Four or five times each week, I drive past an irregular circle of grass just off Interstate 20 in west Shreveport; easy to notice as it is surrounded by acres of concrete parking lot.
There’s really not anything to see for the thousands of vehicles that pass by there every day.
But not for me.
I see Charlie Corbell warming up in the Shreveport Captains’ bullpen, gearing up to throw the historic first pitch.
I see lines and lines of people getting ready to experience something they never thought they’d see in a place they never thought they’d see it.
I see front office personnel with walkie talkies nervously patrolling through the crowd, almost unable to enjoy what is going on before them because things were so perfect that something must be about to go wrong.
In reality, there is nothing to see. But if you allow yourself to drift away from what your eyes are telling you, you can see almost anything your memory will allow.
This week marks the 40th anniversary of the opening of Fair Grounds Field – a one of the most significant dates in the history of sports in Shreveport.
For those who can remember April 14, 1986, it was a day unlike any other before or since.
And April 14, 2026, was a day to stare at the nothingness that seems to stare defiantly right back at us as we travel by.
I am certainly not the exception, but the lifespan of Fair Grounds Field was deeply personal to me. As the public address announcer (as well as beat reporter for the original Shreveport Journal), I spent untold hours there. Probably more than I should, since I had three young children at the time.
But I also filled the same role at the previous home of the Captains, SPAR Stadium, an ancient facility that had its upper grandstand condemned during the early 1980s. I loved SPAR Stadium and its historic charm, but I never imagined there could be anything else.
This was the mid-1980s and things weren’t exactly thriving around here. Banks were closing, buildings were stuttering and businesses were hanging on as best they could.
Yet during that time, Shreveport managed to pass a bond issue that allowed for Fair Ground Field to be built. The idea that you could get taxpayer money to build a baseball stadium to replace the one that maybe got 500 people a night to watch games was almost laughable.
It was a bare-bones amount for stadium construction, but sure enough, the vote passed and ground was broken on the east end of the Fair Grounds.
Almost every late morning Saturday, after putting out the newspaper’s sports section, I’d head that way and just park in the lot to gaze at the construction that was going on. It was almost as if I needed to see it every week to make sure it was still a reality.
And then it was.
The Captains played five games on the road to start the ’86 season – a hedge against last-minute construction issues – and then came that Monday night.
The gates opened at 5 p.m. that night (an hour earlier than normal) and I stood on the field by Captains’ outfielder Alan Cockrell, who had played at SPAR Stadium the year before.
“What do you think?” he asked me as the gates prepared to open.
“I have no idea,” I told him. “But I think it’s going to be pretty good.”
And when the gates opened, I found out I had grossly miscalculated. Fans pour in and literally ran to stake out a seat in the general admission section and the beer garden. An hour before the game started, it was basically full with a crowd of 7,000-plus.
I missed the “pretty good” mark by a few thousand.
The Captains won that night with all sorts of firsts that I can still recall, but I have always said that Opening Night wasn’t the true measuring stick. That came the next night.
Once the see-and-be-seen crowd had disappeared, the true test of minor league baseball’s popularity in Shreveport came on a Tuesday night in April. Would the attendance numbers of 500 return and wash away all of that good feeling?
Game 2 attendance was 1,527. The year before at SPAR Stadium, Game 2 attendance had been 330.
That’s when you knew this was going to be something special.
Until, of course, it wasn’t.
The decline of minor league baseball in Shreveport came from a number of factors but it became more and more obvious that, despite some grassroots efforts to keep it around, Fair Grounds Field had outlived its usefulness.
Seeing the stadium in dilapidated condition in the last few years certainly didn’t give anyone a warm and fuzzy feeling. It just became better to look at the nothingness and see what you wanted to see rather than look at an eyesore that triggered zero good memories.
It is somewhat noteworthy that Fair Ground Field is gone, yet SPAR Stadium, though re-purposed and re-named, is still standing.
Measured in physical distance, those two locations are 2.4 miles from each other.
You’ll have to use your own memories to measure the rest.
Contact JJ at johnjamesmarshall@yahoo.com