06/09/2026
Kilgore baseball stadium!!! ❤️
Over the last decade and a half, writer Cameron Maynard and his father have chosen a stadium to visit every few years. This experiment in father-son exploration has landed them in Busch Stadium, Wrigley Field, Navy-Marine Corps Memorial, and “The Big House” up in Michigan. Each location carries its own weight, and each offers an atmosphere untempered by its continuous smelting of historical largesse.
Driller Park in Kilgore may not host the World Series or a national championship, but it’s drenched in a vernacular architecture that’s hard to come by, Maynard writes. "That alone makes it a worthy stopover along any journey through the nation’s great sporting venues," he says.
Driller Park was built for the Kilgore Drillers, the team that only played from 1947-50 but still managed two championships and one other finals appearance. Concrete slabs stack 3,000-some-odd seats to the base of a corrugated, cantilevered canopy, and pipes salvaged from the East Texas Oil Field pitch the roof outward. The outfield wall is a patchwork of flattened boiler tanks. From the grandstands it resembles a green ribbon, but up close it’s a hopscotch of dings, dents, and gouges, offering a texturized coat that might best be described as reptilian.
But Driller Park isn’t all oil tributes; far from it. The actual playing surface—the grounds that help determine whether hops are true and scorecards are clean—is top-notch, Maynard writes.
Read more about Maynard's visit to Driller Park here: https://bit.ly/4g78tPt
