Capital City Stadium

Walking up to Capital City Stadium, Aug-1996.

The park, near the University of South Carolina’s field, looks out over nothing in particular.

Chronological Tour: Stop 104

• Location: South Assembly Street, Columbia, S.C.
• Opened: 1927 (stadium rebuilt 1991)
• Home team: Columbia Comers (1927-30), Senators (1936-37), Reds (1938-42, 1946-55, 1958-61), Gems (1956-57), (old) South Atlantic League; Columbia Mets (1983-92), Capital City Bombers (1993-2004), (current) South Atlantic League
• Capacity: 6,000

Rating: 2 baseballs

However, the park did give me the impression of being built on the cheap, much like a lot of the stadiums of its era. Little effort seemed to have been made to ensure a view or provide a particular ambience to make it stand out.

Capital City Stadium left the ranks of professional ballparks in February 2005, after the city of Columbia supported a separate bid by the University of South Carolina to build an on-campus stadium. The Bombers moved to the recently vacated Municipal Stadium in Greenville. In August 2012, arrangements were made to tear down the stadium and build a large retail store on the site; however, that hasn’t quite happened yet, according to site visitor Justin Moody. The stadium is still maintained by the city parks department, which now proposes to tear it down during the first half of 2019.

The Columbia Blowfish of the Coastal Plain League, a college summer league, played here until 2014 before moving to a new facility in nearby Lexington County. Professional baseball in Columbia is now played at Segra Park, which rose along Bull Street, a mile north of here, on the site of the former state mental hospital.