home run, the bull snorts smoke, his tail wags, and his eyes shine red. Oh, and the player does indeed win a steak at a local restaurant!
The bull was originally created for the movie, and was adopted by the team when filming concluded.
The current sign is actually the third incarnation of the sign. The first was retired when a brand new (and beautiful) stadium was built for the Bulls in 1997.
The second iteration was damaged by a windstorm in 2007 and completely replaced by the current version.
We were able to get tickets for a game during a week in which they were hosting the Memphis Red Birds. The Bulls came out on top, 8-6.
One of our favorite moments of the game was when center fielder Raimel Tapia, in his second at bat in his first appearance for the Bulls, hit a home run!
As it turns out, Tapia has been playing minor league ball since 2011. In all, five Bulls won steak in the game we attended.
The Durham Bulls Athletic Park, built in 1995, has 10,000 seats and is located right in the middle of the city.
The Tuesday-night game we attended had a robust crowd and $3 tacos, and the breaks between innings were filled with the usual minor league shenanigans led by the Bulls’ mascot Wool E. Bull and an emcee.
One final item of interest (at least to me) was the plaque inside the Park honoring Joe Morgan, the only (at the time) Durham Bull to have been voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Morgan was the second baseball for the Cincinnati Reds in their dominant Big Red Machine days in the 1970s, but he first played for the Bulls in the middle of the 1963 season.
True to later form, he hit a home run in his first at-bat for the Bulls! His career with the Bulls was a relatively-short 95 games, in which he hit 13 home runs and batted .322.
In his career with the Reds, Morgan was voted an all-star nine times, and was named National League MVP in 1975 and 1976, the seasons in which the Reds won the World Series.
In 2018, Chipper Jones (who apparently played professionally for some team in Atlanta) was the second Bull to be elected to Cooperstown. If there’s a plaque in his honor in the park, I didn’t see it.
