Rocky Mount Rocks

The Rocky Mount Rocks played just one season in the Bi-State League, in 1942, but won the only thing that season had to offer. Third in the regular season at 63-60, managed by George Ferrell, they beat the Wilson Tobs in seven games in the first playoff round and then swept the Sanford Spinners four games to one for the championship. Ferrell led the team himself at the plate with 105 RBIs on the year, tops in the league.

Among the players who joined the Rocks partway through the 1942 season was an 18-year-old third baseman named Bobby Thomson, in his first professional year after signing with the New York Giants. Thomson hit .241 in 29 games with the Rocks, with a home run during the playoff series against Wilson, before being drafted into the Army Air Corps that December. On October 3, 1951, playing third base for the Giants against Brooklyn in the deciding game of the National League playoff, Thomson hit one of the most famous home runs in baseball history off Ralph Branca in the ninth inning: the shot known ever since as the Shot Heard Round the World.

Rocky Mount had fielded professional baseball teams under one name or another since 1909, in leagues ranging from the Eastern Carolina League through the Virginia League to the Piedmont League. Buck Leonard, the Hall of Fame first baseman from the Negro National League, grew up playing semi-pro ball in Rocky Mount through the 1920s, and remained a Rocky Mount resident his entire life. The Bi-State League was a Class D circuit that ran from 1934 through 1942, fielding teams from the tobacco and textile country straddling the Virginia-North Carolina border. The league did not resume after World War II.