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A Dream Fulfilled: Bubba Smith, former minor-league player, has fond memories of his long career in baseball
Journal Photo by Bruce Chapman
Bubba Smith is the head coach the Astros, a youth league team in Kernersville.
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Published: May 13, 2008
More than a thousand players have suited up for Winston-Salem's professional baseball teams since they began playing their home games at Ernie Shore Field in 1956. Given how the current major-league affiliate, the Chicago White Sox, shuffles its players around, the number may approach 2,000 by season's end, after which the Warthogs will move into a new ballpark on the western edge of downtown.
Of those many players, none has cut a deeper or wider swath through the park and the Carolina League than Charles Lee Smith.
Chances are, you remember him better as Bubba.
"I think my name had a lot to do with it," Smith said. "Bubba's easy for the kids. It sounds cool over the intercom.
"Then when you're a big burly guy who hits home runs, you fit the mold of a Bubba."
He was a big burly guy, 6-2 and about 220, who hit home runs, and he clubbed them high and far over the left-field wall during a run to the 1993 Carolina League championship.
The ownership of the club, then called the Spirits, manufactured more home runs in the park that season by installing an eight-foot fence in front of the existing 16-foot wall all around the outfield, resulting in a league-high 160 homers.
The next season, with the interior fence still standing, the Spirits set the all-time league record with 202 home runs.
But hitters prodigious enough to inspire their own adjectives don't need much help in piling up homers. Just as sportswriters 80 years ago came up with the term "Ruthian" to describe the exploits of Babe Ruth, any drive that Smith sent sailing toward the row of trees behind the left-field wall was known as a "Bubbian" clout.
"I'm not being arrogant, but it wasn't like I was hitting them over the small fence, hitting them 331 feet," Smith recalled. "I visited the trees back there a couple of times."
Smith did not arrive in Winston-Salem in 1993 unannounced. The season before, he had been most valuable player of the Carolina League when he hit 32 homers -- more than anyone else that season in minor-league baseball -- while leading the Peninsula Pilots to the league title.
The Bubba Smith who played for the Pilots was a prime target for the fans of Ernie Shore Field. Passions were stoked to a fever pitch when Smith was involved in a benches-clearing brawl between the Pilots and Spirits that started on the playing field and continued into the cramped clubhouse shared by the teams in the right-field corner.
"When I was with Peninsula, they killed me in Winston-Salem," Smith said. "That's because I killed you guys. I used to kill Winston-Salem.
"It wasn't Winston-Salem. It was just the park. The park sits down in a hole, and the ball carries."
Smith also was MVP the next season at Winston-Salem after hitting .301 with 27 homers and 81 RBIs, which was no mean feat. It takes a special player to win back-to-back MVP awards in a Class A league, one good enough to do it while being devalued enough by his professional employers to be given the opportunity.
Drafted by the Seattle Mariners in the 26th round of the 1991 draft, after playing at the University of Illinois, Smith played only 245 games for that organization. He was promoted in early 1993 to Jacksonville of the Class AA Southern League but was traded after hitting .219 and striking out 52 times in 137 at-bats.
The Cincinnati Reds, then the major-league affiliate of the Spirits, acquired him on May 24 for right-handed pitcher Travis Buckley. They assigned him to Winston-Salem, where he needed little time to win over the fans who only months before had booed him so vociferously.
"We didn't play in front of crowds like Durham and some of these other places, but the fans we did get were just awesome," Smith said. "They were loud, they were good people and they had fun at the ball park. The kids were great.
"I still talk to people today who remember going down there and watching us play back then. It was just great. It's always been a nice little ballpark."
Two of those fans would have a special impact on Smith's life. One was a local businessman named Wake Wagner, who hired Smith to work at his business, Wagner Appliance Sales, during the offseason. The other was an eye-catching local girl named Kim Cain, who bowled Smith over the moment he saw her.
"Probably the greatest memory of anything from Ernie Shore Field was, that's where I met my wife," Smith said. "She had never been to a baseball game in her life until that night, and me being a young man just thinking how cool I was, staring at her out there.
"I wasn't the best-looking guy, but she was beautiful. I made her laugh enough, so I tricked her."
By the time he turned 24 that Dec. 18, he had yet to return to his hometown of Riverside, Calif. He was, instead, still living in Winston-Salem working for Wagner Appliance Sales.
"That year after we won the championship, I stayed here and got an apartment, trying to get to know Kim," he recalled.
Fifteen years later, he realizes what a great hand that fate had dealt him.
"I look back at it and, like I tell my wife, you know I'm not going to try to fool anybody," Smith said. "I don't go to church three times a week. I believe in God. I think religion's great. It's great to keep your family together and a great place to turn when times are tough.
"But I told her not too many people win an MVP and get traded and sent back to the same league. But for some reason I did that year. And I met her, and I've got an 8-year-old son, Tanner, and a four-month-old son, Chase, and everything's been perfect."
Smith played 11 more seasons of baseball after 1993. He played Class AAA for Oklahoma City and Tucson. He played overseas in Korea, where he hit 40 homers one season and 36 the next. He played in the Mexican Winter Leagues -- where he learned to speak Spanish in order to have a better shot at the full salary he had coming to him. And he played Independent baseball for Joliet of the Northern League and Sioux Falls of the American Association.
He never played in the major leagues, although he was so close he could almost hear the crack of the bat at the Texas Rangers' home stadium.
"It's a matter of timing, a lot of it," Smith said. "In fact, in '96 Texas was going to call me up. And this came from the Triple-A pitching coach.
"And I blew my knee out."
Smith hit 245 professional home runs, or at least that is how many he has been credited with. He insists that the total, counting winter ball and playoffs and those seasons that didn't show up on his record, exceeds 500 and may have even approached 600.
Now 38, he lives in Kernersville and works for Wagner Appliance Sales. Never a big fan, he made his first trip back to Ernie Shore Field earlier this season.
He went as coach of a Little League team, the Texaco Express Astros of the Kernersville Minor Leagues, and watched them run out on the field for the national anthem.
His son Tanner plays for the Astros.
"A lot of people take it like, well I didn't make it to the big leagues, so it wasn't fulfilling my dream," Smith said. "That's bull.
"I got to travel to 40 countries in my career. I've been all over the world. My wife's traveled the world. I know people everywhere. I've never burned any bridges, and I never stabbed anybody in the back to get where I got.
"I guarantee there are about 50 million people in this world who would take my place in a heartbeat, playing in the minor leagues and never playing in the big leagues. I kept that in mind the whole time I played."
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