GRAFTON, W.Va. — The Grafton Merchants, an unaffiliated amateur baseball club that has played its home openers at Blue Diamond Field every April since 1974, welcomed the 2026 season Wednesday afternoon to a crowd of 19, a figure that includes both umpires and the woman selling raffle tickets from a card table behind the backstop.
First pitch was scheduled for 1:00 p.m. It went at 1:38, delayed while the club located someone willing to sing the national anthem after the scheduled soloist, a junior at Grafton High, called in from a dental appointment that had, per her mother, “opened up into something larger.” The anthem was ultimately performed by Dr. Ronald Kettering, DDS, who had been in the parking lot eating a sandwich and agreed on the condition that he not be asked to hold the last note.
“He held it anyway,” said Merchants president Del Vickers, 68, who has run the club since 1997 and describes attendance in terms of how many folding chairs he sets out. Vickers said he set out 60. “We’re building,” he added.
The concession stand, operated this year by the Grafton Kiwanis, ran out of hot dogs in the third inning. Kiwanis treasurer Peg Marlin said the club had purchased two packages of eight, “because last year we threw out a package and a half, and I refuse to do that again on principle.”
By the fifth inning, three of the 19 attendees had left — one to move his truck, two because the sun had come around the grandstand and neither had brought a hat. The Merchants lost 11-2 to the visiting Buckhannon Bison Club, a team that in 2023 forfeited its entire season due to what Vickers would describe only as “a van situation.”
Asked after the game whether he was concerned about turnout, Merchants manager Gary Pruitt, in his fourteenth year, said he was not. “Opening Day’s always slow,” Pruitt said. “The Reds are on. People got taxes. My own wife didn’t come and we live behind the outfield.”
Dr. Kettering, reached by phone Wednesday evening, said he had never sung the national anthem in public before and had learned the words in the parking lot, on his phone. “The high notes are toward the end,” he said, “which I did not know coming in.”
The Merchants play again Saturday, at home, weather permitting. Vickers said he plans to set out 60 chairs.