There's something unsettling about watching a century dissolve into a press release. McCormick Field — the name that appeared on scorecards when Babe Ruth barnstormed through Asheville, when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in exhibition games, when your grandfather took your father to see future major leaguers for a dollar — is now HomeTrust Park.

The Asheville Tourists announced the renaming this week, according to the Asheville Citizen Times. HomeTrust Bank, a regional financial institution headquartered in the area, has secured naming rights to the stadium that's been a fixture in western North Carolina since 1924.

It's the kind of deal that's become standard across minor league baseball. Stadiums that once carried the names of civic leaders, local heroes, or simple geographic markers now advertise insurance companies, credit unions, and fast-food chains. The economics are straightforward: teams need revenue, banks need visibility, and a ballpark offers thousands of impressions per game across a six-month season.

A Field With Stories in Its Bones

But McCormick Field wasn't just any ballpark. Named after Dr. Lewis McCormick, a local physician and baseball enthusiast who helped bring professional baseball to Asheville, the stadium has hosted more than nine decades of the sport's evolution.

The current structure, rebuilt in 1992 after a fire destroyed much of the original, sits on the same footprint where legends once played. Ty Cobb. Ruth. Robinson in 1948, three months before he and the Brooklyn Dodgers would visit for another exhibition that drew overflow crowds. Later came Pete Rose, Cal Ripken Jr., and countless others passing through the South Atlantic League on their way up.

The field itself has always been distinctive — nestled against a hillside, intimate in a way modern stadiums rarely manage, with the Blue Ridge Mountains visible beyond the outfield. On summer evenings, when the air cools and the lights come on, it's felt less like a corporate sports venue than a town square that happens to have bases.

What Gets Lost in Translation

HomeTrust Park. The name is functional, forgettable in the way corporate branding often is. It tells you nothing about where you are or why it matters. It could be anywhere — Charlotte, Chattanooga, Cedar Rapids.

This isn't about nostalgia for its own sake. Names carry memory. They're how communities mark what they value, what they want to preserve. McCormick Field connected present-day fans to a lineage, a sense that the game they were watching was part of something larger and longer than a single season's standings.

The renaming also reflects a broader shift in how minor league baseball operates. Since Major League Baseball reorganized its farm system in 2021, teams have faced new financial pressures. Naming rights deals, once rare at this level, have proliferated. The money matters — it funds player development, stadium maintenance, community programs.

The Practical Realities

HomeTrust Bank isn't some distant conglomerate. Founded in 1926, it's been part of the Asheville area's financial landscape for nearly as long as the ballpark itself. The partnership will likely mean upgraded facilities, better fan experiences, perhaps youth baseball initiatives. These aren't trivial benefits.

And McCormick Field — the physical place, the sightlines, the summer ritual of watching baseball with mountains in the distance — remains unchanged. The grass is the same grass. The game is the same game. Names, in one sense, are just words we agree to use.

But they're also how we remember. How we orient ourselves. How we decide what's worth keeping.

What Remains

The Tourists will play their first game as HomeTrust Park residents this season. Fans will adjust, as fans always do. Within a few years, younger attendees won't remember it ever being called anything else. The old-timers will grumble, then eventually stop correcting people.

Dr. Lewis McCormick, who died in 1949, probably never imagined his name would last a century on a ballpark. That it did suggests something about Asheville's relationship with its past, its tendency to hold onto things that matter even as the town itself transforms around them.

Now that era has ended, not with drama but with a corporate partnership announcement. The field endures. The name changes. And somewhere in that gap between what was and what's coming, a small piece of cultural memory quietly slips away.

The mountains, at least, will still be there beyond the outfield wall. They don't need naming rights to remember what they've seen.